Stories: The Path of Destinies

Pretty good game. Cartoonish graphics. Fast but not too frantic battles (no difficulty levels). Fantastic story, delivered in small segments, with different paths/branches to follow, until unlocking 4 truths (which result in death), but, with the knowledge accumulated, eventually lead to the path of success (imagine the Edge of Tomorrow film). That way you learn the plot piece by piece and in the fifth run you have all the truths at your disposal to lead you to victory. Don’t fret though, at most an hour for each run. Each run/playthrough consists of 5 chapters/areas of about 8-15 minutes long each. Auto-saving after each chapter. Amazing narrator (Julian Casey), having an excellent and fitting voice, and telling many jokes around. And a perfect antihero, Reynardo, who got in a mess that he wasn’t looking for! There are skill points granted, so you can choose skills to enhance your playthrough, and there are also crafting materials, for some simple crafting of swords, which unlock doors. As the only negative, I’d consider that in most areas/chapters you won’t be able to explore the area fully. That’s because when, for example, there are two paths to follow in an area and you pick one of them, then, if that was the main/proper one (without you knowing that), you are blocked from going back and explore the other one too. The good thing is that in some of the areas you’ll traverse again later (in your later runs), but you will still have to remember where that unexplored path was. The ambiguous ending makes the story and the overall game even more interesting.

I just tested the game for a couple of runs. Even if my PC is not that recent, I manage to make most of the current AAA games run smoothly, and this one I have to play in low settings, with awful loading times. Really, I first thought the game crashed at the first start... Anyway, once running, the experience is pleasant, and the game is quite fun !

Neat idea, decent story, only the gameplay is beyond repetitive. Which you may say is to be expected of a game that is all about repeating itself to make different choices at different moments. Well you got me there. Still won't change the fact that you'll be fighting the same enemies and going through the same linear corridors over and over and over. There is no skipping. Once you finish a path and get one of the endings, you go back to the beginning, do every bit of mind-numbingly boring combat again to get to back to that one crucial decisions you need to get to. It doesn't help that most of the dialogue and cutscenes are unskippable, which is unforgivable for a any game, but especially this one. I don't wanna hear the sentence "Pieces of the Sykripper had surfaced." again for the rest of my life.... It took me about 6 attempts to get to true ending, I'm not touching the game ever again for any more endings. On the plus side, the narrator is genuinely funny and the story & characters have their charm. Which sincerely makes me wish it had been a Visual Novel instead.

I couldn't get the game to start at first, solved it by reducing the shadow quality to the minimum (rest on max). So I was expecting a bugfest. I was pleasantly surprised. Aside from some minor bugs I didn't encounter anything gamebraking or otherwise annoying. So let's get to the story. In short, you're playing Reynardo, a bold fox fighting in a rebellion, trying to achieve the seemingly impossible task to defeat the evil toad monarch. Despite the cartoonish look, and although all characters are animals, keep in mind that it's not a child's game. There are five chapters. At the beginning of each you choose the course of action, leading to different consequences and different choices in the next chapters. After the final consequence you're taken back in time (does make sense) with a new secret learned (depending on the choices) and maybe a somewhat better understanding what to do (or not to do) this time. This game is intended to be played through at least five times. "Lame", some may think. But far from it. In every playthrough the story (really rewarding) is different, you'll visit different regions and the enemys get harder each time. I wasn't bored a single minute. Well OK, maybe one...or two. But that was it and on with joy it went. You run around, find stuff for upgrades and fight. A lot. The skill system is nice and with the right skills the fights develop quite the flow. It's more than just a hack and slash - it's a "hack/slash/dash/pull" :-) It was pretty fun. The narration is exceptionally good, the narrator fills the story (which is surprisingly serious and sometimes quite sad) with humour and despite the seriousness I had to laugh many times. He also acts out the voices of the different caracters really well. The music's really good as well. After playing the game I often whistled some melodies for five minutes or so. If you love story-driven games with authentic characters and both witty humour and seriousness I really really recommend this game.

This would be a good, if not great game, if it weren't for the mouse bug: After some time the mouse cursor disappears, making it really annoying to navigate through menues. This bug is known since 2016 but is still there. If at least your arrow keys would work, but no, they don't. Appart from that, what do you get: For most things I'd say, they are slightly on the better side, while not that impressive. Art style is good and save the otherwise okayisch graphics. Cutscenes are nice, but should be more skippable since the game concept includes to see the same story parts again and again. The fighting is mostly fun, but the controls could be more precise sometimes. Skill system is good. Level design is okay. I like the alternative routes but the level design gets repetative after a few hours. The concept with the different stories is great and the most outstanding game point. With some improvements in level design, controls and/or graphics I'd give 4 stars, with the potential to 5 stars if all these aspects were improved.