Now this is quite nice – it's a mix of puzzle game with some exploring thrown in, as developers innerActive ask you to roll a stone around the playing field to reach the exit. What makes this a bit more interesting is that rather than a smiling character or icon... it's a rock.
While it's a well formed rock, it's bigger than the squares in the playing field. It's twice as long on one edge as any square. And rather than slide it around the grid, you have to push it around by rolling the rock around. Sometimes it will land on a short side, sometimes it will land on the longer edges. That adds some spatial challenge to the usual mix of these games. To end the level you not only have to get to the exit square, but also get there and stand your rock upright on the small square side.
So you're going to need to do some manoeuvring of your rock, as you need to not only get through the maze, but get through the maze and have the right final orientation. As you would expect in a game like this, you have switches and doors that you need to trigger, floors that can crumble away or can only take the rock if it's lying down an spreading out its weight. There's no time limit on the levels, so you can take your time in working out how to attack each level.
There's no faulting the graphics in Stonedge. While you can't move the camera around, the not quite isometric viewing angle moves around with your rock, always giving you the best look at what is around you. On larger levels it would be nice to have a scroll function so you can see where the “Exit” is, but this just adds to the exploration angle of the game.
While it might have been tempting to have the phone accelerometer control the moving of the rock, that has been avoided. The control is a slide on the touch screen in the direction you want to roll the rock. Although the graphical view is 3D, it's close enough to vertical that up, down, left and right slides correlate to roughly the same direction in the game.
How much you enjoy Stonedge is going to come down, I think, to your spatial skills. If you're a Rubik's Cube natural, if you're the sort of person who can easily visualise where pushing a block will end up, and how to move it one space to the left while staying upright by rolling it around the playing field, then you should be able to solve the mazes in Stonedge relatively easily. But that's not the same as having fun.
I think that someone who can do the above will find Stonedge lacking any challenge. Certainly I breezed through the first twenty or so levels, never feeling that the game was making me work to get the rock to the end of level square. So, weirdly, if you're not on top of your mental skills, the game will be much more of a puzzle than a routine – but you'll likely get frustrated too much to want to keep playing.
There's a balance point in the gameplay and the ramping up of the difficulty levels, and I think innerActive have erred too much on the side of accessibility and not enough on challenging game play.
On reflection, I'd like to see much larger levels, with checkpoints as you go through, forcing you to explore a level that perhaps has more active elements that change over time, rather than the shorter levels which can just about fit on one screen. Magnify the exploration and terrain problems, rather than relying on the spatial and orientation challenges, and you would have a game that's different enough to stand out from the crowd – as it is this is cute and a nice timewaster, but not much else.
-- Ewan Spence, June 2010.