If you enjoy the old school choose your own adventure novels then Stories: Path of Destinies is a must-play. From developers Spearhead Games, players will embark on an epic journey filled with remorse, heroism, terror, revenge, and betrayal. However, it’s depending on the choices you make on which of these tones will set the game up.
From the title alone, Stories: Path of Destinies, should give players a heads up that there are plenty of adventures within the game. In fact, there is a total of twenty-five different stories within the game and it’s all dependent on the choices you make, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
The game starts off with a civil war between a kingdom emperor and its citizens. While the emperor Toad has embarked on a scheme to revive the old gods and become immortal, a rebellion is quickly forming to stop the once loved toad and save the entire world of impending dire doom. Our protagonist, a sly fox named Reynaldo, becomes a member of the rebellion after a series of unfortunate events.
A once ordinary fox after he ending his days of adventure, Reynaldo becomes a center focus in a means to prevent the world from further harm. Though, as mentioned, the story only unfolds from the various choices you make and none of them is an easy decision. For instance, the start of Stories: Path of Destinies puts players between crossroads of rescuing a dear friend from being executed by the emperor’s orders or find a piece of an ancient weapon that could cause a detrimental damage.
Within the game, there are four main truths, a constant that will never change regardless of the various choices you make throughout the game. Your end goal is to discover those four main truths and with it, you’ll have the knowledge of how to end the game positively. While each end story only takes about an hour to complete, it took me about seven tries before I was able to finally get a positive ending, I’m either really horrible at picking choices or the developers did an incredible job at making each choice tough to determine the correct route, I’m going to say it’s the latter.
This is an action RPG title so there’s plenty of fast pace fighting and Reynaldo can equip up to four different swords, each will come with their own unique power such as being able to regenerate health or freeze your enemies after being struck. Additionally, the actual combat was relatively smooth, I didn’t run into any issues flinging back and forth between enemies, blocking attacks, or throwing an enemy off the platform edge into the empty abyss below.
Complementing the combat is various skills which can be upgraded and unlocked. Gamers can increase their movement speed, overall health, or even tweak the amount of damage you’re able to deal with your foes.
As mentioned, each time you go through the game, Reynaldo is given an insight of how he failed or certain aspects are given about various characters. With this newly found knowledge, you’ll receive new options or can go through and select a different decision, ultimately taking players through another route within the game. As for progression, the game alters the amount of enemies that are found within each play in order to prevent gamers from rushing through early sections of the campaign.
That’s not to say the game doesn’t have a fault, in fact, there was one issue that I had with the game and that’s repetition. I know that the game is very much in the style of a choose your own adventure book and that I would be replaying certain sections of the video game. However, I wished the game offered an option replay certain chapters. Instead, if I realized that I needed to alter a decision within the fourth chapter, the game still required that I start off from the very beginning.
If you find yourself loving fast paced action RPG titles and enjoy an immersive story that forces players into making touch calls then Stores: Path of Destinies is a must-play.
Final Verdict
8/10
Stories: Path of Destines was developed by Spearhead Games and published by Spearhead Games. It was released on April 12, 2016, for PC and PlayStation 4. A copy of the game was provided by the developer for the purpose of this review.
