Stronghold: A Hero’s Fate
Although I had enjoyed Jo Graham and Amy Griswold’s other games, and The Play’s the Thing is one of my all-time favorites, I hadn’t played Stronghold: A Hero’s Fate until last year, when I had the chance to join the beta test for the sequel, Stronghold: Caverns of Sorcery (by Griswold, working alone this time). Then I played A Hero’s Fate several times, to create saves to use in the beta - and quickly came to appreciate its understated brilliance.
The premise is a fairly simple one: you begin the game as a young adult traveling with a merchant caravan, but by the end of the first chapter, you’ve managed to kill a fearsome lich. It wasn’t some kind of quest for glory - you were simply trying to save your own life - but as a reward for your courage and skill, you’re given land to build your own settlement. What begins with a couple dozen people in a handful of hastily erected buildings will grow over the decades to be a thriving town. You’ll make decisions about the economy - do you want to focus on agriculture or mining? - and when your stronghold begins to thrive and attract the attention of bandits and goblins, you’ll have to consider matters of defense as well. And of course you’ll need to have a long-term plan: do you envision your town as a hub of commerce someday, or a center of learning and culture, or just a supremely impregnable fortress? Your personal life matters, too: do you want to marry? Will you have a child? As the years roll on, whom will you name as your heir?
What sets A Hero’s Fate apart from the rest of the civilization-builder/management genre is that it is, above all, not a game about resources, but about people. There are about a dozen major characters other than the PC, and many of them have their own story arcs, which are influenced by the PC’s choices over the course of their lifetimes. It’s not unusual for a management game to include a reputation mechanic, but Graham and Griswold take it to a more intimate scale. Even your decision whether to help make dinner feels relevant to the story: the innkeeper with a crowd of mouths to feed appreciates your help, while the gruff head of the town militia thinks that’s beneath your dignity as a figure of authority. The game spans the PC’s life from young adulthood to old age (unless they fall in battle before then), and the story unfolds episodically, with months or years passing in the space between chapters, but it never feels cursory or detached: I really cared about these characters and the community I was building, and Graham and Griswold somehow give a sense of the fullness of a life in this game that can easily be played through in an evening.
I don’t formally review games on which I have done credited work, but I would feel rather remiss if I didn’t put in a few words here about Caverns of Sorcery. It takes place several generations after A Hero’s Fate; and in most playthroughs based on a saved game, the PC will be the grandchild of the Hero’s Fate PC’s chosen heir. It’s rather different in some ways, with a more focused plot that spans the events of only a year or so, but I enjoyed how Griswold expanded the world she and Graham had created, and there’s a similar focus on both relationships and resource management, although in Caverns of Sorcery you’re deepening your study of magic rather than watching the town grow. A Hero’s Fate is my favorite, but both are worth your time.