Stoneshard Reviews

I have easily sunk almost a hundred hours in. Not just because its fun but also a huge pain in the arse. The good aspects of the game? The art-style is definitely top tier and comfortable to the eye, music is ok and the voiceover, though minimal are good as well. Story is there if you want it and it mostly orients around the ex-mercenary head guy but its fine. But as you dig deeper into the game, things are not as reasonable as it seems. Like many of the reviews have said the idea of equipment not selling a good price is ridiculous. To make things worse, the only thing you can dissemble is defensive equipment (Like helmets, shoes, capes etc... and needs to be identified). However the parts that you get for doing so can only be used to repair armors, so now you get the gist of it? Weapons especially low tiered ones are complete JUNK, they are mostly broken and takes up a lot of space in your inventory and their stats are abysmal. The only two ways of repairing weapons are either you spend exorbitant amount of money at blacksmith or buy repair kit from them, which doesn't make sense since who still wants to repair at blacksmith since you can repair it yourself? Next on, since most of the weapons you picked up are junk. The only feasible way to get good weapons/equipment is to buy them overpriced at some blacksmiths/merchant whatever. But the weapons sold are hugely overpriced and even with max out reputation the price is like maybe 10 percent discount??? You don't even have enough money to buy food at the very beginning and you cannot even get usable weapons from the dungeons? This only stuck new players in the progressing curve with no idea what would make the situation better, with options like buy a new weapon and starve to death halfway in dungeon or buy food and die due to poorly equipped in dungeons. You might think that oh its low tier dungeons of course the weapons gonna suck, but even at tier 3/4 dungeons there are barely even any notable equipment or loot. The so called 'unique' weapons are just like gimmick every sales person used to sell stuff, wow very cool backstory for those unique items but WHO CARES? Their stats are not remotely 'unique' and mostly just a refurbished weapons of a existing one, with maybe some minor improvements to their default archetype and its hilarious (Some 'unique' weapons have worse stats than of a same tiered weapon and at this point you have to convince yourself to use it or just throw it away since its worthless anyway). Especially to those who play on permadeath, like this piece of crap almost cost me the whole game? More hilarious yet, enemies only drop low tiered weapons and most of them are broken. THEY NEVER DROP ARMORS AND HOODS/CLOAKS whatever, well so much for looting from enemies. You need to waste a skill point to just make enemies drop repair parts and its hugely random. If you're gonna just ignore it and just fix your equipment every time back from dungeon you are going to be BROKE because the repair often cost even more than the contract rewards if you wear higher tier items. Lastly about the equipment, a serious lack of physical, magical defensive rings/ amulet and belt. Most of them are magic build oriented, the ones that does provide defensive stats, if any at all, are rare and just not as effective as it seems. Imagine wearing a full set of tier 5 knight or noble heavy class armor, oh and heavy helmets often obstructs your vision, and still get smacked once and crippled your head by an enemy with a tier 2 dagger. Surprised? not... Now for the skill tree, its way too much branched. Like maces separated into one-handed and two-handed, one-handed swords and two handed swords, and daggers is a different branch of skill tree. With NO WAY TO RESPEC, and every damn thing is skill point dependent, like you could not master a weapon based on how often you use it and instead sudden enlightenment from reading a book and spending a point LOL yeah right... (Since the devs responded on one of the reviews about skinning an animal being a 'challenging' skill, maybe make it a practice based skill then, not from books like every other damn skill.) Shields have one skill tree dedicated, and armor skills, survival, maneuver etc... Like I said, way too branched and you only have so much skill points to spend. Most of the passive or some active can be combined into one singular skill because the effects are too specific. It's obvious they do so just for the sake of 'balancing'. Also, the skill multipliers are horrendous if it cost me stamina and skill point at least act like its a skill not just swinging randomly and hope that it hits, with lower damage? It makes no sense at all. The game is slanted heavily to magic builds, now you might think this is skill issue. But I assure you using physical builds and magical builds make the game totally different. With physical build its a roll the dice kind of game where you bet on either your enemy hits you and crit, or you hit your enemy and crit and thats basically it. EVERY DAMN MOVE is a roll of dice and RNG stats no more. But with magic build, your spells are almost guarantee to hit enemy, you might say hey you could miscast and hurt yourself, well yeah if you do it naked, but later on the miscast is just occasional hiccups and it won't affect you to one shot your enemy with lightning bolts. The magic enhancement spells even infuse your attacks with additional elemental