Welcome to the seventh and final installment in the Seven Gaming Heroes series. Since I’ve been talking about heroes for the past seven weeks it would be remiss of me not to mention one of the greatest gaming heroes of this generation from an indie game, that is Reynardo from Stories: The Path of Destinies.
Stories: The Path of Destinies follows a player-chosen branching narrative with intertwining plot points that react to your choices made on each playthrough. Successive playthroughs unlock further choices and dialogue options, including some which can abruptly end the story causing the player to need to restart the current level and make a different choice at the appropriate moment. By the time the player has unlocked the options required to access a complete playthrough of the story arc they have chosen, one run of the game can be expected to take between 20 and 40 minutes.
Graphically, Stories fully leans into a cartoon aesthetic which suits the dialogue and gameplay very well. Gameplay is comprised of controlling Reynardo through an asymmetrical level while the narrator tells the story of what is happening on screen as well as Reynardo and his companions reaction to unfolding events. Stories is a very funny game when it wants to be, but uses comedy more to accompany the fun albeit basic moment to moment encounters, rather than leaning on it or trying to make it a core feature.
Stories: The Path of Destinies was a free title on Playstation Plus in December 2016 and so, like with a number of previous entries in my Gaming Heroes, many Playstation 4 owners will likely have access to the title already if you added it to your game library while it was free.
That concludes the Seven Gaming Heroes series. Thank you for reading about the seven games that I feel have long been unsung heroes in modern gaming and who deserve so much more love and attention than they were getting when this series began. If I have convinced just one person to play each of the games that I have mentioned over the last seven weeks then I will take that as a victory, but if you haven’t played all of them then you owe it to yourself to give them a chance.
What games do you consider to be your Gaming Heroes that you would have liked to see on this list? Make your choices known in the comments or over on our Twitter @RespawningUK.
If you have played Stories: The Path of Destinies before or since reading this article then let me know in the comments or on my Twitter @MaliceVER. Thanks again for reading and I’ll be back next week with a new list feature for you, so I look forward to speaking to you then.
