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Let’s face it, most pets are utterly useless. They eat, sleep, defecate in inappropriate places and cost you thousands in luxury food and vets bills. Okay, they have plenty of charm and provide comfort to the young, the lonely or the elderly, but do they actually do anything to earn their keep? No.

In Fate, things are very different. In this RPG, man’s best friend or lil’ kitty is a hardened warrior, taking on hordes of kobolds without a thought for personal safety. What’s more, Rex or Tigger can fetch and carry vast amounts of weapons, armour and jewellery, then run up from the dungeons, flog it in town, and race back with the proceeds in a thrice. Even better, with the right food they transform into a vicious wolf, a giant spider, a fire-breathing lizard, a hideous walking brain, or one of a host of other monstrous forms, all the better to fight by your side. Imagine Dungeon Siege’s mule with added offensive capabilities and a whole lot of baby-faced charm. It’s a wonderful idea, and Fate has a dozen more where that came from.

You see, Fate is that rarest of things: the low-budget game done well. It’s a cheap single-player RPG, produced and distributed online by Wild Tangent in the USA, with a plot so wispy that it might as well not be there. Its basic gameplay is pure Diablo, and – unbelievably – it’s actually more one-dimensional than Blizzard’s aging hack-and-slash superstar. Yet it’s one of the most enjoyable PC games I’ve played this summer.

Partly, it’s because Fate doesn’t take itself too seriously. Forget the usual pomp and circumstance of most single-player RPGs; their hack-fantasy epic quests and evil sorcerer villains spouting wretched mock-Shakespeare dialogue that would make Lord British blush. Fate gives you a town full of shops and characters who dish out quests, and a dungeon full of monsters and treasure. You pick up quests in the former, wander into the latter, slaughter, loot and pillage until your health runs low, then do a runner back to town and sell your goods (if you haven’t got your feline friend or canine chum to do so first). The overarching plot could be summed up as ‘There’s a big evil bugger lurking on level 47, would you mind killing it?’ That’s it. It’s as easy and as simple as that.

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