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Fighting your family with your sword and words in At Fate's End
A
Alan Wen
"I've always been fascinated by royal families and aristocracy because they are families just like we are, but more complicated," said creative director Nicolas Guerin. "It's why people love to watch the British royal family so much because everything is so much more intense."
Given contemporary stories from family dynasties are rife with scandal and corruption, it was also a sentiment he wanted to translate to the fantasy genre. "I've been reading Tolkien since I was six or seven, and it always felt to me that it was a great setting to make games in," Guerin said. "But at the same time, I always felt fantasy settings tend to continue with the idea that noble aristocratic families are saviors and that nobility and aristocratic values are something great inherently, which I don't believe they are."
So it is, then, that in At Fate's End, you play as Shan Hemlock, the young princess of the Hemlock clan, who will interrogate and confront her family members over the damage that their god-like powers have wrought on the world.
This is nonetheless a world that looks beautiful to behold, with a hand-painted artistry that's been a signature of the studio's work, with characters drawn in detailed high resolution so that they look terrific during gameplay and also when the camera pulls in for more dramatic moments. Surprisingly, this even includes heart-warming hugging animations as seen in its cozy game Spiritfarer.
"For this game, we wanted to delve into a visual that alludes to classic Disney movies from the ‘50s and ‘60s," Guerin added. "The stylized backgrounds are inspired by artists like Eyvind Earle, who made the backgrounds for Sleeping Beauty. It helps create a whimsical fantasy world that's classy but also melancholic."
Swords and siblings
While the game is meant to critique powerful aristocratic families, Guerin still found himself fascinated by the unusual rituals that others might find archaic or out of touch. In this case, the Hemlock clan has a ritual of succession involving the swords wielded by each family member that gives them god-like powers — each sword is even named after deities from the Gaulish pantheon, Shan's sword Aesus, the god of doubt and choice.
"That's a ritual this family has, where every generation, one of the offspring is named Prince or Princess of Swords, and what they have to do is take the other god swords from the hands of their other siblings to bring back to the castle and restart the cycle to become King or Queen of Swords," Guerin explained. "Shan has been named Princess of Swords, so her role is to gather the other swords from her siblings, which you can either take from them, which has consequences, or they will give their sword to you voluntarily."
These enchanted swords aren't just weapons but also literally part of its wielder, as each family member has sacrificed a part of their body for the sword to reside in. Aesus, for instance, emerges from Shan's throat, which itself has a symbolic meaning, according to Guerin: "The sword speaks for her, which is also a big goal of the game to make you feel like the choices you're making are your own as a player and her as a character in that world."
Incidentally, Aesus is considered a sub-par sword, Shan herself also comparatively smaller than her Amazonian sister Camilla, the first of the siblings you'll face, and whose sword Taranis, god of sky and thunder, resides in her left arm. That's not the only reason that she's able to make quick work of you in your opening duel, though.
At Fate's End has swift, precise combat, where you can left-click, hold, then aim the direction of your sword's attack for a more powerful and further-reaching attack — you'll also keep still when performing this action in mid-air. Thunder Lotus has worked hard to achieve tight and responsive controls where combat feels fun with an intermediate challenge, but it's also only one half of this action-adventure.
Even if you're skilful enough to get past the first phase of Camila's fight, you also need to attack her with your words. However, in the initial fight, from the dialogue choices presented, you'll realize that you lack the information to say anything meaningful. So when she strikes you down, simply dusting yourself off to retry immediately would be pointless without first discovering her secrets that will penetrate her defenses.
The result is an investigative side to the game where with the right-click, you can enter what's being tentatively referred to as Shan's inner sight. This essentially lets you use the mouse to explore and interact with objects in the environment, similar to a point-and-click adventure, while time is also suspended.
"The point of this is to leverage a full screen's worth of things to interact with," Guerin explained. "It's hard for us not to just reproduce a structure that's used by other games, where you might jump around and fight, but then only interact with a few elements. But because the game is both investigation and action, I need to have something that allows the player to interact with the world a little bit more complex and with agency."
In practice, this means Shan can interact with onscreen elements even if they're far away from her, while you may also spot symbols hidden in plain sight that can also unearth rewards, much like finding a treasure chest. More importantly, using this to converse with other characters or examine objects is how you will gain information that can break down Camilla's defenses.
"Things you discover in the castle are going to generate insights, basically cards with clues and snapshots of reality that you're going to have to use to make deductions," Guerin explained.
In Camilla's case, she explains to Shan that she won't give up her sword Taranis because she already has an important role in protecting Hemlock Castle as its custodian, and is loved by her people. But once you have explored the castle grounds, you'll gain sights that can disprove her claims and gradually uncover the truth.
A family affair
Inner sight isn't just for exploration, though. One of the powers that Aesus has (besides also being able to save your life when your health runs out) is the ability to absorb some of the power from your siblings' swords, represented in the form of an arcana from a tarot deck.
"You actually absorb two powers at once, because tarots exist in two configurations, upright and reverse," Guerin explained. You can only equip one or the other, but they have been designed so that one is a tactical move, which is activated by entering inner sight, while the other is an active move performed in real-time.
For instance, Camilla's arcana is the Chariot, where the upright card allows you to pause the action and then select a position to instantaneously dash-teleport to, while its reverse allows you to double-jump. You can also switch between these playstyles outside of combat.
"It allows the player to have a lot of choices, and basically the idea is to have choices all the time," Guerin added. The idea is also so that there's ways to balance challenge if a player leans on action over adventure, and vice versa. "If you like action RPGs but less so puzzles, then the hint system will help you. You will also have arcanas that you can equip to make fights easier or harder."
There are even more skills you can unlock in a skill tree that is, cleverly keeping within the theme, also the Hemlock's family tree, inspired by the branches of a royal family tree and its dynastic order. The version Guerin shows is still in a preliminary phase, and functionally, it's not dissimilar to other skill trees that branch as you unlock new beneficial active and passive skills. Still, the idea is that those skills are inherited from Shan's ancestry.
"You will discover your ancestry, the super terrible things your family did over the last 70 generations, and you will also gain knowledge of which knight with which sword did which thing," Guerin said. "It's a way to change your build, improve, and upgrade. It's both narrative discovery and mechanical progression."
Nonetheless, the most important choices are applied through conversing with your siblings, such as once you have unravelled the truth about Camilla, and are equipped to confront her again.
"The idea is for you to understand what's wrong in their lives, but then it's up to you to make a decision about how you approach that with them," Guerin said. "You can always be judgmental or always be empathetic. But it's super important for me that you have a possibility of genuinely honestly choosing one or the other. The game will try to present everything to you factually so when you talk to your sisters and brothers, the tone of that decision is up to you."
There are nonetheless consequences to some dialogue choices that come during different phases of the fight, as one response could be advantageous and take a whole diamond of health from your sibling, or you could lose one yourself. Depending on how you've responded to them, it can also affect the final outcome of the fight and whether you defeat them or convince them to give their sword to you, and still support you as you gather the other swords from your siblings.
"The point is for players to delve into everything that power makes people do, and to try to see that from a very honest perspective," Guerin concluded. "It isn't a rehabilitation of powerful and wealthy people by any means, but it's an exposition of what makes you do the things you do, because of wealth and extreme power, and also the fact that they are your family. It's that core that makes the game and exploration of the theme interesting for me."
At Fate's End releases on the Epic Games Store in 2026.