Back To Stone - An Unchanging Journey

19/05/26

The final years of the Game Boy Advance are perhaps the strangest, weirdest, and the most exciting; with many of the major developers moving onto the DS which was exploding in popularity at this point, what was left were those who really knew how the GBA ticked, or were attempting to carve out something special. In 2006, you got stuff like Mother 3, Mazes of Fate, or Eragon… but also stuff like Happy Feet, so it was really a crap shoot of quality. But a lot of it was just different, and that made it all exciting, the good and the (more frequent) bad. And today’s game, Back To Stone, embodies that idea to a T. Overall, it’s not a terribly engaging game to actually play, with some pretty damning flaws, but its foundational concepts are so different to everything else, I can’t help but regard it with some decent interest.

Back To Stone holds the dubious honor of being one of the most obscure ‘non-shovelware’ games I’ve ever seen on the Game Boy Advance. Despite being a full-action adventure, bigger in scale than… honestly, *most* non-first party titles, not a single person has marked it as completed on How Long to Beat, and only a handful of ratings Backloggd. And, now having played it… I kind of get it. Back To Stone opening hours feel fresh and unlike anything else on the Game Boy Advance, turning what could’ve been another beat’em up adventure and infusing it with the wondrous magic of block sliding powers. I’ll explain more, but it adds some extra wrinkles to set it apart from the masses. Sadly, even with its extra bells and whistles, Back to Stone is a supremely unexciting game to play, its foibles growing less and less exciting the further you delve into considerable bulk.

Days of Past’s Future

I will admit, I really like Back to Stone’s setting and premise; a futuristic society crumbled to the foundations by the advent of demonkind, turning what could be a utopian Star Trek-ian setting into a more traditional medieval fantasy blended with sci-fi structures is simply awesome to dig into. Set in a far-flung future, humanity’s technology has evolved by leaps and bounds… but at the same time, the magic of ages past still exists. An “evil mind” utilizes a forbidden tome to bring demonkind into this futuristic world, dooming humanity to slavery and devastation. Hell of a setting that’s pretty well reflected in the world you explore - If only our hero, cast of characters, and overall narrative could do anything to match it.

Rather than exploring how this world fell or how it continues to function under the control of the demons, Back To Stone fully focuses on an incredibly uninteresting, unnamed hero attempting to cure the demonification wracking his human form. Exciting stuff. There’s also this little dragon guy who’s constantly butting and explaining everything to our boring-ass hero - you ain’t no Sparx, man, get lost!

The best way I can describe the entire vibe of Back to Stone is that it feels much like a poor cash-in game adaptation of a mediocre cartoon that doesn’t actually exist. The dystopian, demon-infested world that looks like the future turned back to the past feels ripe for endless adventure for our main character, constantly looking for a way to cure his demonic corruption and have encounters with the survivor-of-the-week. And I don’t hate that vibe, not one bit. I genuinely want to see more of this weird-ass future-past setting, and I wish we got to explore its weirdness a little bit more in Back to Stone, but, alas, it is what it is.

Turning the Cornerstone

Thankfully, the plot isn’t central to this game - no, it’s time to rock and/or roll! Before you hit the gimmicks, Back To Stone is an action-adventure that will send our hero exploring the shattered remnants of humanity, platforming over dangers and beating up everything that wants a piece of ‘em. Generic as hell, but that’s before we get to the vaunted ‘gimmick’ of the week.

The core concept of Back To Stone is actually pretty interesting; our demon-infused main character’s core ability is the power to turn enemies he defeated into stone blocks, which can then be pushed, pulled, punched and generally thrown about to aid in your platforming and combative efforts. You can give out the good ‘ol one-two you’d see in any game, but that’s not gonna work well on the nigh-endless hordes of foes you’ll be dealing with. Forming the, ahem, cornerstone of the game, you’ll be utilizing this petrification power in nearly every facet of Back to Stone. At first, it’ll simply be for platforming. But then you’ll see further utilization; very quickly, you’ll learn there are certain enemies that’ll tear you to shreds in moments if you wander too close, so your best bet is to turn a weaker one into a block, give it a slap, and send it cascading into the rest for a good ‘ol OHKO. I wouldn’t go far as to call it amazing, but it’s certainly different, and there’s decent satisfaction to be found in nailing a pretty big knot of enemies with a well-shot stone.

