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I'm trying to convince my sister to, essentially, give up her life to me, because I need to collect all of my family's swords, and doing so ultimately kills them. I'm already in the thick of things during my first moments playing At Fate's End, the upcoming action-adventure-RPG from Thunder Lotus Games, so some of the specifics elude me, but the point is: tricky conversation to have.
Rather than submit to my request, my sister instead tears her arm off in order to make a lightning sword. She's going to make me work for it, and that includes some precisely timed combat that sees me zooming around to dodge her attacks and hit her at the same time. This, in hindsight, is the moment I fell in love with what At Fate's End is trying to do.
Slice to meet you
Not that I ever had any real doubt. The At Fate's End reveal trailer from the Xbox Games Showcase 2025 last summer has been on my mind ever since, and the game is one of the first that I actively seek out during Xbox's GDC 2026 event. Nicolas Guérin, Thunder Lotus Games creative director on Spiritfarer and now At Fate's End, guides me through some of the earlier sections of the game as I sniff out secrets and deduce my way to another fight against my sister – all of which is set against gorgeous, painterly backgrounds and extremely anime character animation.
"At Fate's End is quite different from Spiritfarer, but at the same time, it's pretty similar, and it's similar in the way that we try to make experiences that transform people," Guérin says. "It's not arrogant at all; it's just that the idea behind what we try to do is just simply to make people experience stuff that will help them think of something… games should have an impact in your life as much as we can."
In the game, your skill tree is also your family tree. Your abilities are ultimately determined by how you confront each of your siblings and ultimately their individual swords. But you'll need to learn about your family and its history and secrets in order to take them on: At Fate's End is ultimately "about how families break apart – and how they might come back together," the official website states.
These skills also mechanically play into tarot, a major inspiration for At Fate's End. Basically, each power from your sibling has an upright and reverse with one being a more active move than the other. That's just one of the most immediate and obvious connections, however. The concept permeates the whole game thematically.
"Tarot is a huge inspiration for At Fate's End, mainly because from the beginning the idea was always to play with the concept of fate," says Guérin. "Fate is kind of important because [At Fate's End] is about a fantasy family; it's about an aristocratic family. And it's pretty common that aristocracy always justified their own status because of fate – because we deserve to be the one on top. So fate and the manipulation of fate was extraordinarily important for us."
"Also, there is a huge theme in At Fate's End about secrets," continues Guérin. "And the good thing about tarot is that it makes you feel like you're uncovering secrets of life, you feel like you're in control of the threads of fate, which was for us extremely interesting to play with."
That is all certainly interesting as a player, though I don't get much opportunity to see how it works together given my brief time with the game. I do, however, get to experience a gnarly boss fight against my aforementioned lighting sword-wielding sister. It's a combination of landing physical hits with my own sword – it comes out of my throat, a bit like something out of Revolutionary Girl Utena – as well as striking her emotionally with my words, using the discoveries I'd previously puzzled out exploring our family's castle. It's a lot, but not in a bad way.
"It is extremely complex to have both swords combat and words combat in this at the same time," admits Guérin. "We spent a huge time trying to nail that properly for At Fate's End. And I think the formula we have right now is quite good in the sense that you have two tracks working together, but also separately, so you have to focus on what you can do in the words fight and what you can do in the swords fight."
"The swords fight will be improved by the fact that you can buy skills from your ancestors, and the words fight will be improved by the fact that you know stuff about your sibling," he continues. "So having two of them together is pretty complex, and it's only going to get more complex. Because that's the intricacy of it that we love, is the idea that you can actually uncover the secrets of your family. You can understand who they are; you can understand their problems. You can be OK with them or judgmental of them, and it's really all those very deep understandings of who they are that matters."
For now, I'll have to take Guérin's word for it, but I look forward to finding out for myself later this year. In the meantime, I'll simply have to wistfully sigh and play the game's trailers on loop while I wait to uncover more compromising material about my fantasy family in order to defeat them in ritual combat – swords and words both.
At Fate's End is set to release for the PS5, Xbox, and PC in 2026. While you wait, be sure to check out our ranking of the best adventure games to play right now.
