Thank You Giiku Games for providing us with a review code!

When you narrow it down and think about it, the adventure genre complements the mobile platform. It’s not much of a surprise that companies would want to target that very lucrative market. While Fateful End: True Case Files does have a Windows port, it's a fairly bareones one. It was specifically made with those devices in mind but manages to work for the PC platform due to the point-and-click nature. 

Created by Genuine, a Chinese company, Fateful End starts uniquely. It’s a whodunit tale, but the main protagonist Xiang is the victim at hand. In the beginning, he finds himself in a rundown building inside a box. He attempts to flee but is stuck and killed by an assailant. Suddenly, the game flashes back to days before the murder and you the player is slowly given insight into who would want this seemingly uninteresting man dead.

Fateful End is half point-and-click adventure and half visual novel. While both are part of the adventure genre, each subgenre tells its stories differently. Point-and-clicks focus on observing and interacting with the environment while visual novels are (but not always) more along the lines of “choose your own adventure” books where the choices made during moments can lead to different endings or even paths. Combining the two managed to work in Fateful End’s favor. You’ll usually begin each chapter with the visual novel portions before having to do the point-and-click segments. 

The visual novel segments have partial voice acting, mostly consisting of grunts or one-word answers. There are some fully voiced moments during some phone calls. Most of it is in Chinese but some of it is in English, such as the Happy Birthday song. During the visual novel segments, the scroll speed of the text is excruciatingly slow as letters and numbers appear one unit at a time. There are no methods of speeding up the text or having the text instantly appear so a lot of the time, you’ll be clicking constantly to get through dialogue. Sometimes, this has the downside of accidentally clicking a choice that will pop up if your cursor is centered on the screen. Prior to the game being completed, dialogue cannot be fast forwarded so if you happen to run into a bad end or a game over with your save being far back, you’ll have to do all those parts over again at the same speed. And for an adventure-visual novel hybrid, the amount of save files is limited to ten outside of the one autosave. For a game that was released in 2020, it sure is missing a lot of quality-of-life features that even the most basic titles of the genres decades back had.

The adventure segments are like any point-and-click. You’ll look through your surroundings finding items that will help you progress. Sometimes these items can combine with others to create new items. Unlike similar titles in the genre, there are basically no “red herring” items. Every item you come across will have a function or use. These items are pretty easy to spot as they usually have different shading and coloring compared to everything else. For the most part, these moments are pretty simple to figure out and there is a light bulb to give you hints on what to do if you get stuck. The most difficult moments can come from having to interact with parts in a specific order to progress. Some of these moments even put you on a timer so a game over happens if you don’t complete it. There are also story fragments that can be found throughout the chapters, but the way they are found is basically mindlessly clicking around until you find them. I don’t like how it is implemented, but the side content they unlock is informative.

Xiang himself is not a good person, and it was surprising that the narrative lets you know of this shortly after the beginning events of the game. He's a crook, holds plenty of misogynistic views, and never feels bad about any of it. In the first chapter, he is sneaking into his girlfriend’s workplace to set up some sort of embezzlement scheme. The fact that Xiang is an unlikable protagonist and proceeds to become more and more unlikable as the story progresses lets the narrative go in directions that I didn’t anticipate. The more rotten stuff you find out about Xiang, it starts to become less of a surprise why someone wants him dead. As horrible as it sounds, I started to look forward to seeing how he would die or at least get his comeuppance. Xiang ends up narrowing it down to five people he’s come into recent contact with. There is Leeyui, the aforementioned girlfriend who seems to suspect him of something nefarious due to his sketchy and neglectful behavior. Tsang is a former acquaintance he used to commit schemes with in the past. Cheng is another acquaintance of his. Lau is the new guy with Tsang after he and Xiang had a falling out. And last is Yu, a girl he met years back in a coffee shop and now has met once again. Xiang has good reason to suspect all of them as once Leeyui came back from her business trip, Tsang showed up once again with Cheng and Lau to get Xiang into a new scheme, and Yu coming back to town—attempts to end Xiang’s life happened every day since.

In most games, I would usually get upset with the illusion of choice where your choices don’t matter in the end. In Fateful End, it works in its favor because you already know what is going to happen to Xiang in the end. These moments instead are used to give more insight into the characters and setting—usually to show how much of a scumbag Xiang is.

The visuals of Fateful End are what I would call inconsistent. While the characters have a more realistic art style to them, backgrounds and items never seem to know what It wants to adhere to. You’ll have some items and backgrounds that have a dark and realistic shading to them, and others that look like they came out of a cartoon. The resolution is also inconsistent as there are some portraits that are very blurry.

In terms of morality, while Xiang himself manages to avoid violent acts, he is usually subjected to violent ends, typically cutting to black before the fatal hit. Some chapters do have bloodstains on the walls and ground. During a nightmare in a later chapter, Xiang sees his body without arms or legs and has to collect his severed parts to reattach them. Language mostly consists of “d*mn” and “h*ll”, with “sh*t” said a couple of times. The Lord’s name is used in vain a few times in the later chapters. In Chapter 3, there is a statue of the deity Guan Yu, and he lights some incense to worship him. Although, Xiang questions the act as he doesn't even believe in Chinese religion. Sexual content has a point in the first chapter where Xiang comes across an unnamed couple attempting to fool around while he sneaks into the office. In a later chapter, one moment of partial nudity with Leeyui and Xiang attempting to get more intimate, but nothing comes to fruition. Xiang’s sexual frustration with Leeyui also leads to Xiang proceeding to cheat on her with another woman. Just when I thought he couldn’t get any worse, he manages to surprise you with how low he can go.

While Fateful End: True Case Files has an interesting narrative and a compelling despicable person as its protagonist, most things surrounding it are middling at best. The sounds and music are nothing special, the severe lack of QoL in the visual novel parts feels like a slog, and the visuals are too inconsistent. Morally, it’s definitely on the lower end due to the setting and how awful of a person Xiang is. Surprisingly, there are lessons to be learned, as none of the endings Xiang ends up with can be considered good ones. On a PC, I can see from the perspective of others that Fateful End pales in comparison to the massive library of other adventure games. So I’d only recommend it if purchased on the platform when it’s on a fairly deep discount.