Talk to the toaster
Stone is a game with a great set of core ideas and premise that simply falls flat in its execution. The idea of playing an anthropomorphic bear that happens to be a private investigator trying to figure out who kidnapped his partner is certainly unique. However, the poor delivery and haphazard flow of the game steps all over what it is trying to accomplish. What we end up with is a simple experience that screams of lost potential.
Players take on the role of Stone, a koala bear PI that wakes up one morning from too much partying to discover his partner Alex has been kidnapped. He then goes on a tear through the city to try and figure out what happened. There are certainly some twists and turns as the story unfolds, but the poor dialogue delivery really drags down the biggest reveals in the game. It also doesn’t help that everything feels disjointed. Conversations abruptly end due to the game wanting the player to press the interact button again to continue conversations. These wouldn’t be noticeable except that they tend to break up right in the heart of a conversation.
MSRP: $14.99
Platforms: XB1 (reviewed), PC
Price I’d Pay: $4.99
The writing is decent, but the actors delivering the lines feel unenthusiastic about everything they are saying. This makes the biggest moments of the game fall flat. The full adventure only lasts about 60-90 minutes too, which gives it little time to breathe.
At the outset there are only a couple locations to visit and even when the game opens up, a lot of the places are not necessary to progress. For example, the movie theater contains full black and white versions of classic movies, but they are simply there as window dressing. The game never forces players to visit them, and outside of novelty there is really nothing to be gained by heading there.
The game play consists of moving Stone and tapping the left and right bumper to choose dialogue options. Again this feels arbitrary since the choices have zero effect on the outcome of the game. It simply gives players a chance to move down different paths of conversation which all lead to the same conclusion. The only other buttons are the interact and smoke/dance button. Again smoking is never necessary and Stone can’t move while doing it, so not sure of its necessity. The dance mechanic comes up one time for like two seconds and again feels like it was added just for spite.
This is Stone in a nutshell. It feels like there are ideas that could have been fleshed out, but instead they end up feeling unnecessary. The story in the game is interesting, but the characters and their lack of enthusiasm in every conversation drag it down.
Visually the game has a neat look. The characters all have flavor to them and when their dialogue hits, it hits well. The cues for interactivity seem a little slow on the draw and there were a few graphical glitches, but overall it is a unique looking game. The environments are somewhat stale though and since I visited a lot of them over and over, it becomes a bit tedious.
Stone is a game that looks interesting on the surface. Sadly it falls short on delivering just about every step of the way. Achievement hunters should note that you can grab the full 1000 points in less than two hours and it is pretty effortless. I wanted to like Stone way more than I did. It just feels like it puts little effort into telling the story as interestingly as it is written.
Review copy of game provided by publisher.
