Stoneshard

Just my personal taste & opinion: Pros: Right up my alley, as far as an isometric RPG without party management Lots of cool content Great classic aesthetic with good animations Cons: Just one big con. Hunger & thirst, okay. Plus weapon durability, okay. Plus sanity and morale mechanics, eh. Plus body part injuries that require salves, splints, and bandages, fuuu. Plus fatigue. Plus no quicksaving. Plus limited inventory. Plus finding most locations requires asking everyone about rumors. You have to eat constantly to play the game. Constantly. I'm sure some people love these mechanics, but I already live in real life, responsibility-simulators aren't my ideal escapism. I recommend the Eschalon series if you can relate to this review.

I love the game idea, unfortunatly is so frustrating to play. To save the game you need to sleep, you cant sleep all the time because quests have time to complete. So you play for 1 hour and die and all your progress is lost. I dont know who think its fun to play the same thing over and over again, finding usefull itens, spending time to decide wich item deserves to be carryied in the super small bag and then dying and losing everything. I play games to have fun, not this whatever they trying to do.

The save system was updated back in March 2021 - the game is now saved on exit and that save is then deleted when it is loaded, preventing save scumming but allowing the player to stop at any point. It is still possible to save by sleeping.

I'm sure the criticisms below will be fixed by launch. There is a frame of a great Rogue/RPG here. I'm ok with the $16 I paid to support further development. I'm waiting for at least 2 major updates to play again. Three Stars as a rating because it's neutral. The world map is large & mostly empty of anything interesting. You walk - slowly - great distances to reach your target locations. Takes 15-30 min, depending on what you do along the way. Quest area: Clear the underlings, then Boss brutally beats ou down. They have a lot of major attacks & abilities. That's a lost hour. - You should be able to leave a quest dungeon/crypt (before fighting the boss) without the dungeon/quest closing forever. - NPCs can actually trap you in rare circumstances, because you cannot move through them and they are scripted to go to a certain place for bedtime/getting up. - After 8 hours, I found Marauders/bandits, Deer (2), Bears (2), Boars (2), and Wolves (packs of three - brutal) to fight on the world map. There were skeletons and Ghouls as well (in crypts). - The Economy is brutal. Buying anything useful is VERY expensive. You sell for peanuts. A lot of money must be spent on food, bandages, salves, potions (if a shop actually has a good one in stock), and other mending supplies. - I've only seen an enemy drop a weapon (and one time an apple) after dying. No gold ("Crowns"), potions, armor, scrolls, mending supplies ... - Needs a mini-map and a MUCH better world map. It's very basic and not real helpful. Being able to make small notes on the map would be great. - Weapon/Armor variety is very lacking. There's very rarely anything to buy that is helpful. Four pieces of helpful armor in 8 hours play time. - Leveling is punishingly slow. I'm level 3.5 after 8 hours. After playing 8 hours, with about 4 hours lost due to death, I'm staying away for a while.

I really want to like this game, but it is simply unplayable with the current level of difficulty and lack of a real save system. Avoid unless you are willing to repeatedly lose hours of progress due to RNG.