Stories: The Path of Destinies is a game that could be best described as a marriage of Bastion and “choose your own adventure” books. It’s as charming as the source materials, and share the possible frustrations that can come out of such a marriage.
You play as a fox knight/swordsman called Reynardo, caught in the middle of a rebellion against an evil toad king and an army of crows. Along the way, you may or may not befriend a rabbit, a couple of toads, and a cat, and you may or may not reach a happy conclusion to the story. The premise may sound absurd, but good writing brings the story to life, and the single voice that narrates story — and all the characters as if they were in a book — a la Bastion adds to the endearment of the characters.
The story spans across a handful of chapters, each ending with a choice you must make. Should you rescue your rabbit friend, or pursue an ancient weapon? If you pursued the weapon, would you further collect the pieces, or abandon your search and look for an alternative? Had you rescued your rabbit friend, would you then attack and kidnap the daughter of the enemy general, or interrogate her yourself?
Each decision at the end of the chapters opens up an alternate path that will ultimately lead to one of the 24 endings. Unfortunately, 23 of those endings are bad endings, with one being the one true and good ending. To reach that, you must first uncover the “four truths” in the different play-throughs that will reveal the path to victory. This may require six to eight runs of the different story branches.
While this seems great on paper, the reality is that the chapters and levels are identical, so you will get to visit the same levels over and over until you figure out the correct choices for the best ending. Furthermore, you cannot start from a specific chapter; you always have to begin the adventure from chapter one, forcing you to play through until that moment you decide on an alternative path. This makes the game feel unnecessarily longer than it should be.
With every play through, though, you gain levels and skills and they’re carried over. As you upgrade and access new swords (four in total), they give you access to locked doors that were blocked for you in previous visits. As you gain more skills and become stronger, different forms of enemies appear to add to the challenge, hence the monotony is somewhat broken even if you’re traversing the same landscape. The biggest problem I faced, though, is that you cannot skip over the text and conversations, even if you’ve read and heard them many times before.
The gameplay itself is very good. You have four different swords to unlock, each with different abilities, and enemies do what they can to test your skills. You can counter attack, use sword magic to set everyone on fire or freeze them, and use the grapple hook to disarm shielded enemies. Every battle earns you a score, factoring in your fighting style, number of enemies and whether you emerged unscathed, giving you the final XP you’ve earned. This XP is then used to unlock further skills at the totems you find scattered throughout the level.
The mechanics are fun and complemented by gorgeous visuals and art direction. It genuinely feels like a book come to life, but there are some technical glitches. A couple of times during battles, I fell off the cliff or clipped through the ground. It didn’t break my game; I re-appeared back on the field, although my battle score did get affected. The frame-rate — surprisingly — drops quite frequently. It’s a gorgeous game with visual flair, but nothing that one can say will tax the PS4’s processing powers; it’s not Dark Souls or Battlefield. So it’s quite disappointing that the game doesn’t run a constant 60fps.
Is Stories: The Path of Destinies worth playing? For its price, it’s worth giving a shot for sure. One play through is roughly an hour, and in six or eight you would have completed the game with the good ending. If you plan to unlock every different ending, though, prepare to invest some time. It’s a solid game let down by some poor decisions here and there, but certainly worth giving it a shot in the downtown between blockbuster titles.
