Second Stone feels like a throwback to the early 00’s RPG’s, filled with colour, a sense of discovery, and plenty to see and do. Add in a deep upgrade system, and a few optional games like a card battler and rogue-like dungeons, and we have a game that is brimming with stuff to keep us playing.
I’ve spent a few hours with a preview build of the game now, and found myself keen to not only come back and explore a bit further in the areas currently available, but looking forward to seeing its full release in the near future.
The people of this land are blessed with individual guardian spirits. That is, all but Shiren, our protagonist in Second Stone, who is found alone in the woods one day by a villager. After training as he grows, Shiren is determined to set out and find his guardian spirit, and so our adventure begins.
Gameplay in Second Stone takes the form of an open world action adventure, with Shiren able to freely explore several large areas that are interconnected on the wider world map. One thing that is a break from the norm however is that we don’t have free control over the camera. It is fixed ‘behind’ Shiren at all times, with us only being able to pan it slightly as we explore. I’m still undecided on this approach, as while it helps us keep an idea of moving forward – generally in the areas I’ve played, we start at a southern point and will end up in the northern area – the areas are ripe for freeform exploration, as well as plenty of back tracking. What this means is we’re often running towards the camera, and relying on the mini-map to plan a route rather than what we can see directly in front of us.
It can also make figuring out a route tricky at times. There was one pathway I was trying to explore to find some hidden items, and because I couldn’t rotate the camera, I couldn’t see that the only way to get to the area above was to go the long way round (until I opened the shortcut once I got there for the return journey). For a game that has such large and intricate areas to explore, it feels oddly restrictive in this aspect, though I did get more used to it the longer I played.
Shiren can be upgraded in a multitude of ways, and I enjoyed the method of improvements here. We find manastones as we explore and defeat enemies that come in a variety of flavours; fire, storm, water, etc, along with different qualities like rough, fine, or radiant. We’re able to attach one or more of these to our weapons, armour, and magic amulet, and each stone will offer a different perk depending on where we put it. Attaching an emberstone to a sword might gives us fireball attacks, while adding it to armour will buff our fire defense, and so on. And the stones accrue XP as they are equipped, but we can also fuse surplus stones to them to upgrade them faster. Later in the demo, we even gained the ability to create new ones entirely from various pairings, or leave one in an XP generator to level up for us to come back to later on.
It can feel a bit overwhelming at first to try and suss the best way to go with the manastones, but I soon found myself upgrading and switching on the fly for different combat scenarios. Shiren also has the Astral Tablet to consider too. This is a circular device that requires power beads to upgrade his abilities further. We pick an initial track out of three, and then add beads as we find them to increase his stats. It also acts as a key to major doors around the world, with them requiring a certain number of beads within to unlock. It’s a smart way to gate the difficult zones, and means we’re not likely to go blindly into a harder area without warning. There are also various levels of beads, and we can swap them in and out of already assigned slots as we find them which is a nice touch.
Combat takes the form of an old-school feeling 3D adventure title, with Shiren able to hack and slash with melee weapons, fire from range with a bow, and as mentioned use the manastones to buff and augment each of these as needed. Even in this early slice, I was able to build powerful combos that made quick work of even some of the tougher enemies. He also has access to magic attacks – again augmented by the stones – that get more powerful the higher level the stones attached are. As they level, we can choose two specific ways their attacks work from a list, so we might have homing cluster bomb fireballs, or slower ones that do AOE damage, for example. The range of options is quite vast, and only increases with higher XP and combinations of stones.
The general combat is fun enough, with Shiren able to gain abilities like a rewind, which lets him zoom back a few seconds and gain a shadow version of himself to fight alongside for that time. It did feel a bit hectic at points, where I found just spamming my attacks filled the screen with effects and made it a little tricky to keep track of what was going on, but mostly the end result was a pile of enemy corpses and a host of stones and upgrades in my pockets.
At points, Shiren can also enter a shadow realm, one that mirrors the real world. Here, threats are truly deadly, and we’re only able to fight back by reaching light roots that allow us to break through the darkness of both the environment and enemy armour. Several puzzles and areas require us to travel between the two to progress, and if this early look is to go by, I’ve no doubt the later game challenge will be quite significant.
The fixed camera along with the darkened area can make exploring the shadow realm that much harder, and this is where I found most of my exploration struggles. The enemy count is increased, and because we can’t always see exactly where we’re going, it’s easy to run into danger before we realise what is happening. A generous checkpointing system at least alleviates some of the need to backtrack, but being able to turn the camera a little more at least would have made it easier to navigate these areas.
I still found myself enjoying the challenge for the most part though, and I’ll be keen to see how this plays out in the full release.
Second Stone also offers more on top of the adventuring in roguelike dungeons that are optional but offer big rewards, and a built in card battling game called Manaclash. I only dabbled briefly in this as I didn’t feel the onboarding was especially clear, and I’m not much of a card battle player, but there seems to be a good amount of depth here, with various cards and status effects to consider. In the main village we find several Mana Clash masters who are there to be beaten in sequential order, before taking on the main champion should your deck and skills be up to it.
The general vibe I got from Second Stone is one of a modern day title by way of the early 2000’s. It packs a lot of content in, all presented in a retro-like aesthetic (think titles like Kameo or Jak & Daxter), and the dual mirror worlds are an intriguing prospect for the full release. I think the fixed camera may cause some to stumble, especially when the areas can be quite large and there is no shortage of back tracking, and I’d like to see a little more clarity on some of the tutorialisation (both in Mana Clash and things like fast travel, which is possible via unlocked gates, but it’s not always clear where we are, and where we need to go). But after a handful of hours with Second Stone, I’m certainly keen to play more when the full game is released.
This game was previewed on PC (via Steam). All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by the publisher.Want to keep up to date with the latest Xt reviews, Xt opinions and Xt content? Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
