The Game of Fourtune

On the lengthier side of reading content and puzzles, you are certainly getting your money’s worth with The Game of Fourtune: a competition between sixteen quasi-strangers. Sixteen? Yes that’s right. You got 16 people—each with their own route--to keep track of, who all managed to reach acceptable levels of character development, and understanding as to their motives, wants, desires, etc. This grab bag of different ideologies requires you to pay attention as you navigate your way through each game and monitor the behavior of those with you in order to perform properly. And another big yes: the games within GoF are all exquisitely fleshed out; distinct from one another and standing as their own experience. You genuinely do not know what you will play next. While the titular Game is hosted by a magic in-world deity, this does introduce the concept of magic into the story, which is normally uncommon for VNs. Luckily, this isn’t used as some big endgame revolution or solution. Some aspects of the overall story may be slightly handwaved due to the presence of magic (for example: the Game takes place within what is seemingly a magical plane instead of a gigantic nondescript Locked Building/Environment™) and Bell, the aforementioned deity, will comment/talk to the player directly as a light ‘tutorial’. The flowchart merits its own discussion. Big and juicy. This flowchart will even help you, after a certain point, and show you which CGs and achievements you’re missing. I did enjoy the majority of the flowchart screen being used. Crammed with routes, even. If I had to critique anything, the presence of typos and similar was a bit overwhelming; and it seemed that there was a different artist for spritework vs. CG vs. BG so characters can and will come off looking wholly different depending on their visual presentation. And a special positive mention because I never thought a visual novel of all things would remind me of Ashy Larry but now I cannot untangle the association.

I've waited way too long to write a review, so I'm just going to get straight to the point: I loved this game, it had a bunch of very memorable characters, entertaining minigames, and compelling mysteries. Despite being full of references to other games/stories, it very much felt like the Game of Fourtune was its own unique story, and I would strongly recommend the game. A more detailed analysis of the game: -For such a large cast of characters, this game does a really good job at fleshing out each character’s personality and backstory. I definitely have my favorites, but on the whole every character has depth to them and is enjoyable in their own right. Additionally, Bell is a very fun “quirky host” character and is constantly entertaining throughout the game. -The death games the player's play are quite fun! There's quite a large variety of different death games the characters play, creating a bunch of unique scenarios for the characters to be put into. Additionally, within each death game, there are often alternate choices you can make that can give you a different experience through certain games. Often making different choices in death games will have you spend more time with one character over another, and give you different hints towards their own mysteries. They also often just give some nice variance as to what happens in the games and add a lot of replayability to the games. -My play time is way higher than usual (I'm both a slow reader, repeated stuff a lot, and went back for nearly all alternate decisions in the game), It is still quite a long game though, which is worth knowing going into the game to know what you're getting yourself into (I would not be surprised with a 100+ hour playtime). It never felt like it really dragged though- I was entertained from start to finish. -So one thing of note is that I played the game in accordance with the “Route Order Guide” provided in the Steam Guides section, based on what other reviews said about the game. This is something I’m mixed on in retrospect- on one hand, going in order means you’ll avoid spoilers for other routes, and I feel like I was able to appreciate certain scenes more due to playing the game in its “proper” order. On the other hand, there’s some fun to be had with going out of order, and you could get a unique experience going in a non-standard order. On the whole I think it’s a matter of personal preference: I would personally advocate for playing in order, although that’s the only order I ever played it in so I can’t exactly attest to what it is like out of order. (minor spoilers): [spoiler]Out of all the choices where you have to choose a door to go through with what people, something of note is that often you don’t even end up going with who you chose, as either the game will swap POVs to Devon, or the characters will end up swapping who goes through what door anyways. There are some branching decisions that happen inside of the games: those I would understand wanting to make yourself. But for what door to go with what people, the choices you make honestly don’t end up mattering that much.[/spoiler] -The game also has a great soundtrack. The game has a very nice flowchart, and profiles section to keep track of information on each character. Once the game is finished, markers will appear on the flowchart to hint you to where missing achievements/CGs are, which I thought was a nice feature. On the whole, I would say the game was very much worth the full price: it’s been a while since I finished the game and yet I still keep thinking back on the experience.

i love this game, it's not like any other death game games i've played (like danganronpa, 999, the zodiac trial). i like the cast. everyone has their own personality and despite some off them being kinda annoying, it isn't in a way that makes you hate the character. the price is definitely worth the money since i got a good 75 hours out of this game i'm really hoping we got a follow up game on Clyde or one of the other digit games...heck ideally both but we'll see about that.

Top tier game with sixteen amazing characters and an also amazing intertwined story that'll keep you engaged for hours on end!

Really impressive mystery VN with an interesting setting, good variety in it's games, and strong and believable character writing throughout its lengthy 50h+ playtime. It feels polished start to finish with no technical hiccups. Honestly, the characters are so well written with an interweaving web of motivations and interactions that it's set the standard for me in the genre going forward. The minor issues I had with the pacing are completely overshadowed by how well the game executes on this, Recommended to all mystery VN / death game enjoyers.

It is a pretty good game it is unique in the genre of death games it has a lighter tone than most similar games. The game tries to make an illusion of non-linearity but the game is linear which does hurt the story somewhat since you often read the same conversation in nearly every path, I think the developers should have sticked with a linear story and blocked some paths from being played far too early. The characters are all interesting and every character has its own ending which means that every character has at least one important story element. The death game itself is interesting because the characters play many different games its pretty similar to Mario Party and many games are inspired by Mario Party or are even directly taken from the games this makes the different death games really fun to read sadly there are not a lot of CGs. I would recommend this visual novel if you have read a lot of visual novels with death games like Danganronpa or Zero Escape