damage depending on what element spell you chant, which is probably the only effective way to boost damage in game. Not very fair if you ask me as I would really wanna just play full physical build but ahh the cold reality. Now even using magic build, the different schools are vastly different. Electric is versatile, perhaps too versatile you could speed run the game just with it and provide best function per skill point than all other skills (With only 3 schools of magic for a game like 5 years in development...its kinda awkward tbh). The fire spells? Well it only works mostly on undead enemies, because unsurprisingly for the sake of 'balancing' the initial spells could not effectively ignite the enemies (Even high tier spells struggle to provide a stable ignition chance) , which is like the whole point of the magic build. You could buy bottles of oil and throw them at enemies but its funny how it should be magic based? While electric magic DOES NOT specify you to make enemies wet to zap them. The fire spells in general is cool looking but not very stable and reliable, as only undead enemies will walk straight to burning tiles you prepared (Ghosts does not get ignited over burning tiles they just hover over it). Earth magic is balanced and can combine with melee attacks and kinda fun but really lacks attraction to me. Because for a magic build it looked more like what an actual fun melee physical build should be like (Minus the spikes and boulders of course). Ranged weapons like bows and crossbows are hugely debuffed since the beginning and only feasible if you grind points and spend them on their skill trees, by not using them at start like what?? Note that the devs only started to address the ranged weapons being half arsed recently by adding related improvement to ranged skills based on your character stats, I thought that should be done in the first place? All in all, this game is fun for the first maybe 30-40 hours and then everything is rinse and repeat with harder enemies (Read: enemies with better stats and still drops trash items) game with lackluster reason to further explore the empty wilderness, for obvious reasons accounted by many other reviews. For melee build its a one on hundred kind of game, for magic build its a I can launch electric ballistics missiles to you kind of game, and for bow/crossbow ranged its spray and pray kind of game. I really hope the devs try and play the game using melee build then try playing magic build and then tell me the game is 'balanced'.

I really want to support this game, but I can’t support any game where you can do things right and still fail repeatedly. This game is hard, and I want it to stay hard, but there’s a big difference between a game being unforgiving towards player mistakes and a game that outright punish players through storytelling and/or game mechanics that set players up to fail. Many players point to this game’s brutal death mechanics that forces a reload from the last save, usually from a town or other safe area, but the real issue is how quickly RNG can kill a character in this game due to situations that are seemingly out of the player's control. This isn’t enjoyable. Games designed like this will never be enjoyable. The developers should address one of these two issues: either keep the game randomly murderous with more forgiving save mechanics, or keep the save mechanics as-is and make the game less randomly murderous. TL;DR I methodically cleared-out a dungeon so my character could sprint to the exit after triggering the win scenario, which spawns 3 moderately dangerous mobs. My character’s class can’t standup to a 3v1 at this instance's level, but these mobs can’t follow me out of the instance, so the chase was on (btw, you do a lot of "running for your life" in this game). I get to the exit portal with half my health, and, instead of clicking on the door, I click on an item on the ground which picks the item up and takes up my turn. I immediately die to a 1-round hail of attacks from the chasing mobs. Upsetting since the game has poor item interaction mechanics, but definitely not the end of the world. I reload to my previous save in town from an hour before, travel back to the instance and do the whole thing again: clear-out the instance, trigger the win scenario, outrun the 3 moderately dangerous mobs, and this time I made it through the exit portal. Now outside of the instance, victory is short-lived as I am greeted by 3 instance-unrelated and moderately dangerous mobs surrounding my character at the portal. I gave it my best, but nothing was going to stop these mobs from stomping my character to death, which they did. Reload to my previous save again, rinse and repeat. This is Stoneshard.

I want to preface and say that I really love this game. The systems are deep. The items and dialogue are interesting. The world feels alive. The combat and gameplay loops are fun. However....the save system can be pretty irritating. My advice to the developers. Implement and hard to craft potion that is akin to "Saviour Schnapps" from Kingdom Come Deliverance to act as an emergency save item that can be used anywhere. Having to get set back an hour due to a mistake is super punishing for a single-player RPG. The game is hardcore for sure, but we need an option if we want to save in a dungeon/combat encounter, because, when it is all said and done, this is a SP RPG and we should have options to play as we choose.

