Fate of Kai Demo Gameplay Preview – Neat narrative puzzle game

The Fate of Kai demo shows off a very interesting and ingenious narrative puzzle game. You interact with the game through a comic book, flipping through pages as the narrative unfolds. Your main goal is to help the hapless protagonist Kai get through the story safely.

You do this in many interesting ways. One of the first puzzles you encounter has Kai trying to scale a mountain to reach a castle. You have two words, JUMP and CLIMB available. The first sequence of the story plays out with Kai climbing the mountain, and jumping out of the way of a falling rock. This leads to him back at the bottom of the mountain again. To get through the scenario, you page back and choose to JUMP across the river and then CLIMB a short cliff.

This is where the game’s puzzles stand out. In order to solve the puzzles and get Kai safely to his destination, you must change the narrative to a better outcome. The game has new mechanics and challenges as you get through each chapter of Kai’s story.

The last puzzle in the demo has you facing a burly man in a game of chance in order to win a coin to buy passage into the citadel. This sequence was particularly interesting because you had to do many things to solve the puzzle. It ended with you showing your entire hand to your opponent three times to make him angry and pound the table, which dropped the mirror behind him. This let you see what card he was going to play next. Then you intentionally lost each round to pick up all the words available and paged back to then beat him in the game with the right cards, now that you could see what he would play next.

Overall, the Fate of Kai demo shows a very promising and clever puzzle game. The usage of simple mechanics that interact with each other in complex ways provides a unique puzzle solving experience I haven’t encountered before. The art style looks great and the presentation of the game as a comic book also add up to make a pretty interesting experience.