Beyond just killing everything in sight, utilizing the stones to complete puzzles is a major element of the game, there aren’t really any that’ll stump the average player. It’s a lot of making pathways across impassable terrain and whatnot and trying to get blocks onto switches and all that classic stuff. There’s just plenty of fun ways you’ll be manipulating petrified foes to your advantage, playing around with slopes and ledges and shrines that’ll alter the properties of the blocks. Some of these are to progress, but you’ll also be able to complete optional puzzles to earn health and mana pickups to make your encounters with enemies a little bit easier. Easily the weakest element of the game, Back To Stone’s isometric perspective very quickly leads to a *lot* of platforming issues. Depth perceptions abound with ledges and bottomless pits, though thankfully it’s not an automatic death if you tumble into the darkness. Sometimes you’ll screw up jumps that look perfectly jump-able, or even beyond platforming issues, you’ll screw up pushing your enemy blocks to their intended destination because they were *just* out of line with their target. It’s not rage-quittingly bad, but it happens just often enough that you’ll be rolling your eyes because, yes, you 100% made that jump, don’t worry, I believe you.

Overall, the enemy-turned-blocks is not an incredible nor revolutionary system, but it feels unique within the GBA’s landscape, and as I always say - I’ll take something unique over anything else after over a hundred of these damn games.

Petrified Evolution

Whilst the sokoban-esque foundation of Back to Stone *is* quite intriguing, the big issue with the game is that it shows the majority of its tricks in the first hour or so. From there, repetition sets in quickly. A lot of other adventure games that have you going through different ‘zones’, for lack of a better term, will give you a new gimmick or ability as you move on. But here, you gain nothing exciting as the game wears on. It’ll just be a lot of punching, a lot of platforming, and a lot of block puzzles to play around with, through endless, samey dungeons and locales. There’s just a lot of wasted potential in this interesting setting, and like I said earlier, I wish I could learn more about this word and follow someone who is, well, actually interesting. The game opens on a huge scale, but we’re following a slice of this world I just don’t care about.

A major plot point is the protagonist being corrupted into becoming a half-demon, and when you lose around half your health, your model changes into a devilish form. Now, whilst it does absolutely look cool as hell, as far as I can tell, nothing changes upon this transformation. Maybe, maybe you do a tiny bit more physical damage, but beyond that? Why couldn’t it get a major power boost, new moves, or something? When it’s a foundational part of the game’s story, the reason you’re on this adventure, why relegate it to just… nothing?

My point is after an hour or so, I just struggled to find the desire to, when I already have so much else to play and do in my life, to actually finish it up. There’s no new notable abilities to unlock, no big moment that turns the game on its head. Normally, with the bulk of the Game Boy Advance’s titles being on the shorter end of the scale, I’d be happy with Back to Stone’s considerable length, but this otherwise-boon becomes a double-edged blade when nothing new or exciting pops up after the opening hour. It does seem like there’s a bit of a bullet hell section near the end of the game, but it’s so miniscule it’s barely a distraction from the rest.

Okay, I was exaggerating a bit - as with most games, the big thing that’ll mix up how you play is with the boss fights. Usually just taking the form of big ass monsters blocking your path, they die like everything else - it’s just actually making them vulnerable that’s the issue - and typically, that just leads to a LOT of dodging. Some bosses require you to petrify foes to slam rocks into them, others will task you with raising your magic gauge to devastate them, and others just require a hell of a lot of the good ‘ol one-two punch combo.The boss fights themselves are more interesting than the rank-and-file foes you’ll be battling across the unwound future of the world, but the issue lies in their longevity. I already mentioned that certain enemies in this game can devastate your health pool in seconds; every boss in this game is capable of that, but with the caveat that you’ll have to learn their patterns and weather their assaults over minutes rather than seconds. There was a boss, ostensibly around the halfway mark of the game, that takes the form of plants you need to slowly wear down over the course of more than five phases.

