The basic game concept is pretty cool--it's a Choose Your Own Adventure game with 25 story variants, constant high-quality narration ala Bastion, and a Batman-lite combat system that rewards flawless victories while varying up attack types. You start with a short prologue to introduce the mechanics of gameplay, Reynardo the fox, and the Book of Destinies which illustrates the various pathways you can take through the game by making four branching choices as you progress into each story.
Once you get through the prologue you have three initial decisions to choose from, each of which sets you down a major story arc that then branches out. When you get to a story ending you return to the Book of Destiny which lets you start over with the initial choices again. Once you've gotten used to the mechanics each story takes about a half hour to complete. The story arcs end up focusing on one of four secrets by the ending--Stories 1-5 reveal one secret, 6-11 the second, 12-17 the third, and 18-24 the fourth. Once you've finished stories among those sets and revealed all four secrets the True Hero ending will become available to play through. Even among the stories that end in a particular secret the details of each story are rather unique, so even if you play through all 25 endings you'll get content that still feels pretty fresh.
Here is the layout of the stories as described above:
Combat is super basic at its core; you have a single sword attack, a hook attack, a dash attack, and a grab attack. Enemy attacks can be countered and the goal of each combat is to kill all the enemies while using as many attack types as possible and not getting hit. The rewards for a fight are based these four criteria:
- The number of enemies (50exp each, I think)
- The length of your longest combo (5exp per hit)
- Whether you were hit during the fight (300exp for a perfect fight)
- The style you fought with (50exp per move type, 300exp max.)
Fights are never very long and typically only last a minute or two. Each story will put you through maybe 25 fights and getting a perfect and as high a style every time is definitely the best way to get your levels up. The combo rating score is nice but ultimately has the lowest impact on your experience.
The narration in the story is great. I found it a little annoying for the first story or so but then I got used to the guy's voice and the style and it became very enjoyable. The one guy does all of the voices and when he's speaking for various characters he changes his voice to reflect that. It definitely comes across with a feeling that this guy is reading a book to you. It's well done and even the casual non-story dialogue is varied enough that it works well. He tells jokes on occasion when you're fighting or dashing or destroying breakable items but those trigger rarely enough that they don't feel repetitive.
You start out with one of four swords and as you progress you'll come across basic blue chests which give you ore and essences and food and energy items. There are four essence types, each of which correspond to one of the four swords. As you collect ore and essences you can forge or upgrade the swords at the various blacksmiths scattered through each story. Each sword can be used as a key to unlock a matching type of doorway (ice sword opens ice door, fire sword opens fire door, etc.) so forging the swords gives you more area to explore on each playthrough. Upgrading the sword to level 2 gives a unique power for each sword; the starting sword heals you, the fire sword gives you fire attack, etc.. Each sword only has two levels so maxing them all out comes pretty quickly; I believe I had mine maxed out by the end of my fifth playthrough or so.
In addition to blue chests, each of the special doors you unlock will give you access to larger red chests. Red chests tend to give more essence and will each drop a gem. You can equip up to three gems at a time and they each give various effects like 10% additional speed and such; there are I believe 8 gem types, and they each have three levels of progression. The gem effects level up each time you find an additional gem of the same type.
The chests are smart; once you've upgraded all of your swords the blue chests quit dropping ore and essence and only drop food and energy items. The red chests behave the same way once you've collected all the gems.
Reynardo's skills start out pretty basic and never get all that advanced. Leveling him up has the dash and hook attacks become more damaging, increases his health, stamina, and sword energy, and gives him a slowdown effect when successfully attacking or counterattacking enemies. The game is pretty easy starting out and once you've upgraded Reynardo a bit the difficulty completely disappears--fighting becomes not about surviving but rather about getting as high of an experience reward as possible for each fight.
Overall the game feels great and it clicked almost immediately for me when I started out. The beginning of the game is very rewarding as well--you quickly learn the combat system, get your special attacks within your first few level-ups. Exploring the first 4-5 endings, especially if you deliberately make different choices as you start out, gives you the most varied stories and quickly reveals all four hidden secrets and then lets you progress to the true hero ending. The combat is very satisfying in the beginning as well.
Unfortunately once you play further into the game things start to fall apart a bit. Though there are 24 normal stories which have distinct endings, they all start from the same three choices. Once you've made each of those three choices a single time you'll be seeing the first chapter repeat every playthrough afterwards. As you progress through exploring the endings more and more content gets repeated. This combines poorly with the gameplay getting easier and easier as you level up Reynardo. It doesn't take long to max out the swords and the gem upgrades which means that feeling of being rewarded for playing disappears as well. Getting the true hero ending comes very quickly--I believe I found it on my sixth playthrough. It's a good ending but everything afterwards is a bit disappointing in comparison. Trophy hunters will have all but two trophies around that point--the only remaining trophies will probably be for upgrading Reynardo completely and for revealing all 25 story endings. Basically once you've finished 5-6 stories you'll have gotten most of the rewarding content in the game and you'll be left with gameplay that feels increasingly easy and narration that feels increasingly repetitive.
I didn't mention it above, but each story ending gives you a reward. You either get 1 or 2 level-ups or some essence or ore. Unlike the chests, story endings aren't smart; rewards are fixed for each chapter. Even after you've fully upgraded your sword you'll keep getting essence or ore that you no longer have use for. This makes the reward feel like a joke--once you've collected everything you should be getting experience or levels for each playthrough.
The game has some bugs, including constant framerate issues, temporary slowdown/speedup effect bugs, and progression blocks. One time I had a fight where I killed all the enemies but the fight ending wouldn't trigger. I had to quit to the main menu and replay that chapter to continue. A couple of times my character got stuck in a snow drift and I had to quit to the main menu. A few times the game wouldn't load the next foreground area so I was running around on invisible earth with the game background far below me--depending on the location I could either walk backwards a bit and then return to find the foreground loaded or I'd need to quit to the main menu again.
What I think would have really boosted the longevity of the game would be to have around 9 initial story endings; two per secret, to give a bit of variety, then the True Hero ending. Once you get the True Hero ending, Reynardo would speak of thinking things are great...then suddenly find himself at the beginning again and not sure why. Four new secrets would reveal themselves and you'd progress through discovering that one of your enemies also has a Book of Destinies--and that they are also making decisions through each story to try to get their own True Hero ending. Switching the story around halfway and dropping the total number of stories to about 18 in the process would have left the content feeling much fresher throughout. To go along with this, the enemies should at this point begin getting increasingly difficult as the bad guy makes changes to try to take Reynardo out.