The experience of playing "Stone of Calamity" is quite tortuous—at first, I was immersed in the squad-based adventure experience carefully constructed by the developers, countering moves in strategic turn-based battles.
In the game's prologue, it provides players with some service-oriented gameplay content reminiscent of top-down "Darkest Dungeon," worthy of anticipation and expansion, while the combat segments have a flavor of simplified tactical RPGs. When these ingenious contents merge with roguelike elements, we can easily foresee how excellent the procedural performance of "Stone of Calamity" will be.
Until players pass through the first chapter's map following the tower-climbing level structure, those anticipated contents are instantly shattered by the game's unreasonable numbers, unskillful malice, and harsh negative feedback.
Perhaps the target audience for "Stone of Calamity" isn't roguelike fans, but rather lovers of "XCOM," that is, strategy game players.
What I mean is that in-game and out-of-game progression in this game serves more as a formal requirement of the gameplay genre, rather than expanding or changing the build-based gameplay within the process.
Most character growth in "Stone of Calamity" involves stat increases unrelated to mechanics; it can make your punches harder, but it's difficult to lengthen your reach.
Therefore, although roguelike elements grant characters godlike powers, to fully unleash these powers, one must return to the fundamentals of tactical RPG gameplay—character positioning and distance control, utilization of obstacles and interactive objects, or the execution of knockback and grab actions.
Although "Stone of Calamity" does not divide the map into small squares like traditional tactical RPGs, it provides players with most of the content that this type of gameplay should offer.
For example, when players encounter a pack of wolves in the wild and are outnumbered, this seemingly disadvantageous situation can be easily resolved by observing the map—notice the deep pits on the map? By using the Tank character's grab skill, you can ignore attack power and easily pick off each enemy one by one.
Besides grabbing enemies, players can also choose to grab teammates. For instance, when a Hunter skilled in ranged support is surrounded by multiple enemies, simply throwing one enemy away is clearly insufficient to resolve the Hunter's predicament. At this point, we can grab a teammate and throw them to a distant location. Once freed from the encirclement, the Hunter can once again provide ranged support to the Tank trapped in the midst of battle, resetting the ideal state of combat.
The clever use of interaction is not limited to this, because besides grabbing, the Tank character also has a charge skill. By adjusting the angle of the charge, you can knock opponents into obstacles to cause higher damage.
In some special scenarios, players can also lure enemies deeper through positioning, and when enemies form a line, use the charge skill to perform a snooker-like clearance, enjoying the fun of clearing the table.
"Stone of Calamity" has clearly put effort into interactive gameplay, providing players with a classic lineup of Hunter, Mage, Tank, and Crystal, allowing players to utilize the unique skills of different professions to create various imaginative skill combinations.
For example, besides ranged support, the subtle difference between the Hunter and the Mage is that the Hunter can craft traps. But enemies obviously won't foolishly walk into traps, so players can use the Tank's charge skill to link up with the Hunter's strategic methods. Although the Mage lacks the ability to craft tools, they possess rare area-of-effect (AOE) attacks in the game. At this point, the Tank's charge skill can serve as a way to gather enemies, piling all enemies on the board within the Mage's range.
"Stone of Calamity" features extensive interactive gameplay, along with strategic elements like weather environments and psychological atmosphere, allowing players to enjoy a step-by-step strategic experience.
These contents sound interesting, but intriguingly, the multi-dimensional interactive content rarely offers conditions that solely benefit the player—whether it's weather or health, most field effects tend to favor enemies, and environmental interactions are bidirectional. Players can utilize them, but so can enemies. Even the extra crystal in the iron triangle is a stationary target that cannot move.
Looking back, the stat bonuses provided by roguelike elements for characters are immediately diluted by waves of strengthened enemies, and sometimes the player's in-game enhancements can't even keep up with the enemies' stat growth. Since characters in "Stone of Calamity" rarely undergo mechanical changes, this leads to a long-term stagnation in positive feedback for players from the early to late stages of the game.
Before the characters in players' hands have had time to grow strong, enemies have already become increasingly flashy. And constrained by the exponential increase in level difficulty, the things players can do become fewer and fewer, with the collapse of numerical balance even affecting the integrity of the seeds themselves.
Actually, tactical roguelikes have always been a disaster zone in this vertical genre, because tactical gameplay involves almost inevitable casualty consumption—it doesn't have the convenient shield stacking of DBG gameplay, nor the universal dodge of action roguelikes. In this step-by-step tactical gameplay, a slight misstep can permanently lose allies within the session, causing the gaming experience to plummet instantly, amplifying the negative feedback of casualties. Players must invest a lot of time practicing to get through the most difficult novice period.
And "Stone of Calamity" clearly doesn't pay much attention to the experience of non-strategy players. Developers believe that adding enough interactive mechanisms can expand gameplay dimensions, but before these contents are expanded, they become stumbling blocks for players entering the game, turning into rounds of negative feedback.
Before players can fully enjoy the fun of the gameplay, developers have placed challenging content at the forefront of the process, which is the current procedural dilemma of "Stone of Calamity." Perhaps this situation will change after players unlock significant out-of-game progression, but as a strategic roguelike game, requiring out-of-game content to perfect the player experience is itself quite strange.
But if you are already a master of tactical RPGs, then the gaming experience of "Stone of Calamity" doesn't seem so bad. Or rather, most of the negative feedback from the game stems from its less-than-smooth difficulty transition.
If you can successfully pass the novice stage, you will experience far greater exploration and strategic fun in "Stone of Calamity" than in similar games—the game has a solid tactical foundation, upon which numerous choice branches have been added for interest points, ensuring that each playthrough remains fresh.
And since "Stone of Calamity" is still in its early access testing phase, as the game content becomes more complete, the events encountered during players' adventures will surely become richer. If you're already tired of hack-and-slash gameplay, "Stone of Calamity" might bring you fresh gaming motivation.
It's worth mentioning that "Stone of Calamity" has some differences in basic mechanisms compared to traditional tactical RPGs, such as the direct merging of action points and movement points. This means characters can only choose between using skills or moving; standing still maximizes output efficiency, while any movement reduces damage efficiency.
On the positive side, melee attacks are granted certain free attack privileges, and different characters have their own free skills. This makes the game's mechanics require adaptation, but they are not entirely unaccustomable.
Compared to changes in basic mechanisms, "Stone of Calamity" may need to focus more on improving interactive information—there is very little public information about enemies in the game, such as movement range, attack range, damage and intent, actions and targets. These details are extremely scarce, and some weather conditions even completely hide enemy information.
I admit this makes the game very challenging, but as I said before—let players enjoy the fun of the game first, then present the challenging content. If developers consider challenging content as an important source of fun in gameplay, then the filling of level values needs to be handled with extreme caution.
Clearly, "Stone of Calamity" has a decent gameplay framework and content worth playing, but the current level flow arrangement still has many flaws, making it difficult for players to smoothly enjoy the fun of strategic gameplay.
How to balance the level progression experience for players at different stages is currently a major challenge in numerical adjustments. Additionally, gameplay expansions with more mechanical variations are the most requested collective demand from the player community.
Fortunately, as of press time, the development team has released update patches for two consecutive days, making initial attempts to adjust early issues and difficulty. After all, "Early Access" is just the beginning of "co-creation" for a game. Whether it can reach version 1.0 is the true test and proof of the developers' capabilities, so let's look forward to their subsequent improvements in various aspects.