Recent reviews by tranquilConnection

I like skill trees. I like mining. I like farming. I like it when these numbers go up. And there are numbers in this game, and they do go up. It's a very satisfying experience overall. Good game.

It's no Morrowind, but after a couple dozen mods (and there are plenty of mods) it's great

Game is pricey. A couple stuffs implemented in the mobile game via DLC purchase or ad-watching are seemingly just entirely missing from the desktop version of the game. If the 30$ price tag is too much, I'd recommend checking out the free mobile version first.

Still, it's a good game. The music is great, the ASCII art is impressive (somehow, they even scale well with screen resolution), and there's a certain charm to nearly every place and character. If you liked Candy Box, you'll like this. For me though, the game starts to get genuinely really good when you unlock the Mind Stone, and consequently Stonescript, a game-automating programming language. Rest of this review is about that spoiler, because it's easily the best and most unique feature of Stone Story RPG to me.

By all means, Stonescript is a terrible programming language. I bet it's perfectly suitable for people who are very new to programming (and if that's you, feel free to skip this paragraph!), but for anyone with experience, it's everything you hate about TOML or shell parsing on steroids. Make sure you wrap every string in double-quotes, and many variables in @-signs, because at times the interpreter has a mind of its own parsing an identifier as a reference to variable or just as a string literal. There is a weird mixing of snake_case and PascalCase. Extremely useful identifiers like if-statements and print statements are oddly marked respectively with question marks and right-angle brackets, as a brief example. Stonescript feels like it fails the player the same way JavaScript fails the programmer: by attempting to simplify the language to reduce runtime errors (think of JS implicit type-casting), it behaves in ways that the programmer would never expect. On the bright side, it does have syntactically meaningful indentation, which is nice for legibility imo. On the other hand, the documentation is also awful: booleans, strings, integers are all specified using question marks (the if-statement token), and the only way to get any information about what some things even are is by printing them out in-game. Trying to gleam information from the docs is difficult. Stonescript and its documentation are both incompetent, and the latter incomplete.

But it is a programming language, and that is itself great. The most fun that I've had in this game has primarily been through the Mind Stone interface. I love optimizing the ♥♥♥♥ out of my code to squeeze out a slightly faster run or a more successful boss fighting strategy. There's a million different ways you can do things a little faster—there's a stone that improves your walk speed, there's a stone that magnetizes pickups, some weapons are more effective in some places, ...—but that are all terribly inconvenient to do manually. This is where Stonescript is so useful. Over the past couple of days I've refined about 80 lines of script, which I would NOT recommend doing on mobile. The ability to copy-paste into the Mind Stone from an IDE or the Internet and the overall smoothness of the local editor is incomparable. Plus, you get a shortcut (M by default opens the Mind Stone mid-location). If you're interested in learning to write Stonescript, which should be a relatively easy task even for newbies, I'd highly recommend checking out the PC version instead of mobile. I'd go as far as to call it a requirement for late-game.

It's expensive, sure, but I still say it's worth buying. If you're less impulsive than me, maybe stuff it on your wishlist and wait for it to be on sale.

It's a good game! You can beat the main storyline in about one sitting (I'm taking that word very liberally). Afterwards, it unlocks two new gamemodes (NG+ and a challenge mode), so hopefully it has some replay value.

As for the first run on Normal mode:
- NPCs and mechanics were interesting to play around with. I love the concept of timestopping, and as a central mechanic it's great. Messing around with different equips was cool, though ultimately I settled on one Thing and rarely switched unless experimenting with a new one
- the difficulty to reward ratio was good, though it could've used more difficulty on certain bosses. It generally felt like the way the character responded to my controller input was responsive, and that mistakes were fair & of my own doing
- speaking of controllers, I played with a steam controller, and everything was fully integrated and supported with it. The only issue is that this is one of those games where Steam will get confused and stop recognizing the controller when you alt tab, which forced me to run to a save point and exit the game once, but other than that, great!
- audiovisual is generally well designed! noises are consistent and didn't need any volume mix adjusting, the pixel art works well for the game, music was pleasing but not distracting, sound and visual effects looked and worked well, and so on and so forth

While the main story of the game might be a bit short for a 20$ game, it was definitely a Good Experience™, I recommend it

enjoyable Strategy Game 👍

Good

You've played for 72 hours
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undertale

around once a year i remember i own this
(enable mustache mode to get your moneys worth)

very epic overall