Stonemachia

Publisher: Crossfall Games

Developer: Crossfall Games

Platform: Microsoft Windows

Price: $19.99

What is it about the humble soulslike that seems to inspire developers so? We've got gun-based soulslikes, historical fiction soulslikes, soulslikes set in existing IPs, fairytale soulslikes, and even a dinosaur soulslike releasing later this month. Perhaps the fact that its a winning formula at its core makes people wonder how far they can stretch the concept?

I couldn't begin to tell you the answer to these questions, dear reader...but I can tell you that Stonemachia takes the soulslike genre somewhere previously unvisited: chess. Or to be slightly more accurate, statues and other stone formations, with a heavy emphasis on chess in the lore. 

I can also tell you that Stonemachia is easily one of the best in the genre. Its clearly indie budget and lofty ambitions do betray it somewhat, but from a pure gameplay and hype perspective, it stands head and shoulders above some other soulslikes. 

So, go ahead and check out what I have to say, mate!

The world of Stonemachia is kind of a pseudo-biblical pseudo-Earth. There's a giant tower of Babel-looking spire that leads directly to heaven, and the world itself is mostly made up of fallen angels. When an angel falls, they're given a stone form by "the sculptor," who sees their innermost secrets and decides what form best fits them. Many have been reduced to little stone rats. Some have been placed in unassuming vessels such as street lamps and benches. And others are given proper warrior forms, though this is a rarity.

You are one such rare fallen angel sealed in the form of a chess pawn, and your mission is the same as it is for all other angels: reach the spire, seek an audience with the sculptor, and return to heaven.

As with most soulslikes, straightforward storytelling isn't the point here. Rather, the focus is on the world and its lore. And I'm an absolute sucker for concepts as tortured as this one. Turning chess into an epic battle of biblical proportions? That's corny as all hell, and I am here for it!

I'm an especially big fan of tortured concepts that organically work their way into gameplay, as is the case in Stonemachia. Unlike most soulslikes, this isn't exactly an RPG. You aren't crafting builds or anything like that. Instead, you have four "forms" you can swap through at will. 

The basic form you start off with is "Pawn" form, and as you progress through the plot, you pick up forms corresponding to the pieces that a pawn can become in chess: Knight, Rook, and Bishop. There's also a superpowered "Queen" form, but we'll get to that. 

Bishop form features the fastest attack speed but the lowest damage.

Rook form features the slowest attack speed but the highest damage.

And Knight form is kind of a black sheep in that it's all about having higher movement speed and maneuverability than anything else.

These other forms are obviously different to each other, but they all have one thing in common...

I never used any of them. 

Yeah...I would swap forms for maybe long enough to kill an enemy or two for a first-time try, but beyond that, I was having a perfectly fine time in the standard Pawn form. 

This is because in addition to being one of the better soulslikes I've played, Stonemachia is also undoubtedly the easiest. 

There's a whole magic system involved where each form has a different spell, and that superpowered Queen form does a ton of damage, I guess. Most boss arenas also come with a summonable ally. But I literally never used any of these advantages outside of first-time tries. And it isn't because I'm prideful or weird about using advantages in soulslikes. I don't have a problem summoning allies when I get frustrated, and I'll for sure use magic even if its overpowered. 

But there was never even one time where I felt any of these things were remotely needed. The final boss is the only boss that gave me anything resembling trouble, and I still conquered it over the course of less than an hour.

So the game is somewhat overloaded with mechanics it simply doesn't need, but I can still appreciate the vision and the flexibility it gives you. I can also appreciate that the team at Crossfall Games was clearly aiming to make this "skill-based," not "hard." Because while I've called this the "easiest" soulslike, that isn't to say it isn't a challenge. It's just that the challenge comes from your ability to perform with consistency. 

