Developer: Revival
Publisher: Revival
Year: 2007
Platform: Windows

Rating: 4/10

A film-noir interactive movie with point and click adventure elements, Fate By Numbers is a free, short indie game that while entertaining, feels incomplete and unfortunately didn’t launch the company forward.

You play as Alice Sanger, a former cop turned private detective after her investigation into corruption in the force left her husband dead and her career in shambles. While working with a new anonymous client, you run into your presumed-dead husband (now working for the bad guys) and get shot at by a sniper. So, a normal day in the film noir world.

Gameplay is clicking on hotspots with occasional inventory puzzles. The pacing is fairly solid, which is necessary in a full motion video adventure. Backgrounds are green screen and painfully obvious, but it certainly hits all the film noir beats I expect. With a couple of exceptions, the performances are not great; direction seems lacking, many of the actors project and emote. But at least it’s earnest.

Fate By Numbers is rather short and was supposed to be the beginning of a larger story. Unfortunately, Revival never got off the ground. The game is still free and still available, though it’s over a gigabyte and must be downloaded in .iso form and then mounted.