Swashbucklers, magic swords, beautiful sorceresses, politics, desperate gambits, shady spies, star crossed lovers, ancient and evil artifacts, Stories the Path of Destinies has all of the ingredients of your generic adventure. Researching the game on Steam, I noted the colorful, yet common verdant backgrounds. By the time I saw that the characters were animals alarms started ringing in my head. Even the name sounds generic. I was ready to hate whatever this random game was. After spending time with it, though, I am convinced that Stories is a great example of how presentation can keep a fantastic game from getting the attention it deserves.
Stories puts you in the shoes of Reynardo, a fox and former rouge/adventurer/mercenary (it’s not really clear which and it doesn’t matter) who promised his mother that he would not die in the gallows, so he retired to shack up with a librarian rabbit and drink wine. However, his peace would not last. The Empire, under orders of its mad Emperor, ransack the city looking for ancient artifacts. Amongst them is a book, which costs Reynardo’s lady friend her life. The book is given to her son Peter, who wants to take it to the Resistance that opposes the Empire. However, with her dying words, Peter’s mother asks Reynardo to protect Peter. Reynardo does go after Peter, who runs away after the two disagree on whether or not he should join the resistance. Thus starts the tutorial section. Eventually, after introducing the basic concepts of the game and making it clear that Peter is going to be a thorn in your side, Peter dies. His book is untouched. Reynardo laments not having lied to the youngster, picks up the book, and boards his airship, fleeing the destruction.
Raynardo looks in the book and he is presented with a choice: Try to find a legendary weapon, or save his friend who has vital information. It is at this point that you will restart in any subsequent playthroughs. Stories will have you making decisions that will drive what story you see. These branching paths can result in widely different stories. Although you will notice that locations, characters, and concepts often appear in different stories, but their roles and the consequences for the choices are different enough, and well written enough that it feels like natural consequences from making different choices. After making a few choices you will arrive at the ending of the story which will most likely end badly, and will be transported to the beginning, to make new choices. The real objective is to learn four crucial truths, which will allow you to get the ending Reynardo wants.
A game like this is carried by the strength of its writing, and I was pleasantly surprised by how good the writing is. The world, made up of floating islands and airships that move between them, appears generic at first. But there has been a clear effort to explain how things in a world like that would work. The details are mostly presented by the narrator and notes found in game in very small doses, so they are not intrusive but provide interesting background information. There is a surprising amount of lore in the world. It is not as deep as a full-on RPG, but for something that looked like a Diablo clone, I was not expecting this level of detail.
Characters are well written as well, they have defined arcs in the stories in which they appear and despite being anthropomorphic animals, they feel very human. They have complex backgrounds, aspirations, and regrets. Their behavior remains consistent through all of the stories. This means that after finishing a few runs, you would have an idea of how a character will react to things you do. They will refer with longing to old times. I was even surprised to hear Reynardo himself talk about missing the woman he was living with. It would have been very easy for the game to forget about her, I forgot about her before that point. It is a small detail but it shows how well written the game is. It helps that the game only really has to be finished five times in order to get the “good” ending, but it has about 32 endings for those who want to keep playing after that.
This great writing is brought to life to great effect by the game’s narrator and sole voice actor: Justin Casey. Casey narrates the entire game, and reads the lines of all of the characters. It feels a lot like having a really enthusiastic grandfather reading you a bedtime story. The voice acting really brings everything together, and were it of lesser quality, Stories: Path of Destinies would not be as engaging a game as it turned out to be.
You will traverse the same handful of areas in each of the stories doing a mixture of very small navigational puzzles, and a lot of combat. The combat starts off as very basic. You have your basic attacks, a dash move that allows you to escape your enemies, and a counter move that is performed by tilting the controller stick towards your enemy as it attacks. You can also grab enemies and throw them at other enemies, or off of the platform in which you are fighting. Attacking, countering, and grabbing all use the same button which can cause the occasional confusion, but aside from that the combat was responsive. As you advance through the game, you will get more abilities and so will the enemies, but you will seldom have to use anything beyond the three original abilities to get through.
Since you are expected to play the levels several times, there are ways to unlock alternate paths via the crafting of new swords. The crafting system is fairly rudimentary, and there are only four swords that you can craft, and an upgraded version of each you can unlock. These swords serve as keys to unlocking alternate paths through the level. This exploration keep the levels from becoming too repetitive, and they also reward you with resources and gems for crafting and to expand your abilities. There is a skill tree where you can earn more abilities and generally make Reynardo more capable, using the great excuse that through his sabbatical he forgot all of his combat training. The way new levels in this skill tree are unlocked is by finding the truths, which means that you must finish the game a few times to unlock the skill. It is a great way to keep the game feeling dynamic through multiple play troughs.
I did find some technical issues with the game. The loading times sometimes were very long; I clocked a particularly heinous one in at seven minutes. This seemed to occur more or less randomly. Sometimes it’d be the initial load, sometimes it’d be a stage. Loading times in general are a bit long as it is. I’ve also experienced weird crashes during play where the animation stopped playing and the audio of the game kept working for a few seconds before that stopped also. The only way to get out of those freezes was to use the task manager. In the time I played this to get the true ending, about six hours, it only happened twice so it is not incredible common, but keep in mind it is there if you choose to pic this up for PC.
Despite these small technical issues, Stories the Paths of Destiny is a pleasant surprise. A competently executed action RPG that is set apart by magnificent world building, and wonderful story telling. It is almost sad that this game’s presentation is so generic and mundane that many people might dismiss it as just another steam indie game. It feels like this game would have been better served by putting more emphasis in its unique features. It was such a pleasant surprise when I played it! If you are looking for a good action RPG with a unique and strong narrative focus, I would recommend that you give Stories a go.
This review was performed on PC code sent by the publisher.
