Welcome to our review of STONE, a very slow-paced story based game that is plagued by waiting screens…
STONE is a single-player third-person interactive story, where a hungover koala detective wakes to find his lover Alex has been kidnapped. An Aussie STONEr noir story game by Convict Games.
G’day, I’m STONE. Here’s our Nintendo Switch™ page. Play this feature length interactive story ( don’t expect shooting or winning or losing ) and see what happened. Yeah it was rough, but a good life lesson. Enjoy, and remember don’t do this at home ya bunch of crazy animals.
By the way this story really isn’t going to be for everyone. So enter at your own risk, mate. Plus this was created by a global team including the narrative designer of QUANTUM BREAK, CONTROL and VFX artist from GRAVITY, PROMETHEUS and more. You’re in good hands, mate.
STONE is a very weird game.
STONE is also very short as a game, I finished it in around 90 minutes. In short, he woke up to find his lover missing. Hungover or STONEd out of his mind, I assume this part is purely satire on the behalf of the developers, but it is the main red line through the story. Too drunk to realise what had happened, STONE sets off on his quest to find his male lover Alex.
On his SLOW quest, he gets beat up. Twice.
He also gets to go hang out in a bar, go to a rave, … There is a lot to do in this game, but sadly everything is so slow. I know Koalas are not the most nimble of animals out there, but he is really taking his time for everything and those 25+ interlude screens were more than irritating. Not because they were pink in color, no, the 10+ seconds it took in between every 3 to 5 minutes of actually following the story.
You really got to learn a lot about this odd koala but in the end, this continuous breaking of the pace and his inability to even walk a tiny bit faster… Sigh, it really hurt the game despite its rather decent storyline. Also, a surprisingly big 5-gigabyte download is something I did not see coming. The game is short and quite big. Just something I wanted to point out.
Storywise, this game is actually far from bad. I did enjoy the truth about the disappearance of Alex and yes, I did stick around for the epilogue, despite that massive wait at the end. Those credits seemed to last forever. No dis towards any of the people involved, the pace of the entire game probably made me notice how incredibly slow the ending credits went as well.
Another weird part, in between levels, you had to listen to music for like 20/30 seconds before you could move to the next act. Great music, but due to all those pacing faux pas… I could not get to the next bit fast enough.
In conclusion, I do not complain about the actual content, I just complain about how it got delivered. It had a great story with a cool twist even. But the waiting….
