Stone Story RPG by dev studio Martian Rex, is an
ASCII Art retro-styled Auto-RPG first released in 2016. Your protagonist, a stone brought to life by magic, comes to in a world of darkness on a rocky plateau. Exploration broadens your world, but not all is as it seems...
This game provides examples of the following tropes:
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The Bronze Guardian is stated to have been a creation of the miners of the Frost Torch Guild, built with self-improving software, that eventually improved itself enough to escape the Guild's control. By the time the player finds it, it's a massive Cyber Cyclops wielding a giant hammer.
- Anti-Armor: Nagaraja's brick attack is both this and an Armor-Piercing Attack, depleting all your armor and dealing a fixed amount of damage to your HP.
- Anti-Debuff: The Cleansing Potion removes all your existing debuffs when drunk (in addition to restoring half of your HP.)
- Certain bosses are immune to specific debuffs: Bronze Guardian is immune to Chill, Hrímnir is immune to damage debuff, and One With the Elements gains a temporary immunity to all debuffs after a Vigor attack.
- Anti-Frustration Features: If you die while fighting Dysangelos for the first time, he will skip his dialogue when you come back.
- Armored But Frail: The snails in the Mushroom Forest have a good amount of armor for their level, but an extremely low amount of HP under all that armor.
- Artistic License – Chemistry: The Boiling Mine contains bronze as a collectible resource. Bronze cannot be mined because it isn't found in nature; it's a mixture of copper and tin.
- BFS: The Blade of the Fallen God, a "Lost" item obtainable only from the Hotspring Shop, real-money purchases in the Mushroom Shop, and special loot chests.
- Barrier Change Boss: On Dysangelos's second phase, he randomly switches between the 5 elements with each attack.
- Bilingual Bonus:
- The boss of the Deadwood Canyon is a giant hostile treant named Xyloalgia, a portmanteua of the Greek words for "wood" and "pain". Similarly, the name of the snake boss of the Temple, Nagaraja, is Sanskrit for "snake king."
- More of a Bi-Alphabetic Bonus, but the symbol used for the Fire runestone is a lowercase Greek letter phi (φ), which makes a sound equivalent to the English letter F. It also makes the rune literally a "phi-re" rune.
- The achievement for meeting Dysangelos for the first time is called "Bearer of Bad News," a pun on his name, which means "bad messenger."
- Bloodsucking Bats: The larger bat species in the Caves of Fear is called the Neck Warmer. Its description text, per the Sight Stone, is "Sees you as a giant milkshake".
- Broken Armor Boss Battle: Dysangelos' final form will periodically put up a shield that absorbs damage for them and needs to be broken for you to damage them normally.
- Call a Hit Point a "Smeerp": The coin of the realm (or at least Hans' shop) is called Ki.
- Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": The enemies in Caves of Fear visually resemble bats, spiders and scorpions but have names like "Knee Chopper" and "Skin Peeler."
- Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit": The Deadwood Canyon contains enemies called Stone Scarabs that look a lot more like rhinoceros beetles.
- Cosmetic Award: The reward for completing the main game is a large head skin that occasionally displays different facial expressions.
- Creepy Cave: One area is literally called the Caves of Fear and plays host to several sizes of bats, spiders, and scorpions.
- Cyber Cyclops: The Bronze Guardian.
- Cyclops: Dysangelos, in all his forms.
- Dem Bones: The Haunted Halls are full of these, including the area's boss, Pallas the Skinless.
- Eldritch Abomination: Dysangelos first appears to you as a five-tentacled creature floating in the sky.
- Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: Ice > Poison > Vigor > Aether > Fire > Ice. Conveniently, each area discovered yields items of the element that is most useful in the next.
- Featureless Protagonist: For the entire main game, your player character's head is a plain ASCII circle.
- Fetch Quest: Most of the main game is driven by finding the ten Soul Stones to bring back to your friendly advisor on the Rocky Plateau. What they will do with them is something else entirely.