Enemies and bosses alike have some of the easiest-to-read attack patterns in the genre, and the parry window is usually pretty generous. But you can't just spam the parry like you can in Sekiro or Lies of P. So in order to survive, you have to keep your head in the game and stay calm. It isn't about lightning-fast reaction times or keeping track of thousands of attack patterns. It's about watching these slow attacks as they come and only reacting when you know you're going to get hit. 

That's a bit harder than I'm making it sound, because we're all prone to acting on panic. Bosses also take some time to fully suss out. But let me put it to you this way: There was one late-game boss that I was getting creamed by within a couple seconds for like...two tries. On the third try, everything just *clicked*, and that was my winning attempt. That is what I mean when I say that attack patterns are easily-readable. If you can survive an initial bit of panic when a boss hits hard, it's entirely possible to beat them within a single attempt having not seen 90% of their patterns if you just keep your head on your shoulders. 

To clarify, I don't mean you have to be sitting there unmoving and watching a boss' weapon. You can just spam your attack willy-nilly and parry out of it at a moment's notice. So you really only need to be paying attention out of the corner of your eye as you wail on your enemies.

Healing, like parrying, is near-instant and can be done as you attack. Interestingly, Stonemachia actually forgoes the standard "Estus Flask" mechanic that all soulslikes use in favor of a single heal that can be regenerated in combat either by killing enemies or by parrying.

One parry or dead enemy will refill your healing by a little bit, which you can use to regain a (you guessed it) little bit of health in a pinch. This will be excellent news for habitual healers such as myself who feel the need to heal when they take even a little bit of damage! But if you avoid making mistakes, you can fill up your little healing phial all the way and get yourself out of a much bigger bind if necessary. In this way, the healing doesn't send the usual soulslike message of "this is how many mistakes you can afford to make." Instead, it's "this is how big a mistake you can save yourself from right now." And I think that's awesome!

It's also possible that you only use as much of your generated healing as you need when you press the heal button (leaving the rest to be used next time you heal). But don't quote me on that, as I never paid close enough attention to find out for sure. It sure looked like that was the case, though. 

So, consistency isn't just the key to surviving in general, it's also the key to making sure you can get out of any mistakes you make. But there's one other way that consistency rears its head in this gameplay loop: special attacks.

When you parry enough attacks, you'll suddenly see a gold circle form close to your character. When that happens, it means you can press up on the d-pad to unleash a giant laser shot in whatever direction you're currently pointing.

Soulslike veterans who haven't yet played this are probably rolling their eyes upon hearing that. But here's the thing...the boss you're aiming at doesn't actually have to be in the line of fire to take damage. So when they inevitably happen to move out of the way, they'll still get hurt a considerable amount. It certainly seems like the damage is better when they're in the line of fire, but it's never a waste of time to use the special attack like it would be in almost every other soulslike. This is especially true given that you don't take damage while using it and you seem to automatically parry an attack if it lands right as you're coming out of the animation.

If you're playing a boss fight exceptionally well, this will mean that you're firing off massive damage every couple seconds with a full healing phial. Consistency, again, is the glue binding all of this together.

To round out this whole idea of Stonemachia being the easiest in the genre, the process of leveling up is streamlined in a way most soulslike leveling systems aren't. When you level up at a checkpoint, you aren't picking a stat and adding a point to it. Instead, you're filling up a bar with your collected "feathers" ("souls"...but you already intuited that). Once that bar gets filled all the way, you level up and every stat you have increases for all forms at the same time. This resets the bar back to zero, at which point you can continue to fill it with whatever feathers you have leftover.

If you don't have enough to level up, you can fill up the bar with what you have anyway. No more holding onto 1998 souls because you don't have the 2000 you need. No more running the risk of losing them all while you try to gather those 2 extra souls. Whatever you've accrued, you can invest. You still drop all held feathers on the ground when you die and lose them all if you die again, but I found that was a negligible aspect of this game since it came up so rarely.

I will say that having to retrieve your feathers by killing a little creature that runs away from you is a lame idea that annoys more than inspires...but again, it's not like I was ever chomping at the bit to get those feathers back in the first place.

