Recent reviews by Heavius

The best game I've ever played, I hate it so much my hands shake. William and Ari, if you read this, screw you. Can't wait for the sequel or whatever it is you are planning. Cheers.

First of all, since the game is in early access some things have to be made clear about it. The available plot can be done with in a couple of hours most of which will not be plot related activities, many mechanics and UI elements are work-in-progress or outright placeholders, the development was slow for a while but is picking up as the mechanics get finished by the team one after another. It will take time.

With that out of the way, the game in its current state is a mechanically rich and very replayable rogue-like that is all about build planning, resource management and dungeon crawling with one of the best turn-based combat systems I’ve seen, set in an immersive non-standard low fantasy setting with attention to detail that is second to none and absolutely gorgeous visuals.

Allow me to sing high praises to those visuals and the world because they truly deserve it. The game is set in a medieval kingdom inspired by quite a few historical references. It just went through a war and a religious supernatural calamity, and it’s all realized in a staggering amount of detail. Every place feels authentic, lived in and outright beautiful (or horrifying). You will see villages touched by war to different degrees, grand churches only rivaled in beauty by those in Kingdom Come, fortresses, castles, war camps, graveyards, etc. And then too many details to count, just wait till you see merchants remove their goods from the stalls when their working hours end. Or take a bite of a sausage and see that it has hand-made images for multiple stages of being eaten. How do you feel about every single piece of gear having images for stages of durability degradation? Stoneshard bothers where no other game does and it shows.

Now let’s talk builds. At first it seems simple enough, you have a few characters to choose from with their starting stats, skill sets and perks. Then you have a variety of skill trees that focus on a concept, a weapon type, a magic school. It gets complex once you realize that all trees can be mixed and matched as you can see fit and benefit from different stats in various ways. So, you can have a swordsman that is focused on an aspect of that weapon type that matters to you the most and it will play and feel differently from what I will build it towards. And then you make additional tree choices, like what will you do to protect yourself (dash around & avoid damage, dig in and brace for it, use magic to keep enemies away, etc.). Then there are different armor types, weapon have subtypes, there are potions, drugs, traps, throwables. You can disregard weapons completely and build a good old wizard and even still there are more magic school trees than there are points, you can rebuild almost every fantasy archetype there is and most of them you can make work. But what are you building these characters towards?

Dungeon crawling. Also, some exploration, hunting and boss-killing. But primarily dungeon crawling. You get a contract, discuss your pay and what’s waiting for you and then prepare accordingly. Because your character will get tired, hungry, thirsty, hurt, wounded, bled out. And they will die a lot. But that’s just your characters, the missions you undertake are generated from various options (and multiple enemy types and ranks) and will get your character killed if you don’t bring your best game and your best gear. Is it a rescue mission from a bandit fort? Or a poison filled crypt with a necromancer in the end? How long is the trek there going to take? Therefore, how much food, medicine, and what tools do you bring? There will be traps, rooms full of things that want you dead, and you will carelessly run into them and lose progress. And you will learn and overcome the next dungeon, and then the next. So, what’s the final goal? Currently, getting through all 5 tiers of dungeons for all 3 enemy factions, exploring around a bit for the few quests that are in and defeating 2 wonderful bosses that pose quite a challenge for most builds. How long will that take depends entirely on you, I’d say at least a few evenings. Now do that as every build that you can come up with, thus I have the 200 hours of actual playtime without any inclination of stopping. It’s a hard and at times a frustrating experience but always a work of art and a deeply engaging game that I encourage you to try. If you are reading this, thank you.


Here come a few of my gripes with the game I’d enjoy to see resolved:
• No way to see the skill formulas, forcing wiki usage. Add an option, a button to press, anything to see them fully ingame.
• No way of checking remaining block power, other than scrolling a huge list of stats. Add an optional bar next to health.
• Some combat animations take too long, for example the dog bite and the bandit drummer beating his drum.
• No way of configuring the amount of skill panels at the bottom. Make it an option. For example, so I could have just 3 and use the next panel hotkey to move from panel 3 to panel 1 instead of going back or forward twice. Or add keybinds for specific panels, for example F1 for the first panel and so on.
• Add a way of configuring keybinds of skill panels. 6-0 is uncomfortable to use, and mouse clicking is slow.
• Add separate keybinds for Examine Surroundings, Craft and Butchering skills, so they don't take space on the panels if the player wants it. And/or make Butchering not require a skill press at all, just make it automatically available out of combat on left click.