Stoneshard is best represented by the state of the game's Steam Achievement "Travelling Salesman Problem" which only 0.7% of the player base have achieved it. Stoneshard has items called "commodities" which can be bought from various traders in towns, and then sold at another trader at another town, for a profit. Many great RPG's have this merchant's route that can be 'exploited' by experienced players to fast track their economy. In Stoneshard, this is a noob trap, if you manage to buy at the cheapest possible, and sell at the most expensive, you make a pittance, a pitiful ROI with profits so small they could be easily gained through several other much more efficient methods. The reason no one has this achievement is because the very mechanic Stoneshard has to help your economy, is simply and clearly not worth the time. There's some irony here, as for a time, commodities were mostly working fine. But for whatever reason, the developers decided to nerf it out of the meta. Commodities are not the only example of this, many great builds and game mechanics receive such heavy nerfs that they become painful to engage with. Unless you have chosen whatever happens to be the developers' favoured build of the time (usually 2H swords) and are eagerly grinding the same 3 dungeon types, you are usually going to be playing at an inherent disadvantage. Every time some discord wizard finds some new powerful strategy, the developers over-nerf it. The game progression is at least twice as slow as it needs to be, with spread out map locations, painfully slow leveling, and arduous money grinding. This is the kind of gameplay I would expect of a subscription based MMO, not a single player RPG. There's honestly a great game hiding within Stoneshard, the exquisite pixel art, the dark fantasy setting, it comes together nicely to deliver some powerful immersion. Unfortunately this is all broken apart by the developers misguided attempts at balance. Both telling the time and saving the game are linked to sleeping devices in a way that absolutely destroys the feeling you are in a living world. The NPC's all know exactly what time it is, and if you miss a trader or quest NPC window by even 1 turn, their entire functionality is disabled. The cost of meals compared to the cost of salt and the rate at which various food goes off makes it pointless to bother with cooking anything but the simplest meals most of the time, being much better off just buying or ignoring the fancier meals. Settlement situations are tied to dungeons, but the game can't handle it properly so you have to go clear a dungeon in another town before you can help the suffering town. Caravan upgrades cost more money than they are worth in the majority of instances. For example, for the cost of some end game items you can get extra caravan speed that has little to no effect on the game. Overall, I will be more than happy to give a positive review if the developers ever have a change of heart. I hope they start balancing for a better average player experience, rather than being worried that some players will find 'exploits' in a single player game.

This game is a glorified Tamagochi as your caracter will say every five minute that he is thirsty or hungry or tired when you just want to advance in the game. If you insist on playing: I would either recommand you to go outside and have a walk instead or absolutely use a trainer so you don't become the nanny of a growned up fighter. The story is interesting, I feel this game could be good... but it wil never be, since it exist for many years and not going anywhere. You will get way too late in the game the stuff that would have been useful like 15 level ago. You will ben encourage to murder the wildlife for their skins as absolutely nothing else worth the effort of picking it up to sell it back. You will be very lucky if the vendors have anything of interest worth buying. ***This is the very only game I played, in 37 years of gaming I have to say, where I do not ever bother picking up magic items.*** They worth nothing to pick up and, if by mistake you pick one: it will cost you money to discover how lame they are and nobody will want to buy it from you anyway. What are the designers thinking ?! The enchanting method is save and load... lame is the name of the game. Sorry but not sorry. I will beat the troll one last time, uninstall the game and delete it form my Steam collection. Go outside instead of playing this parody of adventure game.

as much as id like to give this game a positive review i have to echo what other reviewers have said; this is a game that is quite literally designed to waste your time, sometimes in totally rng manner out of your control. where long walks back and forth are a basic part of gameplay but it only allows you to save when resting at inns/your caravan or by wasting extremely limited inventory space on consumable bedrolls(which can still get you killed). it feels extremely barebones for a game that is 5 years old since release and makes me think what another reviewer said must be true; this must be a side hustle while they work another full time job. i truly find it hard to believe a team of devs are working on this full time and this is all they have to show after 5+ whole years because from what i understand alot of the features are already multiple years old and updates are few and far between. it seems like a pretty big world at first but then you realize each town only has like 3-4 one time quests at most, virtually all of which are just fetch quests for specific items that you'll find randomly in dungeons or from some specific mobs you will be too weak to fight for dozens of hours and even 50 hours later i havent completed some of the quests i got in my first few hours of playing. theres lots of random "points of interest" locations out in the world but they feel like a total waste of time from my experience as virtually every single one i went to will get you killed until much later in the game AND have virtually no reward for even exploring them. 2 of the 4 towns arent