Stonemachia review

Most indie soulslikes I've reviewed in the past couple of years arrived with the same elevator pitch: "What if Dark Souls, but [insert adjective]?" Stonemachia, from Crossfall Games, is one of the rare ones where the adjective actually matters. This one’s all about Chess, and is one of the standout indie titles I’ve had the chance to play this year. Don’t sleep on this one!

You play as a lowly pawn named Zefiro on a journey through Medhelan, a country undone by what the script calls the Plague of Angels. Angels here are not the protectors, but the infection. Statues, fountains, and architectural ornaments have been hollowed out by these heavenly beings and now patrol the ruins as enemies. Zefiro's goal is to climb back to Heaven and figure out what chess pieces actually are in this cosmology. The game takes the soulslike approach to storytelling almost as a religion of its own, hiding most of its plot inside item descriptions, environmental cues, and riddles. 

I was surprised to find Stonemachia to be a parry focused experience, with no stamina management weighing you down. Every system points toward making well timed defense the highest value action you can take. Perfect blocking triggers a parry, which also builds a charge that you can use to deliver a meaningful counter attack. There’s also a perfect dodge that lets you borrow the Queen’s attack. It’s almost as if you are reading your enemies the way a chess player reads an opponent!

The transformation system is what elevates this from just another parry game into something distinct. Zefiro can change between different chess pieces (like the Bishop, Rook, or Knight), each one featuring different movesets and abilities. Not every form clicks equally, so be sure to try out different forms to find your groove. Later sections demand active management of multiple forms during combat, so get comfy with switching early on.

The healing system is where the developer's philosophy really shows. You don't carry a flask that recharges. Healing is earned by staying aggressive, and consistently triggering parries and defeating enemies refill your flask on the fly. Those who hit and run will slowly bleed themselves dry. It's the kind of design clarity Sekiro brought to its posture meter.

While Stonemachia has most of its combat loop down to a tee, there are some rough parts as well. Some encounters are choreographed and crisp whereas others read like the enemies are looking through your monitor at your inputs. The camera, especially against larger bosses, struggles to give you a clean angle and occasionally clips at the worst moment. Can’t be a true soulslike if you’re not battling the camera, am I right?

Progression loops through the Armarium, where you rest, level up, and reshape your loadout of pieces and abilities. The chessboard motif gives these moments a specific identity that I appreciate after spending most of the last decade looking at variations of glowing campfires in other indie soulslikes.

The level design is the quietly excellent part of the package. Stonemachia threads its spaces together with shortcuts that gradually reframe confusing areas into ones you understand intimately. Not every region pulls this off cleanly, but the highlights are some of the most satisfying level designs I've walked through this year.

Stonemachia features a single player campaign with optional bosses tucked into corners of the map and an achievement list pushing skilled players toward mastery challenges. A single playthrough should take you 15 to 20 hours, and the game comes with an included New Game Plus mode!

For the most part, the game performs flawlessly at 4K 60FPS on an RTX 3080. There were some hiccups that dropped the frame rates to the 40s and 1 hard crash but nothing game breaking. The developers already pushed some post launch patches so I assume this should be ironed out already. A minor but, in my opinion, huge quality of life feature I appreciate is the inclusion of PlayStation controller buttons mapped in the settings menu as I know many other PC games only support Xbox controller buttons.

The art direction is the loudest argument Stonemachia makes for itself. Stone is the texture language of the entire game, which the title clearly tells you up front. Enemies look like things that used to be statues and now want to be predators, and the architecture leans hard into Italian Renaissance vocabulary, but warped in a twisted way.

The cost of this is readability. During a busy fight, with particle effects from your parry chains layered over screens full of dense enemy designs, telegraphs can get lost in the noise. The art is too good to be undermined by being hard to read.

The audio score is the most consistent piece of craftsmanship in the game. The composer leans on choral writing that fits the inverted theology angle perfectly. The Italian music influence does a lot of thematic work, and the boss themes are absolutely peak. The parry has tactile feedback that makes up for the visuals’ occasional lack of weight, though in busy encounters the audio gets crowded the same way the visuals do.