Stories: Path of Destinies Review

Stories: Path of Destinies

Release: January 1, 1970
Publisher: Spearhead Games
Developer: Spearhead Games
Genre:
PEGI: T
Comments:

 

Comment

In Stories, you play a comedic genius fox who must save the world. While this might sound like the most boring – and most overused – premise ever, but the developers make it work. See, you will fail, and fail again, and fail again. That’s the point. At a minimum, you will need to fail four times before you can technically beat the game. Each time you fail, you will learn something new about the world, called a “Truth.” Once you know the 4 Truths that the story is based on, you can make the correct decisions at each juncture to complete the game. But, that’s not very interesting is it – there are actually over 20 ways to fail at Stories: The Path of Destinies, and while some might consider failing 20 times to be a repetitive slog, the developers have found a way to make it insanely interesting and compelling, in a few very specific ways.

Time to Beat

You can legitimately ‘beat’ (fail) the level in 30 minutes or less, depending on how well you do at combat and how much you plan to explore. You can easily do a play through or two a day, which minimizes the repetitiveness of the 10 or so areas you will play through.

Funny Dialogue

The game is presented as a story, and while you will play through 5 chapters, each is divided by a few pages of book dialogue that is both informative and well written. Humor lies around every corner. With so many different paths to choose, there are so many dialogue options. Fortunately, the developers could have rehashed old commentaries over and over again, but with lots of dialogue options, you won’t often hear the exact same thing twice. This becomes less true as you move through play 15+ – as you will have visited most areas and attempted most of the possible choices – but still, it is fairly varied.

Upgrade Carry Over

When you begin the game, a few areas of the map will be locked behind gates that requires certain weapons to open. In total, there are 4 weapons available in the game, but it takes at least 5 or 6 play throughs before you will have collected enough resources from chests to craft every weapon available. That means all of your early adventures will vary as you get the ability to open up new areas. Weapons always carry forward from one adventure to the next, as do upgrades, so again, this adds to the excitement each time you fail.

It’s Not all Perfect

Obviously, there are things that could be better in Stories. If you play for long periods of time, the game does get repetitive quickly. This is definitely a title that needs to be played in short spurts. Unfortunately, many will pass this over if they attempt to play for hours on end. Another problem I have is with the combat. It often seems unfair, especially when you are required to use an enemey to destroy the shield of another. Unless you tackle those shield carrying enemies first, you are toast – even though the game automatically spawns new enemies to use on the shield enemies, unless you have a huge battle area to work with, you’ll never get away to do what you need to do. This often resulted in deaths that felt fairly unfair.

Conclusion

Stories: The Path of Destinies is different, and it is something you should try to enjoy soon on your PS4. I know Uncharted just launched, but take a break and try this. You won’t be disappointed. You can buy Stories: The Path of Destinies online via the Playstation Store.