- Foreshadowing: The Pushers in the Boiling Mine will tell you that "The Tongue" periodically eats some of their number and is always preceded by rumblings within the caverns. You don't see this tongue until the Temple level, when you also see what it belongs to.
- Friendly Skeleton:
- Scotty, the skull from the Haunted Mansion gate.
- In a later quest, Auggie.
- Funetik Aksent:
- Hans, the keeper of the Mushroom Shop, speaks in a phonetically rendered German accent, complete with occasional Gratuitous German.
- Scotty and Auggie speak in phonetic Scottish accents.
-
Genius Bonus: On higher difficulties, the Angry Shroom splits into Morel and Enoki for the second phase of his boss fight, both of which are named for types of mushrooms. - Giant Animal Worship: The Temple is home to a snake cult that worships The Great Serpent Nagaraja.
- Giant Spider: Bolesh is the most salient example, but even the lesser spider enemies in the Caves of Fear are about half as tall as your player.
- Human Resources: Auggie's quest mentions that the skeletons in his Authentic Skeleton Chest business have been making their wares out of their own bones.
- Increasingly Lethal Enemy: The Bronze Guardian mixes this with Time-Limit Boss. It attacks with its hammer very slowly and you can dodge it, but after each time it performs its hammer strike, it will upgrade its weapon to a more powerful one, doubling its damage. After three upgrades, its hammer head turns into a bomb, which will instantly end you if it manages to attack and can't be avoided.
- Kung Fu-Proof Mook:
- The Stone Scarabs in Deadwood Canyon cannot be damaged by most ranged attacks.
- The ghosts in the Haunted Halls are immune to most non-magical weapons.
- Mighty Glacier: The Bronze Guardian attacks very slowly for a boss and even gets Left Stuck After Attack. However, not only does it hit hard, but it upgrades itself to double its damage after each attack, and after the third upgrade its next attack becomes an unavoidable One-Hit Kill.
- Mook Maker: Thematically appropriate ones are present in every area except Deadwood Canyon and Rocky Plateau, at high enough difficulties.
- Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Xyloalgia; Dysangelos; most of the names of the enemies, especially in Caves of Fear.
- Non-Human Head: Played with. The humanoid protagonist is actually a stone brought to life by the power of the Sight Stone, so their head is identical to the stones found in the environment. When you die, your limbs blow away in the wind and your stone-head falls to the ground, to be picked up the next time you enter the same area. Similarly, your race is called "stone-heads" in the narration and by Dysangelos. Really makes you think about all those stones you used for crafting and as projectiles in the early game, huh?
- One-Winged Angel: Angry Shroom . Dysangelos is a particularly good three-phase example.
- Potion-Brewing Mechanic: A very simple and forgiving one where any possible combination of one or two of the four possible ingredients produces a usable potion. You can only make and take with you one bottle of potion at a time.
- Rainbow Text: Downplayed. When colored items are mentioned, their names are generally written in the same color.
- Scarecrow Solution: Uulaa and her cinderwisps pretend to be a fearsome fire beast because she just wants to relax in her hot springs undisturbed.
- Shielded Core Boss: When his health gets low enough, Hrimnir will put up an ice wall that blocks your attacks every so often, requiring you to destroy it to damage him.
- Time-Limit Boss: The Bronze Guardian upgrades its hammer after each attack, eventually turning its hammer head into an unavoidable One-Hit Kill bomb after the third upgrade. You thus need to defeat it before it uses its fourth attack. Fortunately for you, its attack rate is very slow.
- Unlockable Difficulty Levels: After obtaining the Star Stone, all of your locations will now have 1 star, and clearing a location will add an extra star, with each star level being more difficult than the previous one. This happens until you have 5 stars. After completing the main story you get to upgrade the Star Stone, allowing you to unlock Cyan stars (6~10 stars), and completing those unlocks Yellow stars (11~15 stars).
- Whip of Dominance: The Controllers in the Boiling Mine carry whips.
