The Game of Fourtune

Richard is babygirl

Old review: Still in the process of playing the game (currently have 4/16 endings) but I can already give this a recommendation. Excellent death game story reminiscent of some of the greats like Zero Escape. The characters are fun and have funny, snappy dialogue. The individual games are creative and have some interesting twists, making for a well-paced story where you're given some more immediate, exciting plot twists as twists in the greater overarching plot are slowly unveiled over the course of many routes. Naturally, I don't have the full picture yet with only 4 routes complete, but I'm starting to get a decent grasp of some of the major overarching plot points and character motivations, and I very much like what I see so far. However, I do find myself somewhat frequently taken out of the experience by typos. Given the strong flow of the dialogue, it's a shame that the flow is sometimes brought to a halt by some strange sentence construction or grammatical error. The script could definitely use some more proofreading. In addition, there are a few instances where I believe I may have found some minor logic errors/plot holes. It's very possible that these plot-related issues will be explained later, but I just thought it worth noting. Edit. Finished the game and really enjoyed it! Most of what I said before still applies, so I'll just jot down some of my final thoughts here - I liked how the character routes played out. Some of the ones I expected to be less interesting or even redundant because of the order I played them in still had something to offer. - I was a little disappointed that there was no big, earth-shattering, recontextualizing twists like are often found in similar titles (Danganronpa, Zero Escape, etc.) - The loose plot threads leave me hungry for a sequel, and I'm not sure how much I like that (it's probably fine, but I wasn't excepting this to be the start of a series so it caught me a little off guard). Overall, I look forward to more from this developer!

The Game of Fourtune is a death game with an intriguing mystery and great character writing, but also repetitive routes and a lackluster ending. The protagonist Clyde's mother is deathly ill, so as a last resort, he enters and wins a shady raffle for a free visit to a treatment center. He is required to have a partner when going to the center, so he brings his friend and coworker Devon (who is also the protagonist for half of the routes). The "treatment center," however, turns out to be The Game of Fourtune, a death game ran by a sadistic goddess who will grant the winner one wish. From there, the story branches out into 16 different routes, one for each participant in the Game of Fourtune. I highly recommend following a route order guide, as the nature of the story makes it so that if you stumble upon certain routes early, they spoil nearly half of the remaining routes. The last four routes must be played in order, but a stricter enforced playing order would have been appreciated to keep the other routes unspoiled. The Game of Fourtune's best trait is its character writing and moment-to-moment character interactions. The cast has a well-tuned mix of different personalities that all play off of each other nicely and create engaging scenes via their banter, arguments, and emotional moments. Even the villains get their time in the spotlight to show their more sympathetic sides or their utter despair in the face of defeat. The one-route-per-character format also works well to give each character their time to shine, but the large number of routes is at times a detriment to this visual novel. Because the protagonists Clyde and Devon begin each route unaware of the nature of the Game of Fourtune, the first half to sometimes three-quarters of each route has them speculating on mysteries whose answers have already been revealed during previous routes. At first, this didn't bother me too much, but during the final four routes especially, it started to grate on me. This visual novel also builds an intriguing mystery across multiple routes as we learn how and why these specific 16 participants were chosen to participant in the Game of Fourtune by the Digits of Eden, the organization that grants access to it. Other than the character interactions, this was my favorite part of the VN. However, by the end of the story, it turns out that learning about the Digits of Eden from the inside was more interesting than seeing what was happening in the organization firsthand. I was expecting an exciting finale after the Game of Fourtune concluded, but it turned out to be quite lackluster. The art, specifically the CGs, was also fairly poor in this visual novel. Art is usually among the last things I care about in a visual novel,—the "novel" part is much more important to me—but it was bad enough in this one that I thought it necessary to mention. The CGs were done by three artists and the sprites by another artist who did not do any of the CGs, and it's easy to tell. There is no consistent style between different CGs or between the CGs and the sprites. One of the CG artists' set of CGs is particularly bad—inconsistent perspective, oddly scaled and placed facial features, and a style that makes it look like every character is melting. Lastly, the script for this VN desperately needed another more thorough editing pass. There were an incredible amount of errors (roughly once every 10-15 minutes)—from missing commas to missing words to run-on sentences—that made the writing very frustrating to read at times. Overall, the Game of Fourtune is yet another death game visual novel by an English-speaking author obviously influenced by Danganronpa and Zero Escape. Still, it is of a higher quality than many of its peers. I loved the character writing and multiple route mystery, but was let down by the ending, repetitive route structure, and lackluster artwork. However, I see potential in this author,—The Zodiac Trial was another middling, generic death game, debut OELVN, and that author went on to write some of my favorite English visual novels with The Divine Deception and The Specter's Desire—and I hope that they can realize it with their next projects. 6/10

God + Death Games = Poggers! I really liked it, it was a lot of fun to play many death games!!!!

Richard my beloved <3

This game is a ton of fun, has interesting and well written characters as well as a amazing story. If your looking for a long visual novel with multiple paths and unique games that get you engaged this is the game for you.

"I didn't come here for redemption." This game is really fun -- it may suffer from a lacklustre ending but the journey to get there is so enjoyable I can confidently recommend this game. I'm not a reviewer or anything, but you can feel the SOUL put into this.

Disregard the playtime, I've beat this on an old build and it didn't track the time correctly for some reason before I updated. Overall, this game took me roughly 40 hours. tl;dr ~7/10, if you like Your Turn To Die or Danganronpa, you will likely enjoy this as well. The good: Interesting premise. One half of the story is a Danganronpa-esque character-centric backstory exploration, with near-soap opera presentation that ties all of the characters together in a suspiciously convenient series of coincidences. Personally, not a fan of such stories, but it was executed competently and my only complaint is a somewhat dragging middle part of the game due to VLR-like structure that assumes that you can take almost any route as your first one. The other half of the story are ruthless, bloody Mario Party-esque minigames that traumatize the characters, as well as deliver on some strategy and mindgame stuff. I'm hesitant to call this the meat of the game, but there's some surprising depth to their interactivity, as well as good character moments. Thematically, the game feels very cohesive, which is probably the reason I'm willing to forgive some of the more contrived coincidences in the story. The bad: Very inconsistent and bland visual presentation that feels jarring at first, lack of memorable soundtrack, lack of polish on release (that had been mostly addressed with recent patches, to be fair), sometimes character writing/presentation feels a bit too on-the-nose, the story doesn't take advantage of the entirety of its premise's potential (there are a lot of story mechanics and interesting quirks that could've been explored far, far better which would've improved this game from a tentative 7/10 to a solid 8/10). Overall, I enjoyed my time with this game, but I don't think it's memorable enough to justify the price tag. That said, it's honestly a wonder that I feel positive enough about this game to consider it a 7/10 despite its numerous and obvious flaws, so if you're willing to look past them, you will find a solid (if amateurish), entertaining story to enjoy. Tentative recommendation from me, buy it on a sale if you enjoy death game stuff and enjoy/don't mind contrived coincidences.

This game may seem like a lot of options, but in many cases it will only give you the only correct option, only if you choose this correct option to keep the game going, and the other options are to bring the game to a direct end. so when I play this game, it doesn't give me a sense of participation brought by too many choices. And I don't know why it has to be made into a double perspective, the plot is a little fragmented, which affects the sense of substitution to a certain extent.