It’s been a while since I read a ‘choose your own adventure’ type story. As a child these types of books were so much fun to read, but once you’d read through certain sections a few times, you’d start to get pretty bored. In Stories: The Path of Destinies, things stay fresh with combat, upgrading your weapon etc. but I must say, I still couldn’t help but feel a tad bored at times. Read the rest of our Stories The Path of Destinies review below.

Platform Used For Stories The Path of Destinies Review: Gigabyte P35, Intel i7-4720HQ 2.60GHz, 16GB Ram, GeForce GT 965M
Developer: Spearhead Games
Genre: Action, Adventure, Indie, RPG
Recommended If You Liked: Epistory – Typing Chronicles, Hyper Light Drifter, The Banner Saga
Price: $14.99USD
Rating:

RPGs tend to follow a set storyline and many end up coming across as rather linear. Spearhead Games decided to take the linearity out of games and replace it with a ‘choose your own adventure’ style of conveying a story in many different ways.

One such example of this is right at the beginning of the game where you have the option of moving on to find a super weapon, or visit a friend who needs your help. By choosing to look for this so-called super weapon, your friend dies. It’s choices like these that had me a bit confused as to which age demographic the game was aimed at.

The graphics being very colourful, characters being quite cute, and the relatively basic and fairy tale-esque storyline all felt like Stories is a game for children. However, the amount of death in the storyline requires one to have a certain level of maturity so as to not be too hard hit by the choices you make.

These choices are broken up by multi-tiered dungeons to run through with Reynardo; an ex-pirate who finds his fox-self heading down the path of an unintentional hero. Dungeons are littered with raven enemies that come at you in swarms. Combat requires you to mash one button constantly to swing your sword and perform combos. Enemies’ attacks can be deflected, and with the help of visiting an upgrade shrine, different abilities and effects can be acquired via a skill tree. Such effects/abilities can be things like time slowing down when an enemy attack is deflected, or a hook that can be shot out to swing across otherwise impassable gaps between platforms.

Combat is very easy to get used to, but it can also feel quite clunky at times. For example, on a PC you use right-click to move. That being said, there’s a bit of a delay between finishing an attack and being able to move again. I’d understand why this is if there was a particular combat animation going on, like Reynardo sheathing his blade or something, but from what I can see Reynardo is doing nothing that looks to be interfering with him being able to move. Therefore combat comes across as button-bashing, but so does moving around, which is quite silly in my opinion. Being very button-bashing oriented, combat in Stories becomes quite easy towards the end game. There doesn’t feel to be any incline in difficulty the further you get.

Stories Story

Story-wise, if you were to ask me what the game is all about, I wouldn’t really be able to tell you. All I know is it has something to do with an ex-pirate fox who comes across a sword that can unlock doors, has to defeat heaps of raven-like baddies and find a way to put an end to a big baddy. Oh and there are also some toads that you come across.

I felt the story was a bit lacking in interesting-ness and the only thing that made up for it was the very nicely voiced narration by Julian Casey. Julian does all the voices for each character found throughout the story and does a marvellous job at inventing a different sounding voice for each. It’s just sad that Reynardo’s voice comes across as a bit monotonous and uninteresting. When playing an RPG, I want the protagonist to be quite likeable, but when you mix Reynardo’s personality with his voice, I just couldn’t find it in my heart to like the guy.

Choose Your Own Adventure

The whole idea of choosing which path you want to take in order to progress the story is very well done. And the fact that there are heaps of different outcomes provides a great deal of replayability which is very welcome in today’s gaming market. Each outcome is eventually collected as cards.

If choosing your own adventure wasn’t enough to keep you coming back, the skill tree and sword upgrading system will be. As your sword improves, new doors become accessible. And as you progress through the skill tree, combat will become easier and easier.

Continue reading on the next page…

[schema type=”review” url=”http://store.steampowered.com/app/439190/” name=”Stories The Path of Destinies on Steam” description=”It’s been a while since I read a ‘choose your own adventure’ type story. As a child these types of books were so much fun to read, but once you’d read through certain sections a few times, you’d start to get pretty bored. In Stories: The Path of Destinies, things stay fresh with combat, upgrading your weapon etc. but I must say, I still couldn’t help but feel a tad bored at times.” rev_name=”Stories The Path of Destinies Review” rev_body=”I’m really on the fence about whether or not I enjoyed my experience with Stories: The Path of Destinies. I know I really loved the graphics and art-style, but everything else from the combat to the storyline felt a bit under-thought and empty.” author=”GameReviews AU” pubdate=”2016-06-04″ user_review=”3″ min_review=”1″ max_review=”5″ ]