Stories: The Path of Destinies

Generally enjoyable, with most of the progression systems in the game lasting long enough for the casual playthough (5-10 endings). Worth a try if you already have the game (like me).
Unfortunately, obtaining 100% achievements in this game is a slog, and there are questionable design choices in this game that quickly sour the game experience after a while. My playthrough of this game is strictly with keyboard and mouse only, and some aspects may be different from playthoughs done with a controller. Below are some of the gripes I have with this game:
Inability to Remap Keybinds
You don't need to press too many different buttons to play this game, but you are ONLY allowed to press those specific buttons. Rebinding controls is strictly forbidden in this game—you'll just have to make do with the default controls given to you.
Janky Movement Commands
The movement commands issued from your cursor seem to extend horizontally from the character's torso—not from your feet or aligned to terrain like you would expect. This design choice, coupled with the angled camera, leads to a pretty noticeable parallax error when attempting to move around, and your character will appear to drift when traversing straight corridors.
Stages that feature stairs and uneven terrain in general will guarantee that you get real intimate with the level geometry and end up stuck in corners you didn't know existed. This parallax can also assist you in snapping to the wrong enemy during combat with grouped enemies, which may cause you to miss counters or accidentally detonate an explosive raven.
You are able to adapt to this movement with more game time, but is unintuitive and comes across as jarring when first starting out.
Lack of Input Buffering for Movement
For a Hack and Slash game, you would expect the controls to be more fluid. The attack commands are generally fine in this regard, but the movement leaves more to be desired. There is a distinct lack of input buffering for movement (including dashes), which serves no real purpose other than slowing down gameplay.
When watching cutscenes or waiting for your character to finish an animation, you HAVE to wait for them to finish completely before trying to move or dash. Failure to do so will leave your character idling on the spot (and at the mercy of stage hazards or enemies) until you issue another keydown event on your movement keys. The lack of input buffering becomes a massive hindrance when trying to move fast and clear levels quickly.
Lots of Waiting
The narration and storytelling is enjoyable for the first few times, but you'll discover that waiting is a big part of this game after reaching a few endings.
Every single cutscene and every dialogue option in this game is unskippable, no matter how many times you've encountered it. Yes, tell me more about how I can choose to rescue Lapino, or choose to find the armature, or choose to find the gem for the umpteenth time—I have no idea these options existed and really need the brief.
With 20+ unique endings to reach, and each ending/run taking around 20-30 minutes to complete, having a skip button to speed things up would be a much appreciated quality of life to have. Unfortunately, this game does not spare you that convenience, and forces you to listen to the narration over and over again. Keep in mind that the game pauses automatically when you alt-tab to a different window, ensuring that progress can only be made if and only if you sit through those cutscenes.
Chest Loot and Shallow Weapon Progression
There are chests scattered around each stage, and opening them can provide the player with gems and sword upgrade materials (ore and essence). However, all swords can only be forged to a maximum level of 2, which is easily done after completing 3 to 4 endings. Additionally, duplicate gem drops do not exist, and you are able to easily obtain all gems by the time you fully upgrade your swords.
Once every gem is collected and every sword is fully upgraded, chests no longer contain meaningful loot, and only exist to replenish lost health and energy (if you even need it). This ends up hurting the game's replayability as the player is no longer incentivised to explore stages and look for chests.
Having multiple weapons to craft and use seems interesting at first, but becomes pointless fast. Each weapon has its own unique ability that can aid you in combat, and can allow you to open a corresponding elemental door within stages. Unlocking these elemental doors can provide you with more loot and grant access to alternate routes and shortcuts.
Unfortunately, the different swords all do the same damage with their normal attacks, and are only differentiated by their abilities which all do the same thing—allow you to do more damage by expending energy. The only exception to this is the hero sword, which allows you to regenerate health at the cost of energy,
The fire, ice and void swords all allow you to do more damage when their abilities are active, but are never needed because knockdowns are overpowered in this game. Attacking an enemy in a knocked-down state always results in an instant kill, even if empowered and even at max health. This allows you to completely ignore the amount of damage you do per sword swing and simply fish for knockdowns for every single fight to score those instant kills.
The only incentive to use multiple swords is for their ability to unlock elemental doors to gain access to new areas in stages. These special areas can contain chests (that you no longer need) and shortcuts, but the animation to unlock doors is so slow that you'll be better off staying on the beaten path.
As a result, the only sword that matters is the hero sword, the default sword given to you at the start of the game, only because it allows you to heal the damage taken from enemy encounters.
Limited Selection of Unique Stages
There are only 6 unique stages you can explore, which becomes stale quickly after playing through the game a few times. You always start at the same spot, and always end around the same spot. The lack of variation in enemy types and enemy spawns causes every playthough to become the same—you end up clearing through the same few stages regardless of the choices you make in the story.

A game with a unique style and beautiful narrative, gets destroyed by repetitive gameplay and boring combat. The game could have been so good, but the combat alone turns it into a very average game.
The story is so good tho it's worth a playthrough.

The writing and characters in this game are great and funny, but there's only so many times I can be bothered to play through the game to get alternative endings, especially when dialogue can't be skipped at any point.
I played through it enough times until I stopped having fun. Maybe that's the best way to enjoy this game, but it's sad it has to be that way.
I would still, however, recommend it, even if just for a few runs, because the game is still very fun overall.

I personally liked the game, despite its repetitive nature. The combat felt pretty satisfying to me.
As an overthinker I loved Reynardo, the fox protagonist.
Two bad things to say:
- Despite being able to skip some cutscenes after you have seen them once, it still feels so slow to be able to choose the paths when the narrator is describing them;
- El** **sk reference :(.

This is one of those games I think I got in a bundle at some point and then it sat unplayed in my library for years. Finally played it, and it's actually great! Combat is simple but fun once you get a few upgrades, voice acting is excellent, the story is interesting. Highly recommend.

Basically imagine if you took the Batman Arkham Asylum combat but put it in a branching paths time loop with furries.
The combat system is straightforward and fun and most of the story paths are interesting if a bit simple (understandable for a story you go through over and over), it can get repetitive playing the same levels over and over to try and get all the endings but the late game skill unlocks allow you to clear enemy encounters very fast, I just wish some of the unskippable dialogue would have been skippable.

Wonderful narrative, really charming characters and a really addictive gameplay loop. It also doesn't outlast it's welcome. I really recommend picking this up and playing it. We absolutely need more games like this.