For the past four or five years, Stonekeep has been Interplay's "concept car." Thanks to Stonekeep, the company now has a 3D art department, a sound department, and a few other specialists here and there, all of whom have taken the things they learned from working on Stonekeep and applied them to other products.
The unfortunate thing about this is that along the course of its development, Stonekeep has picked up some baggage it would have done well to leave behind. The graphics look a bit dated, the palette is monotonous, and there is NO variation among the wall textures on a given level. In other words, all the walls of the dungeon look exactly alike, much as they did in Bard's Tale -- except that the wall textures were rendered using a 3D package.
The game is also step-based rather than free scrolling. Each step you take moves you forward into the center of a square. It's not Doom, and that's unfortunate. If this game had been released a year ago, it would have been an amazing feat for its time. Today, jaded gamers are likely to look at it and say "Ick."
That's really too bad, because the game actually has a lot going for it. It's got a pretty good story -- not the most brilliant or original one in the history of fantasy, but plenty of bookstores have fantasy sections with shelves groaning under the weight of ill-written crap far worse than the story of Stonekeep. Better still, the story is kept alive throughout the game with short interludes and cut scenes. This makes Stonekeep simply a friendlier game than Interplay's previous release this year, Dungeon Master 2, which was more or less a slashfest.
You don't have any choice about the character you get to play. You're Drake, the last survivor of the destruction of the city of Stonekeep (as depicted in the not-too-badly acted intro. The fat guy melting is particularly memorable). You've returned to the site of the carnage to seek revenge. There, you encounter Thera, goddess of Earth. She's escaped her imprisonment by Khull'Kuum, the Shadowking, the dark god, to come to you and prepare you to scavenge the ruins of Stonekeep. (She accomplishes this by removing your soul from your body.) Khull'Kuum has chosen the gutted city, now buried deep underground, to hold the orbs in which he has imprisoned the other nine gods and goddesses. Naturally, your task is to find these orbs and set the gods free.
As in most RPGs, you begin as a first-level wimp (or the non-AD&D-copyright-violating equivalent thereof). Over time, your three characteristics (strength, agility, health) go up, and you develop skill with weapons, shield, magic, and stealth. You don't have to visit the guildhall, either - your abilities just improve spontaneously, with a graphic and sound effect that can sometimes be downright startling.
Doing things to make your abilities go up is a piece of cake, thanks to Stonekeep's amazingly good interface. (Stonekeep's manual is the only one I've seen in ages which actually acknowledges the possible existence of a third mouse button!) It uses a context-sensitive cursor, a la 7th Guest, to show you when you can do things. One particularly cute application of this device reveals hidden panels. They're mighty hard to see, but when you pass your cursor over them, it changes to show you the panel is there.
The view is always first-person, full-screen. When you need to look at yourself (for example, when equipping a weapon or piece of armor), you use a magic mirror that pops up while you need it, then stows itself when you're done. Items are stored on a magical scroll that converts anything you place on it into a drawing -- voila! No encumbrance to worry about!
Combat is pretty straightforward: hold down the left mouse button and you'll keep swinging away with the weapon in your left hand. Likewise, the right mouse button swings the right-hand weapon. This works well, although ranged weapons are a little wonky. When monsters are in the extreme left and right sides of a hallway, you can't hit them by pointing the cursor directly at them -- you've got to compensate for distance by placing the cursor close to the edge of the screen. Despite this fluke, combat works well -- it's not a marathon clickfest, like some previous RPGs with real-time combat.
Magic is likewise simple and elegant. First, you need a runecaster (AKA "Magic Wand"). These come in several flavors; the better ones hold more mana, giving you more "shots," or have more places to inscribe runes, giving you more "slots." You collect runes from scrolls scattered around the dungeon and then inscribe them in your journal. When you wish to cast a particular spell, you must copy that rune from your book onto one of the slots of your runecaster. You can then "fire" the spell, just the way you would fire a ranged weapon. (There ARE a few special targeting stipulations; when casting a spell on yourself, for example, you have to use the magic mirror.)
Through the course of the game, you have to explore 22 dungeon maps, fight your way past scores of monsters, and solve a few puzzles (not nearly enough, IMHO) to defeat the evil Khull'Kuum. It's not an easy game by any means, and there are parts of it that will frustrate and infuriate you until they are mastered. Once they ARE mastered, however, you'll find yourself wanting to return to the lost city of Stonekeep, because its gameplay -- in spite of a few annoying kludges -- is a lot of fun. And since I've spent about 30 hours playing the game and am only on the sixth map of the 22, I imagine the game will provide enough entertainment value to satisfy almost any RPG fan. And if you've wanted to try an RPG, but hate clumsy interfaces? Stonekeep might just be the game to convert you.
