At the 2025 Xbox Games Showcase, Spiritfarer developer Thunder Lotus announced At Fate’s End, “an action-adventure game where you fight the ones you love and your skill tree is your family tree.” The reveal trailer is a roughly two-minute fever dream of young women pulling swords made of light out of their throats, dudes ripping their spines out to use as chainblades, and messy demigod family drama.
It’s got a gorgeous style, I don’t understand any of it, and my interest could not be more piqued.
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The Steam page for At Fate’s End says it takes place in a “lush fantasy world” where you play as Shan, the wielder of “the legendary God Sword Aesus” and “the deft young heiress of the Hemlock clan”—all great stuff for fans of proper nouns. It’s unclear why Shan is driven into conflict with her siblings, all of whom seem to be capable of drawing their own divine weaponry from various points on their bodies, but it is clear that it looks sick.
Once Shan pulls her legendary sword from her throat, there’s apparently a lot she can do with it: As it hovers nearby, she can swing it telekinetically for standard attacks, or she can do more complicated maneuvers like using it to conjure a luminous bird-spirit that can launch her across the screen in a blink slash.
Some of those more involved combat techniques are apparently derived from her siblings, whose skills (and swords) you’ll claim for yourself as you confront them. But hashing out your family’s conflicts will involve more than bladecraft: In the trailer, as Shan duelled with her siblings—like the lightning-charged, eyepatch-wearing Camilla or the meditative, moon-conjuring Barrel—she triggered mid-combat dialogue choices.
Those moments are opportunities for “tactical dialogue,” where you shake your sibling’s resolve using information you’ve learned about your family’s history—doing some Dun Möch shit, in other words. Utilizing your mindmap of family secrets, you could, for example, press on lingering parental trauma and tell your extremely cool lightning sword sister that she’s “acting like mom” while you’re locking blades. Even the finest duellists can’t survive a blow like that.
At Fate’s End launches in 2026.
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