Kyrandia is disappearing! Heavens, as if we don’t all have enough to deal with.
There’s something wonderful about diving back into an adventure game you grew up with and, in many respects, finding it even better than you remembered it. Such has it been for lovely, lovely The Legend of Kyrandia Book Two: The Hand of Fate — a classic from Westwood Studios our family enjoyed back in the late nineties and early aughts.
Late to the party? Well, indeed we were — and we didn’t realise at the time that this title was part of a trilogy either. It stands on its own beautifully though, with a richly realised world and voice acting. It’s a fantasy adventure in a surrealistic and magical realm — but what really has stood the test of time is its inventory and spellcrafting system.
Like many adventure games, you spend much of Hand of Fate trawling around the place, stuffing whatever looks handy into your conspicuously capacious pockets. So far, so adventure game.
But a few things stand out in Hand of Fate versus the modern adventure games of today. Firstly, no hotspots light up with text when you roll your mouse about — clicking stuff and seeing what happens is very much the order of the day. It’s not a mechanic often beloved in today’s point and click landscape, but lends an enticing element of exploration here.
Those doodads and trinkets you’re hauling up here, there and everywhere — a clutch of berries here, an empty bottle there — all come together, often in multiple examples of the same item, for both puzzle solving and spellcraft, courtesy of protagonist Zanthia’s spellbook.
Zanthia is a mage, and she explores Kyrandia with a portable cauldron in tow, lovingly animated and rendered at the bottom right of your screen. With your spellbook and its ever expanding repertoire of pages tucked carefully beside it, you soon learn that progress in Hand of Fate isn’t just about mixing objects with other objects to solve problems.
Grabbing items, following spell recipes, thinking what you might need to substitute, figuring out where to find weird stuff… it’s brilliant gameplay. However, even that alone isn’t enough to make this game’s inventory mechanics such a tremendous joy.
Hand of Fate actually works by treating items somewhat differently to a number of adventure games, especially in the modern area. In most adventure games, you pick up objects and they vanish from the landscape, locked into your inventory until they’re used, given away or get lost as part of a plot event.
This sort of thing still happens to Zanthia on her travels, yet you’re also free to pick up multiples of an item, and to drop things here and there — with objects plopping off the cursor and landing on the ground exactly where you leave them, too. It’s gorgeously tactile, and not a feeling we get much of in other inventory systems these days.
Lose something? You’ll stumble across it again later. Short a clutch of berries? Mooch back to the bush and see if some more have sprouted. Need some water? Click an empty flask on any body of water in the landscape to fill it. Bottle already full? Well, better pour it out into the cauldron and flush it out.
Accidentally left a bunch of stuff in the cauldron and now flushed it all away? Well, crumbs. You’re remembering to save a lot or keen for a good walk back to all the places you just went, right…?
Hand of Fate isn’t the perfect adventure game, neither is its inventory and magic system the most precisely tuned of mechanics.
But it absolutely shines throughout nonetheless, and in an era in which Westwood Studios are such a fond yet sadly departed memory, any adventure gamer worth their onions is bound to find a unique slice of puzzly goodness in Zanthia’s forays across Kyrandia — stuffing her pockets silly all the while.