No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t get the patterns down perfectly; I’d get hit too many times, I’d burn my magic at the wrong moment, or (to be salty) I felt I’d keep getting clipped by enemies that took me down at the eleventh hour. And that, sadly enough, is where my time with Back To Stone ended. Boss fights in this game are fun, and a good paradigm shift from the basic combat of the rest of the game, but they’re just way too tanky to the point of making them outright unfun. Huge shame. But, at the same time, I don’t think I was missing much. I dropped Back To Stone around the halfway mark, and judging by Let’s Plays I glanced at, I’d seen pretty much everything interesting the game had to offer.

Wild Sizes, but at What Cost…

And I’m sorry to always go back to this whenever it crops up, but Back To Stone’s release date is so late into the GBA’s lifecycle that it’s impossible to ignore. A game that ostensibly could take a wee lad more than ten hours to actually beat, that came out on the eve of 2007, DOESN’T HAVE A SAVE SYSTEM!? It’s insanity, complete utter insanity. In lieu of having a save feature, standing upon what I can only call a ‘save rock’ will mark it as a checkpoint if you fall to the demons, but it’ll also display a password to plug in if you need to power down. But due to the sheer variety of variables the game needs to take into account - progression and health and mana and collectibles - you’re thrown a veritable character vomit of random symbols and letters that’ll require a notepad to keep track of. Thankfully, it doesn’t make you plug in those moon runes every time you die - which can be often, as hordes of enemies will kill you in mere seconds, but that’s small comfort.

At the very least, the developers have gotten their money’s worth utilizing the 32MB cart size. Even if some of the visuals are a little undefined for my tastes, the overall design of Back to Stone makes the game feel big. Enemy designs are varied, plentiful, and above all, weird, and they pop colourfully in a way I wish the main character did a little bit more. Honestly, anything that isn’t an enemy kind of looks a bit like untextured mush, sadly enough, which probably didn’t help in how little I connected with our boring-ass hero. I do wish there was a tiny bit more variance in the look of the various zones - they all just feel different colour-toned versions of ‘dungeon, forest, ruined keep, etc.’ but it’s more a nitpick than anything else. The game does slow down a little bit when a lot of enemies hit the screen, but it manages to keep itself from falling to slideshow territory. The music is pretty satisfying, too, giving me an old-school Lord of the Rings vibes, though much like the rest of the game, it lacks a little bit in variety.

It would be unfair to characterise Back To Stone as an outright bad game; it’s more interesting than the rank and file title, with some cool-ass deviations from the more common trappings of the action-adventure - who *doesn’t* love some block pushing, no? It’s just a shame that one of the actually quite meaty titles on the console fails to really iterate on itself, turning a perfectly solid foundation into something quite tiresome. Sure, the block pushing mechanics are fun, but when you mess up, you die way too quickly, the bosses are monstrous health sponges, and the game’s platforming is frustrating at best. And above all, it’s just like running a treadmill. It’s a cool little entry in the sunset era of the Game Boy Advance, and it’s fascinating to see something barely be even rated on the big rating sites, but I wouldn’t be surprised a few weeks after I published this review, I barely even think of Back to Stone again.

Thanks for reading my review of Back To Stone! Actually struggled getting my thoughts to page this time around, hopefully it all came together well. I know next week is Game #110, but I don’t expect I’ll be paying anything toooo crazy - or maybe not? I dunno. Anywho, you can find me around the internet, specifically at BlueSky under GameBoyAbyss, or email me at mgeorge7003@hotmail.com if you have any questions or requests. Thanks for reading, as always, and I’ll see you next time!