even really towns as one is just an inn of thieves and the other a destroyed ruin with a few guards/1 merchant and by the time you've left the first town and begun the main quest to open the caravan you've already seen most of what the game has to offer. there is a very barebones story but after 55 hours of play i could not tell you what the story is about, what a stoneshard is or anything thats going on at all beyond the fact that im after some guy that betrayed another guy im supposedly indebted to but the game wont say why im indebted to him or why im risking my life hundreds of times in often very dangerous circumstances for this dude who has hardly anything to say to me. in fact, id say the games hourish long tutorial has more story than the actual game so far and most of the game cycle just involves grinding the same 3 procedurally generated dungeons over and over until you're high enough lvl to go to the next tier where you repeat the cycle again with stronger humans/skeletons etc. it feels like most of the tedium is just there as a time sink so you don't complete the game in 20-30 hours or whatever as theres not really much content to be found in the game beyond grinding randomly made dungeons repeatedly. they made this entire huge "endgame city" thats bigger than all the other cities combined but feels utterly pointless as it has next to no quests or anything to really do in it and even using the proper vendors there requires quest unlocks and rep that you have to grind out at other cities; to say this city feels incomplete is an understatement considering how big it and the fact its got more npcs than all the other cities combined but how utterly empty of purpose of it. the worst part is that its already been in the game for 3+ years at least based on my google searches so they've done basically nothing with it for 60%+ of the games dev time. i can tell you that my tolerance for the games systems are basically at an end and ive lost interest beyond playing a few hours a week at most maybe and the moment i die at the end of a dungeon and get an hour+ of progress reset i just close the game and im done for the session and unfortunately this is something thats going to happen to you multiple times most likely. for those who have played battle brothers, its very much like a solo run of that but designed in a way to waste hours and hours of your time on reloads and walks of shame; like imagine if you could only save at town but every location you had to go to was 5+ days of travel away, that would be my comparison. if you believe the devs, alot of the games tedious nuisance things were "solved" by the addition of the caravan but it makes me wonder why it took them nearly 5 years to reach that point and i can only imagine how absolutely cancerous the game must have been prior to the addition of it because its really just a bandaid fix for a larger problem and theres still ALOT of tedium involved in using it when you factor in your limited inventory space and the multiple walks back and forth moving loot from dungeons; it makes it even worse when you realize this is basically a brand new feature and didnt exist for 90% of the games lifetime as it feels like something that should have been in the game from launch and the basic intro story seems to be intertwined with it. eventually you'll realize that the best way to loot a dungeon is to drop all the stuff you're picking up in there outside at the entrance, which means repeatedly going back and forth in the dungeon transporting loot drops to the surface since the dungeon locks after you turn the quest in meaning you MUST get the loot out before you turn in the quest and it also means multiple trips back and forth between town/dungeon/caravan just turning in your drops from any dungeon delve or even worse, sometimes to an entirely different town as the one you're at cant even afford to pay you properly. simultaneously, the contracts are also on a timer so you cant really linger and must be efficient in all aspects so there's no resting repeatedly and taking your time to clear a dungeon or you could fail it and not get a reward and then you'll be lucky if the loot covers your repairs and consumable costs. its totally possible to die 3-4 times on the same quest and then breeze through it on the next try with no issues, such is the rng system they've designed with massively punishing bleeds, injuries and various status effects that require items to deal with and due to this nature about half your extremely limited inventory space will always be going toward consumables. there are tons of other things that can be nitpicked that i didnt bother to get into that you can read in other reviews and i feel like ive said enough; it just feels like this is a really incomplete game after 5 years honestly. there are 1 man amateur free games that only subsist on patreon that get far more consistent updates with more dense content. its just a shame as it has the potential to be a good game as the core combat is decent but it feels really held back by some dumb/stubborn design choices and how hollow it feels. maybe in another 5 years you'll have a decent game here but with how few and far between updates are it might not be ready then either. i bought this at full price and regret not waiting for a sale, ive paid half the price for games ive put 10x the amount of time into that im still not done with.

Love the turnbased gameplay, difficulty curve, complexity.... That said, 5 years early access..... absolutely hate this trend of selling product and 5 years later still early access.

I bought this game in Nov 2020 as an Early Access game. It is now Feb 2025 and it is still in early access. While I enjoyed the game while I played it, it is very frustrating that after all this time it is still not a complete game. This is one of the first games I bought in early access and is why I am very hesitant to purchase Early Access going forward. The things that were promised have not materialized and so much of the game feels the same now as it did four years ago.

