Stories: The Path of Destinies

Playing out like an interactive bedtime story, Stories: The Path of Destinies places you firmly in control of its unfolding narrative, throwing a number of pivotal decisions at you along the way.  Dripping with charm from every pore, Stories showcases a beautifully vibrant art-direction and a witty narrator who is ever present to spout constant one-liners.

You take control of Reynardo, a dimwitted yet courageous fox, as he stumbles through a number of poorly made choices in an effort to defeat a seemingly unstoppable tyrannical emperor. Across your journey you'll have to rely on the help of a number of old allies and carefully make a number of painstaking decisions in order to help win the war and bring the rebellion to an end.

Much like Supergiant Games' excellent Transistor, Stories features a narrator who is there to poke fun at the actions unfolding onscreen. Whether you're unleashing your rage on an inanimate object or making peace with your own grizzly demise, the narrator is always on hand to throw out something utterly hilarious. Even after multiple playthroughs of the game the narration always feels fresh as you'll rarely hear the same few lines repeated.

The game is vividly colourful with vibrant greens, blues and purples working to illuminate the rich mystical planes of Boreas. Its lively color palette helps to bring its world alive and will leave you itching to explore every inch possible. The landscape of each five chapters feels distinctly different and offers multiple secret paths that you can explore in search of hidden treasure.

Between chapters you'll be caught at a crossroads and left to decide between three choices, which largely dictates the direction of the story. Once you've hacked and slashed your way through all five chapters you'll be met with 1 of 24 possible conclusions and the book's pages will flutter back to the start. Each playthrough can take anywhere between half an hour and an hour depending on your skill level, giving you a total playtime of up to 24 hours for 100% completion. After multiple playthroughs you'll start to uncover the many truths behind each character's motives, leading you to informatively reach a happy ending.  

Every new story path responds like a new game+, allowing you to continue with all the swords, gems and skills you have stacked up previously. Admittedly, the game can get pretty tedious after multiple playthroughs as you'll end up revisiting the same environments and repeating the same actions just to unlock a slight variation on the ending. This is made worse as, by around your tenth return, you'll have probably fully upgraded all of your swords, found all of the gems and purchased the majority of the skills.

Combat feels similar to Batman: Arkham Knight, as you slash your opponents to pieces, string together combos, and counter oncoming attacks. You can also send enemies hurtling to their death, slow down time itself, and bolt out of the way of danger. The main issue is that encounters feel incredibly easy and there's no real penalty for dying as your next checkpoint can always be found around the corner. What makes this even worse is that you'll return to battle after dying with half of your health and energy, diminishing all challenge and making it very likely that you'll succeed upon your second try. It feels like a horde of angry raven soldiers - your main enemies - would be a little more difficult to take down, but instead they just stand and watch as you pummel them into oblivion.

After slicing your opponents in two and watching the feathers fly, you'll be rewarded with XP, which contributes towards leveling up and unlocking new skill points. When kneeling at an altar you'll be presented with a branching skill tree where you can use your hard earned points to regain some of Reynardo's forgotten abilities. These range from general health and stamina upgrades, to all new powers such as being able to grapple enemies towards you.

Starting with the plainfully basic hero sword, Reynardo has the ability to craft an additional three elemental swords that can be wielded in battle. While rummaging through hidden treasure chests you'll find the components needed for crafting a shiny new blade. Apart from using them to unlock hidden pathways there doesn't seem any real point in switching between them in battle as they all pretty much function the same. By hitting R2 you can unleash each sword's hidden power, which increases their overall damage, but again there feels like no incentive to switch as all of these powers feel largely similar.

You'll find it pretty difficult to close the book on this fast-paced RPG adventure. Its story after multiple playthroughs may feel a little tedious and encounters may lack challenge, but its charmingly addictive gameplay will see you returning again and again to the gorgeous world of Boreas in an effort to unlock all of the available endings.