A profoundly intimate and unsettling experience, cloaked and guarded, quietly beautiful and occasionally frightening. Sometimes it veers all the way past cryptic straight into nonsense. This is not necessarily a criticism, but it did make it difficult for me to find the patience to discover all endings (I ended up with 6 of them - I think there are 10).
Truly, I was a little blindsided by Fatum Betula. When I went in I was expecting more of an experimental walking simulator along the lines of LSD: Dream Emulator. That influence is still definitely felt on the way the parts fit together, but it's actually ultimately closer to a classic point-and-click adventure game in the way the puzzle-box endings are discovered. You follow obtuse clues and try combinations of objects until you find miraculous activation moments - some of these were disturbing and others benign (at least one of them was also hilarious), but they all felt significant, like there's a balance in the world that you're undoing just by being there.
Unfortunately a lot of the actions required to find the endings are repetitive, and without following a guide I wasn't sure where the best place to save would be when attempting certain combinations. This meant I was trying the same things a lot of the time to see if anything new would happen under different circumstances.
Overall Fatum Betula is incredibly unique and has an immense vibe. I would 1000% play a new game in this mould a few times a year if I knew where to find them.
"Every problem is solved but one.
Being alive."
Truly, I was a little blindsided by Fatum Betula. When I went in I was expecting more of an experimental walking simulator along the lines of LSD: Dream Emulator. That influence is still definitely felt on the way the parts fit together, but it's actually ultimately closer to a classic point-and-click adventure game in the way the puzzle-box endings are discovered. You follow obtuse clues and try combinations of objects until you find miraculous activation moments - some of these were disturbing and others benign (at least one of them was also hilarious), but they all felt significant, like there's a balance in the world that you're undoing just by being there.
Unfortunately a lot of the actions required to find the endings are repetitive, and without following a guide I wasn't sure where the best place to save would be when attempting certain combinations. This meant I was trying the same things a lot of the time to see if anything new would happen under different circumstances.
Overall Fatum Betula is incredibly unique and has an immense vibe. I would 1000% play a new game in this mould a few times a year if I knew where to find them.
"Every problem is solved but one.
Being alive."