So far, so good, right? Well yes...but it's time for the low-budget monkey's paw to curl up. Stonemachia is far from the jankiest indie game I've ever played...in fact, I'd say it's pretty impressive for the scope of its gameplay and cinematics compared to its budget. But it is a bit rough around the edges in ways that need to be discussed. 

The framerate, for the most part, holds the line. But there's a late-game level that's absolutely lousy with drops for reasons I can't quite discern. Furthermore, all cutscenes seem to run at 30fps maximum. That's a bit of a problem when you're faced with impressive biblical-scale battles.

Another problem that arises in the face of these cinematics is the fact that...well...you just look silly. As a chess piece, you move around by bouncing. So, there'll be biblically accurate angels doing their thing in the distance, and meanwhile you and some NPCs look like Veggietales characters...which I suppose is rather fitting for the thematic imagery, but there's no way in hell that was intentional. 

Then there are little quirks that will be all too familiar to you if you play as many indie Unreal Engine 5 games as I do. 

Weird sound mixing is one of them. I don't know what it is about indie games made with this engine, but footsteps and exertion sounds always seem to be at volumes that are magnitudes lower than everything else. It gives Stonemachia a sort of artificial feel that gets further hammered home by that traditional UE5 movement look. 

I don't have the technical jargon to describe what I mean, but it's a specific way that characters move...like a kind of unnatural smoothness, like the character isn't actually an entity in the world, maybe? I'm talking out of my ass here to describe what I mean, but I feel like anyone familiar with the engine will pick up what I'm putting down.

Is it really fair of me to complain about the quirks of the engine used for this game? Well...Lies of P didn't have these issues. Neither did Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Extreme examples, to be sure, but they prove that these quirks can be dealt with if a developer tries. Most developers don't, so a lot of these indie projects end up being unmistakably UE5. 

So yes. It is fair of me to complain about these things.

I will, however, balance all of that out with some positives. 

For starters, while the graphical quality is nothing to write home about, the art direction is stellar. A lot of care clearly went into crafting levels that don't feel like standard soulslike fare. There isn't a single poison swamp, for example! 

Equally stellar is the soundtrack. It slaps. You'll hear sounds such as Nier: Automata-coded vocal ambiance, epic choral bits, an out of nowhere bit of metal that somehow works, and even some slightly-altered renditions of classics such as "Clair de Lune" and a movement from Vivaldi's The Four Seasons (if my ears don't deceive me).

But this game's greatest technical strength by far is how parrying feels. The audiovisual feedback is second only to Lies of P, and it contains enough of an epic-sounding "clang" to drive home the fact that you're dueling with angels a lot of the time. 

Finally, I never experienced any crashes or serious glitches. 

There's clearly a fine layer of jank coating this game...but it's more solid than you might expect underneath.

Stonemachia is the kind of game I simply love to cover. It's a unique, well-executed idea from an underdog team with nothing but some bus change and a dream. So many developers end up making soulslikes that, while fun, ultimately miss the point of what the "challenge" is supposed to be. Crossfall Games is not one of those developers. 

Sure, their gameplay loop has a few too many unnecessary doodads, but they're all thematically relevant and don't detract from anything. Sure, it's the easiest soulslike I've ever played, but the only reason I think that is because the challenge is well-curated and intuitive.

At the end of the day, I'd love to see more games in this genre take a page from Stonemachia's book. Change up how healing works. Change up how leveling works. Understand that you can offer a brilliant challenge by asking the player to be consistent, not supremely adaptive. Choose a new setting and don't have it just be ancient Asia AGAIN for CHRIST'S SAKE!!! And above all else...make something that feels more like its own thing than just another soulslike. 

Stonemachia is one of the best in the genre in spite of its limitations. And I, for one, am glad I looked past its janky look and gave it a shot. There's a demo on Steam, so what do you have to lose? Your move!

Let us review:

Technical jank - 1.0

The final score for Stonemachia is...

9.0/10 - Fantastic