Fatum Betula

I have a lot of thoughts about this game, and they're mostly good. I got this game on sell as part of a package with another game called Paratopic (which I will likely not be reviewing because I don't see myself finishing it and I did not like it) for $3.99, so that makes this game about $2 on its own. I'm going to be reviewing it with that price point in mind.

This is one of the best games that I have played in a long time, in terms of it really feeling like a piece of performance art. I not only enjoyed the time I spent with this game, I found myself thinking about it after I had already unlocked all the different endings, which I did in about 2 days.

Editing note: Upon further research I have not unlocked all endings.

This game is really short. If game rentals were still a thing, I would say to rent it instead of buying it, but back when game rentals were a thing, a rental would have run you $1-$2 so it's really the same difference financially. Also, I did look at a guide to get two of the endings (one of which I don't think I ever would have gotten without the guide), so if I hadn't done that, I would have gotten more play time out of it, so part of the reason it was so short was because I consulted a guide.

I also found the controls to be incredibly unintuitive, which is how I initially found the guide. I looked up on-line how to control the game because I couldn't figure out what the action button was. I played it on Switch, and this information is available from the menu at the beginning of the game, but I am a dumbass, and if I can miss it, I think other people could too. It's the back R trigger button, the action button. Which I still think is weird.

You don't learn a lot about the player character, but you don't really need to. All you know you learn from a letter at the beginning of the game that calls you a "girl". So you have gender, a really wide age range, and nothing else. This is fine for me. It's a first person game so you never see this character, so it really allows you to just project yourself into the game.

Fatum Betula means "Fate Birch" in Latin, and that's really fitting, because what this game is about is a birch tree growing in a river at the heart of the world, that you can water with a number of different substances to change the fate of the world. You take on this task, find these different substances, and whatever you water the tree with changes the world and gets you a specific ending.

This world is implied to be a sort of purgatory, because many of the characters mention having been alive somewhere else at some point. The Beast, whom I thought was a cute kitty cat, but is actually a cute black racoon, mentions that it kind of remembers the world it was from, but really only remembers a lot of fire, and that it has been hungry for a long time, but has never died of starvation. Another character is literally just a skeleton in a basement, but also laments not being able to die. Yet another character flat out calls himself a ghost, and asks you to go ahead and just destroy the world so that he can finally not have to be a ghost anymore.

The low-poly characters lead me into my perspective on the visual art. I was shocked to learn that the artist is fairly young, and would not have lived through the 1990s, when this low-poly art style was common, because I feel that it was captured perfectly. I found an overwhelming sense of nostalgia came over me when playing this game, so I assumed that it was created by someone who had lived through that time period and was purposefully trying to evoke that nostalgia that they themselves would feel. But apparently, that's not the case. I do wonder if other people my age got that same feeling playing the game.

The autumn area, revealed in one of the endings to have been inspired by Ocarina of Time, was particularly notable for evoking this feeling in me. It's shown in the gif above, and this is a difficult emotion to explain. It isn't that you feel transported back in time the way you do when playing a game from this time period, such as Ocarina of Time or Tomb Raider, but more I guess that you feel that this game could have existed during that time, but you're experiencing it anew, with all your gained life experience, but it puts you back into those eyes that you once saw the world with. I think that this emotion is why I kept thinking about the game, even once I had 100% completed it.

Editing note: Once again, I have not 100% completed it. There's at least one ending I haven't unlocked, but I want to preserve my hubris from when I originally wrote this.

Looking at these screenshots, I'm realizing that I may not have 100% completed the game. There's an image that I don't remember seeing at any point that keeps coming up in my search that I don't remember ever seeing, even though I thought I had gotten every ending. The thing about this game is that though each playthrough is short, it has a lot of replay value to try to get all the different endings with all the different substances that you can use to water the tree. It took me a minute to figure out that you could even mix substances in the pond by the beast. I think I probably need to mix something. This is the image I don't remember seeing.

I have no memory of this baby in the middle of eyes telling me that I'm going to hell. That means that I haven't actually unlocked all that the game has to offer, even though I thought I had found every substance and every area. I went to the moon in this game. It was a wild ride.

Speaking of it being a wild ride, I would also like to add that I do enjoy sureality, just as a concept. And this game is surreal. I've always liked things that worked by their own logic, and this game does. In that way it was a bit nostalgic, as well. I've honestly not seen many video games use what was, at least at one time, referred to as, "video game logic," or "moon logic". But this game does, which is likely another thing that makes it nostalgic for me.

In conclusion, I really enjoyed this game and heartily recommend it, especially for someone in the later Gen X or Elder Millenial age range. That just seems to be the prime target to feel that emotion that I'm talking about, that nostalgia for something that you've never seen before. But, I do think that it's worth a try for anyone at its price point, especially if you can find it on sell. However, it might not be worth it to get the bundle like I did, because I can't recommend Paratopic, the game it was bundled with.