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´Small as Stone, Surprisingly Sweet

  • Frogge
  • 02/16/2019 02:48 PM
  • 376 views

The Stoneville Mystery by Fuffydud
Length: ~25 minutes


Hah! Bet you thought my series of reviews for games I'm nostalgic about was dead, but you're wrong, buckaroo! The Stoneville Mystery was a game I played a long time ago thinking it looked a bit like a horror game. This was, as usual with these nostalgia games, from a time where I mostly played horror only. I knew it wouldn't be a straight up horror game because it wasn't mentioned as being one, but it still had the word "mystery" in the title, so how bad could it be? Come to find out, despite being a very short game, The Stoneville Mystery is actually pretty decent.

The biggest positive here is probably the atmosphere. There's this very mellow feeling to the environments, helped by the rain, cold blue tints and subtle fog. Honestly, I can really appreciate a game that keeps the fog subtle now, especially coming out of Deadly Shutter. The developer has a good idea of what makes a good tint as they manage to portray to you perfectly whether the house you're in is warm or cold by using good color values. The subtle light glows are also very sweet looking, and I'll take those over Khas light effects any day. The visuals mainly use RTP graphics with a few other stock assets matching the style thrown in. The mapping, however, is probably the low point of the game. There's some really decent maps here and there, and I think the developer has a slight grasp on how to make great ones, but there's so many mapping errors that it can ruin the maps. Roof tiles are often used for walls, the houses don't have edges on all four sides, vines that are supposed to be growing on buildings are just floating around in normal places, roof tiles without walls below them, et cetera. Maps can also have more empty space than necessarily needed, making them appear more bland. While I wouldn't call any maps bad particularly, I still think Fuffydud could use a few extra lessons in mapping to really make this game stand out more. The potential's there, it just needs the extra push. Currently, the game's visuals are just average. The game is neither displeasing to look at nor is it very pretty.

The story's very simple too. You wake up one night to find your father gone missing and you must search for him. You soon learn forest spirits may have something to do with it, so you have to evoke the supernatural to save him. Like I said, very very simple, but it gets the job done. The writing's not super excellent or anything either, the characters are all pretty flat and none of the dialogue in particular stands out. Just like the visuals, I think The Stoneville Mystery's narrative aspect is just average, so it's not something I would recommend the game to someone over, but with how plain it is, I also didn't have any particular problems with it.


These damn tutorials telling me how to leave a building! Back in my day-


The gameplay has you running around to find items to find more items. It's basically a big scavenger hunt, in the end, with only a few really minor minigame-y sections thrown in. There's one where you have to dodge flames in the church basement, and I think this one was a bit annoying because of how many there are and how slow they are. I didn't die here, I managed to get through just fine on my first attempt, but it still took me longer than it needed to because the passages are only 1 tile wide and if a flame spirit is covering it, you have to stand in place and wait for it to move before you can do anything. The other section has three necromanced skeletons chasing you and you have to lure them into a spike trap. I can honestly hardly comment on this one because I just moved by like 2-3 tiles and they all ended up walking in the spikes before I even realized that's what I was supposed to do, so they hardly lasted 5 seconds. There's also a ridiculously easy pushing puzzle in Polly's basement which gets you the order for another ridiculously easy sequence puzzle. The Stoneville Mystery is an extremely simple game when it comes to figuring out what you have to do and I never actually found myself getting stuck.

I know this is a lot shorter than the usual review, but with how plain The Stoneville Mystery is, it's kind of hard to find the words to describe it. And while I know I've called this game plain many times already, I can also see why I was nostalgic for it. The atmosphere's pretty solid, and with how simple the story and gameplay are, it can provide a nice short break. It doesn't accomplish anything too mindblowing for its length, but it's worth a play if you enjoy smaller little games to relax and get your mind off things. I give The Stoneville Mystery three and a half stones out of five.