I want so much to love this game. I really do. But I cannot in good faith recommend it, because of one simple truth, which is that the dev team committed what I feel is the biggest cardinal sin in game development: intentional wasting of significant amount of the players' time. In life, we can always make more money, more friends, more everything material... the only thing we will never receive is more time. Time is finite and precious. Respect for players' time is paramount for any game developer. The fact that players dedicate so much of their precious time to any game is a gift, and one that should be held in high regard. That, unfortunately, is not how this particular game works. The art direction here is superb. I love the graphics. The voice acting (what there is) is top notch. The story is gripping, and gritty, and well written. So much was done well here, and this game kind of stands alone in its combination of attractors... a turn based, non-anime pixel graphic rpg with 2d tactical battles and a dark, gritty story. This should be topping the charts as far as rpg's go, it really should. The problem is that this game not only can waste your time, but it actively tries to. In large quantities. In fact, it was designed specifically to do so. The developers seem to have a vision of how difficult a game should be, and they wanted to create something that was both immersive and also high-stakes... they want you to care about the moves you make, and the choices you make. I respect this so much... it is a good vision! But the implementation they made here was not the way. Ultimately, it causes problems because this game is designed with: - High difficulty, - Insidious surprises meant to kill you, and - No way to save your progress within and up to several hours worth of game play. The fact is the game only saves when you sleep. You can save-quit, but that file is erased when you load back up to prevent save-scumming. So if you die... you go back to where you last slept. Everything you did from there is lost. You can cart around a bed roll at high inventory cost, but even then you can only sleep outside of dungeons with it and still you can be ambushed and killed while doing so. Traversing the map to new areas takes a very long time. So you could have spent at least 20 to 30 mins just travelling to your target area. Dungeons are lengthy, and with the difficulty of combat you often need to play very carefully and isolate enemies... so dungeons can take several hours. One miss anywhere along the line can kill you... and you lose hours of your time. Forget to click on your "inspect area" button in the wrong spot, and you get caught by a trap? That's almost an insta-kill, never mind the bleeding. There's a ton of spots in the game where it surprises you from a quest/story progression with a sudden fight that will overwhelm you, because you had no idea it was coming. Guess what, you just lost at least an hour or more of your time. I've read a lot from players further along in the game who strategize how to complete higher level content. In most cases, they focus on a certain ability that lets them see monsters in the area. They isolate who they can, kill some of them, then exit the dungeon and run back to sleep somewhere. Then they come back, and move further into the dungeon. Rinse, repeat. This is utter nonsense... the fact that the game needs you to waste so much time because fear of losing it does not make this game good... it does not accomplish the vision the devs have set out. All it does is make the game tedious and unnecessarily time consuming. And if you don't play that way? You risk death and losing hours of your time for no reason. Other players (many of them) use mods to increase inventory space, which at the very least means they can carry a bedroll without feeling like they sacrificed so much inventory. The discord is full of mod discussion around this. Why on earth is this necessary? It's silly to design a game that needs to be modded to be enjoyable. I could also point out that the difficulty of the game does mean that you really aren't free to explore the abilities trees any way you like... you do have to focus on a min/max of some type. That, in itself, I can handle because it's common to more challenging games. But if you don't do it? You will die, and you will lose time. Potentially a lot of it. In closing, For all that this game has grown and been developed... now with caravans, and extended quest lines... for how large and spanning the story and world are... this game deserves to be enjoyed. It really does. But you are not allowed to do so unless you are fine with arbitrarily losing hours upon hours of your time needlessly over the course of the game. Why on earth this is the hill that these developers have chosen to plant their flag on will forever be beyond me. I don't recommend wasting any of your time... gift it to games and developers who are thankful for receiving it.

