Stories: The Path of Destinies

As some already wrote, the graphics are nice, but the gameplay is not that great. - You have 4 swords to play with, but each sword only has 3 levels, including the level 1 which is unusable (the first upgrade unlocks the ability to use the sword) - You can equip up to 3 gems amongst something like 8 possible ones, and each has 3 levels ("true" levels, this time) - You have a talent tree with some parts of it are locked until you unrevealed some "Truth" (there are 4 truths to reveal) - Each story make you go through something like 5 acts, each act having often 2 variants The annoying point with the gameplay is that it feels like a little unbalanced (not in the sense that some parts are ridiculously easy or hard, but in the sens that some present aspects which could be interesting, are in fact completely useless). Levels have check points from where you cannot go back, which means, that you cannot fully explore a level. There are 4 kind of doors, each unlockable by a different sword, but you will quickly get all swords, making the door system pretty useless besides making you loose some seconds to swap weapons. Also, you do not gain something really relevant by opening a door you did not opened before. Most of the time, it is just a chest which provides random stuff that any other chest could provide). I explored something like 6 or 7 stories out of the 25 possible, before unlocking the good end, and I see no point in doing all the remaining ones. After 4 or 5 runs, you have unlocked all sword levels and gems, and visited every level. The only remaining thing is the talent tree to complete, but at this point, there is no real stake as you are already strong enough to win every encounter, so that farming for last points is not that much attractive. In the end, this is a game based on choices for the story to explore, but when playing it, the choice aspect is not always where you would like it to be. I still enjoyed it, but it could have been so much better...

This game immediately reminded me of Bastion and Transistor regarding the artsy style and atmosphere but also regarding the Narrator (Bastion) and arena fights (Transistor). What "Stories" also shares with these games is its very limited content. However, where Bastion and Transistor slowed down the progress by repetitive challenges, replaying levels is a design element here. Which is actually quite clever and for the first few replays (you need a few to finish), different paths within the levels and locked doors (you can only open later with the according swords) make the replaying quite enjoyable. Then there's the narrator and his commenting of more or less everything you do adds a certain self-ironic touch that I liked a lot. The actual game mechanics are rather simplistic though. There are only very few (and very simple) puzzles and while there are different paths to take and some areas behind locked doors (which always contain treasure chests with upgrade items), you actually just need to run through a level and survive a few arena fights on your way. The movement and fight system is (more or less) completely mouse based and very simple but it actually works quite well. Again, the twist in this game is that after each level, you can make a choice how to continue and each choice will have consequences that you can't predict in the beginning. So you need to fail a few (at least four) times until you can finally win. Now, theoretically you can continue playing the game to play through all possible combinations, but I didn't feel the urge to do so and I guess most people won't. Even tough I enjoyed the game, I need to add that there are some technical issues. Firstly, this game has absolutely excessive loading times for such a small game. Even reaching the main menu takes minutes on a Core i7-6700K when installed on SSD. Plus there are some bugs and glitches (getting stuck in walls, graphics missing so you are walking in the air, mouse cursor vanishes).

Game itself is good in general but it is really frustrating that whenever you finish a battle if you were damaged during battle you will barely find any healt at all, when you breake barrels or crystals even when your energy is at full they will keep on giving you energy and not health sometimes forcing you to wait until you get killed to have half of your health regenerated but if you had your energy at full when you got killed when you respawn it will have half of your energy only.

Cool fairy tale, it has a tree of skills, the graphics is pleasant and nice. The best thing in the game is the way we make choices. They actually matter a lot. You have to walk though the game several times to get the full story and compare the alternatives. To cut the long story short the game is worth playing. I recommend.

The story(ies), the humor, the gameplay..it's all pretty damn good. But there are two glaring issues: The loading times and the overall performance. The loading times are abysmal. Not just a bit, we are talking PS3-Bloodborne-Tier. The game is very stylised, uses the UE4...yet it runs worse than bloody Witcher 3. Without the technical issues id give 5 stars with no hesitation what so ever.