izigame.me

I want so much to love this game. I really do. But I cannot in good faith recommend it, because of one simple truth. The dev team committed the biggest cardinal sin in game development: intentional wasting of significant amounts of the players' time.
In life, we can always make more money, more friends, more everything material... the only thing we will never receive is more time.
Time is finite and precious. Respect for players' time is paramount for any game developer. The fact that players dedicate so much of their precious time to any game is a gift, and one that should be held in high regard. That, unfortunately, is not how this particular game works.
The art direction here is superb. I love the graphics. The voice acting (what there is) is top notch. The story is gripping, and gritty, and well written. So much was done well, and this game stands alone in its unique combination of attractors... a turn based, non-anime pixel graphic rpg with 2d tactical battles and a dark, gritty story. This should be topping the rpg charts!
The problem is that this game not only can waste your time, but it actively tries to. In large quantities. In fact, it was designed specifically to do so.
The developers seem to have a vision of how difficult a game should be, and they wanted to create something that was both immersive and also high-stakes... they want you to care about the moves you make, and the choices you make. I respect this so much... it is a good vision! But the implementation they made here was not the way. Ultimately, it causes problems because this game is designed with:
- High difficulty,
- Insidious surprises meant to kill you, and
- No way to save your progress within and up to several hours worth of game play.
The fact is the game only saves when you sleep. You can save-quit, but that file is erased when you load back up to prevent save-scumming. So if you die... you go back to where you last slept. Everything you did from there is lost. You can cart around a bed roll at high inventory cost, but even then you can only sleep outside of dungeons with it and still you can be ambushed and killed while doing so.
Traversing the map to new areas takes a very long time. So you could have spent at least 20 to 30 mins just travelling to your target area. Dungeons are lengthy, and with the difficulty of combat you often need to play very carefully and isolate enemies... so dungeons can take several hours.
One miss anywhere along the line can kill you... and you lose hours of your time. Forget to click on your "inspect area" button in the wrong spot, and you get caught by a trap? That's almost an insta-kill, never mind the bleeding. There's a ton of spots in the game where it surprises you from a quest/story progression with a sudden fight that will overwhelm you, because you had no idea it was coming. Guess what, you just lost at least an hour or more of your time.
And to be clear, this is not a problem of difficulty. Many of us welcome a difficult game. But this game, unlike every other rpg game, refuses to allow you save your own progress at times of your choosing. Other games you can save before a tough fight and try it as many times as it takes for you to get it right. Maybe you even backtrack to re-equip in town and come back and re-save before trying the fight again. That is good design, and is how difficulty is best accomplished. Most gamers welcome that challenge. But in Stoneshard, you don't have that option.
This isn't like a roguelite where you get meta-progression, nor is it a full roguelike where you may have lost everything from the previous run, but you can try a new run a different way. No, in this game you simply have to re-do everything you just did. Even if you did everything well for an hour, you get the chance to do it all over again... even if it is something as boring as walking from screen to screen. This is such an utter waste of time, and a truly poor design choice. And just imagine successfully completing a dungeon and getting ambushed on the way back to town! You quite literally lose everything you just did, and you need to do it all over again for no good reason.
Also, don't be fooled by false information. This game has a large degree of rng in it. You can, and will, be defeated at times by random rolls for things from enemy awareness, or to hit or damage rolls. There's also surprise fights buried in the story that you had no idea were coming and had no way to "prepare" for. The idea that "every death was preventable" is something that I'm sure the developers wish was true... but it just isn't true, no matter how much they pretend. And even if it were true... that's no reason to remove the ability to save from the game. It's an unnecessary punishment that goes above and beyond what is reasonable.
I've read a lot from players further along in the game who strategize how to complete higher level content. In most cases, they focus on a certain ability that lets them see monsters in the area. They isolate who they can, kill some of them, then exit the dungeon and run back to sleep somewhere. Then they come back, and move further into the dungeon. Rinse, repeat. This is utter nonsense... the fact that the game needs you to waste so much time because fear of losing it does not make this game good... it does not accomplish the vision the devs have set out. All it does is make the game tedious and unnecessarily time consuming. And if you don't play that way? You risk death and losing hours of your time for no reason.
Other players (many of them) use mods to increase inventory space, which at the very least means they can carry a bedroll without feeling like they sacrificed so much inventory. The discord is full of mod discussion around this. Why on earth is this necessary? It's silly to design a game that needs to be modded to be enjoyable, and even that has its limitations since as I said before, you cannot even sleep in a dungeon (and stand a chance to be ambushed outside of one).
I could also point out that the difficulty of the game does mean that you really aren't free to explore the abilities trees any way you like... you do have to focus on a min/max of some type. But honestly that's ok. That, in itself, is common to more challenging games. But if you don't do it? You will die, and you will lose time. Potentially a lot of it. So the choice really doesn't belong to you anymore, unless you are fine with wasted time.
All this being said... want to fix this game? It's simple. Quicksave would be best, but even autosave would work. A single autosave executed every time you zone from map chunk to map chunk, on the world or in a dungeon. Because just having to repeat a single room, or a single floor... well that's not so bad. But the chances are that this will never happen, and you should be aware of the potential cost of sinking time into this game if you choose to play it.
In closing,
For all that this game has grown and been developed... now with caravans, and extended quest lines... for how large and spanning the story and world are... this game deserves to be enjoyed! It really does. But you are simply not allowed to do so unless you are fine with arbitrarily losing hours upon hours of your time needlessly over the course of the game.

Why on earth this is the hill that these developers have chosen to plant their flag on is beyond me.
I don't recommend paying for a product that was designed specifically to waste your time. Gift your time to games and developers who are thankful for receiving it.