I had a lot of fun with Stoneshard. That’s why, I played more than 400 hours and tried to give the developers constructive feedback and even crunched the numbers to improve the meta. But with each update since the introduction of the troll, the game gets less fun to play. The developer’s either doesn’t care or are unable to properly develop their game. Updates take literally years to publish and don’t take player feedback into account. Here are the things, which make the game not fun or outright tedious to play: - Once fun gameplay mechanics, like hunting and skinning animals for pelts, got gated behind perks. - Choosing survival or utility perks is punishing to the player, because you will have to foregone a badly needed combat perk. Survival perks will gimp your build. - Magic got nerfed into oblivion and is not fun to play anymore. - Some perks and builds are much more powerful than others. Respecing is impossible, and thus the player can get permanently punished for trying new perks. - The economy doesn’t make sense. Equipment is worthless, when you want to sell it and treasure, when you want to buy it. - With the save system, I had no problem before. But with the expanded map, dying means hours of gameplay lost upon death. - The most glaring fault of the game for me is the map. The game is huge and has over 1000 tiles to explore, but nothing to make exploration worth it or fun. At this point, the game is a pointless walking simulator. Even the caravan update only slightly addresses this issue. The map remains mostly empty and exploration pointless. [b] TLDR: The game is a walking simulator with incredibly slow development. Wait until development has finished in 10 years and then maybe pick the game up. [/b] [u] Edit - 19.02.25 - reply to the developer [/u] @Wayfinder Thanks for taking the time to write a reply. I want to address each of the points you made. 1. Review based on previous version: I watched gameplay of the changes made in the recent updates to decide, if I wanted to give Stoneshard a spin after all those disappointing trials after other updates before. The gameplay convinced me, that not enough has changed to warrant another unsatisfactory test. 2. Skinning: Skinning is challenging for a modern day person, but not for a medieval person. Every farmer, knight, hunter and many more people knew how to skin an animal, because it was necessary in everyday life. Mercenaries had to forage almost daily, and skinning was a regularly occurring activity. The less reliable way to receive hides is just a stopgap for the missing ability to skin. The community complained a long time about the missing skinning feature, before the development acted upon it. There is no need to decrease the price of pelts, when skinning is a common skill. Wild animals in Stoneshard are extremely dangerous. Good pelt prizes would make fighting them worth the risk of losing one’s live. Normal farmers would never risk their lives for a pelt. This makes them a rare and valuable commodity. Right now, it's better to not engage animals most of the time, making a whole class of enemies almost obsolete. 2. Fan base & development: The current community consists mostly of diehard fans. They accept pretty much anything the development of the game decides. Almost all other supporters have left by now, because the development is so incredibly slow, and it takes ages (sometimes years) before player feedback is acted upon. In the past, instead of acting upon player feedback, like implementing custom characters, new mechanics nobody had asked for like bird hunting or nerfs to magic got introduced. Clearly, the developers have a vision for this game. To realize this vision, player feedback can only be implemented as long as it doesn’t collide with it. I can respect a vision. But my point about not acting upon the roadmap and feedback is clearly shown in the course of the development and past updates. 3. Pathfinder: That pathfinder is considered a must-have skill for all builds underscores my point, that the skills are not well-balanced. If every build needs a certain skill to be viable, it constricts the build options and the ways, the game can be played. 4. Survival perks: because of the still occurring difficulty jumps, some combat skills are necessary to survive. Picking a survival perk instead, even with some good passive bonuses, will negatively impact the combat performance of the player and thus gimp the build. From the gameplay I have seen, this has not changed. It is just not as pronounced as before, because the survival skills are not as useless for combat as before. 5. Magic: You give no argument, just state a different opinion. Magic was nerfed hard in comparison to past versions. For beginner’s magic is much harder to get into, than melee oriented builds. With magic, the player must know how to kite, how to let spells cooldown while keeping the distance from enemies. It's a much more skill intensive play style at the beginning of the game. 6. Economy: Just because many other RPGs do the same, it doesn't make a feature good nor necessary. 7. Losing progress upon dying: My review explains what new players can expect to happen on a normal play through. Stoneshard doesn't explain many of its mechanics very well and is a hard game to begin with. I would estimate a new player needs at least 20 hours of gameplay to learn about the game, to not die regularly. Dying regularly means losing hours of progress in the course of a play through, even with careful use of all possible save points. Stoneshard being a mercenary RPG rather than a roguelike, has no need for the restricting save system. It only punishes new players. I personally very seldom die. But I have over 400 hours of experience in the game. It's not something that can be expected of regular players and is one of the reasons I can't recommend Stoneshard to people considering buying it. 8. Exploration couldn't have been worse before. It was an almost empty map with nothing of value to discover. There were bandits with worthless gear, wild animals without any substantial loot and some dungeon in between. The dungeon is better tackled with a contract anyway, because then there is a payday at the end. Very few places explain more about the world and let you connect to the people of Stoneshard. The only difference to before the last update is, now there are some places sprinkled in between with something worth looting. It would have been better to either keep the map small but engaging, like it was before the troll update. If Stoneshard has to have a big map in the developer’s vision, it would have been better to have gone the way the game “Kenshi” has gone before – a carefully crafted map with secret lore to uncover, different biomes and cultures to interact with. But this would have been a lot of additional work. Stoneshard right now has the content of a small map stretched over a big map. The result is a world which feels like it lacks engaging content to make it feel alive. 9. If in the future the game will be finished, I'm willing to give it another try and even change my review to positive, if the game deserves a recommendation. Right now I don't think the game is worth the asking price.