Heavy Destinies

I went in expecting almost nothing, which is probably the only honest way to approach a one-person adventure shooter from 2017 with two Steam reviews to its name. Heavy Destinies is a top-down action RPG built by a single developer under the MarksApp label, and its central idea is genuinely interesting: 23 playable characters, each carrying their own survival story, all eventually knotting together into one overarching narrative. The first character you meet is former Sheriff Mike, and from there the game introduces a progression system alongside combat that the developer describes as layered with Easter eggs and smaller structural touches. That kind of handcrafted ambition, tucked inside a release that most people scrolled past, is exactly the sort of thing I think deserves a fair hearing. The genre sits at the crossroads of action and RPG, with a top-down perspective and shooter mechanics underpinning the character-switching structure. The leveling and character upgrade system gives each of the 23 heroes a reason to feel distinct, and the violence and gore tags on the Steam page are not decorative. This is not a gentle narrative experience. Combat is the load-bearing wall here, and the story threading between characters is the architectural plan holding it all together. Whether the execution actually delivers on that plan is harder to confirm given the near-total absence of community coverage, but the concept itself is more cohesive than the usual solo-dev grab-bag of borrowed assets and unfinished loops. The honest caveats are real and worth naming. There are only two user reviews on Steam after years on the platform, which means either the audience never found it or those who did walked away quietly. The Steam page disclaimer is written in Russian and carries a "provided as-is" tone, which signals limited post-launch support. English is listed as a supported language, but translation quality in games of this profile can vary in ways that affect how the interconnected storylines actually read. The character count is ambitious for a solo project, and ambition without sufficient runtime or budget to back each story can result in thin individual arcs even when the overall structure holds. For narrative-curious players who genuinely enjoy hunting through the deep end of the indie catalog, Heavy Destinies is a curio worth the low asking price just to see whether its linking-fates conceit pays off in practice. If you need a polished, community-vetted experience with active patch notes and a Discord, this is not that. But if you have ever enjoyed sitting with a small, strange game that nobody else covered and finding something real inside it, the structural idea here is unusual enough to warrant the risk. Manage expectations, keep the sheriff's story running, and see where the tangle leads.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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