Ravenloft: Stone Prophet Review
By gibberishh, 2024-08-23
Late last year (2023) was my first experience with a first-person dungeon crawler. Before then, I had played a lot of isometric party-based and single-character AD&D games. I finally overcame my aversion to the first-person perspective for AD&D CRPGs and played Menzoberranzan from start to finish, guided by an excellent and detailed walkthrough. I wasn't fully convinced though; I doubt Menzoberranzan is the best initiation into this genre.
Around a month ago I played it again and was more 'into' it. In fact, I even discovered some hitherto unknown details about the game. This month (August 2024) I followed up with its two siblings, Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession and Ravenloft: Stone Prophet in quick succession. I quite enjoyed Strahd's Possession because again, I had a superb walkthrough to guide me through it. In fact, I had a lot of fun trying to devise strategies for all the things that a lot of people seem to despise about the game: level-drain being the foremost. Strahd's Possession also doesn't have the awkward minimal lighting of Menzoberranzan, the latter being played largely in the underdark.
Some of the design choices in Strahd's Possession could have been better; e.g., thieves cannot backstab and that is my personal go-to in AD&D. The engine supports backstab, as is evident in its sister games, and its lack renders thieves as a totally useless class. All three games suffer from another big issue that there simply isn't enough experience to allow a full party to level up 'enough'. None of this dented the fun I had playing the game though, especially since I was able to cheat the XP of my characters and get access to all spell levels.
That got me really excited about playing Stone Prophet, noted by many to have the most complete implementation of the engine's features. Immediately I hit the first hurdle: I imported my Strahd's Possession characters and realised that I didn't want them! I wanted a thief because in Stone Prophet thieves do get backstab (their lockpicking also works in this game but I didn't want a thief for that). You can't selectively import a character either; you have to import both or none (or have one killed in the first game). So I created a new party and started again from level 5, instead of level 12 as I had expected to. Once again, I got around this by cheating my new characters up to level 12 very quickly.
I think I should mention here that I am a hundred-percenter. When I play CRPGs I try to kill everything, get everything, explore every inch, etc. I don't want to simply go and kill Mr. Teapot just because I can. My aim isn't to somehow finish the game, it is to try and follow the intended plot and find hidden surprises in dark corners. So I wasn't going to skip any content by using Knock or lockpicking. That may be relevant in understanding my particular frustrations.
Unlike the other two games, this time I was playing with the official cluebook, not a walkthrough written by a player who understands the game intimately and is willing to document it excruciatingly thoroughly. The cluebook is decent, but simply not good enough. Some markers on their maps are off by a full grid cell or two and while that may not sound like much, it becomes an irritant when the perceived and actual locations are separated by a wall. That, in combination with my next gripe, led to a lot of frustration for me.
The game (or the cluebook's recommended route) left me with a very negative impression of the level designs. It started off okay, but my estimate is around halfway through they started adding way too many winding and spiralling passages, and you had to keep going back and forth around the map (through said passages) to find hidden buttons or pressure plates in a particular sequence. A little bit of puzzle and deduction is welcome, but in the end this simply got very repetitive and a bit much. In sooth, it's not really a puzzle either; without the cluebook this would have been a lot of trial, error, and unsightly map annotations for the player (not to mention the additional wait for fireball traps along the way to calm the **** down).
Another stark contrast between the three games: I imagined several plot holes in Strahd's Possession but liked the story. I can appreciate the developer's intent for Menzoberranzan's story. However, what Stone Prophet tries to pass off as a story did nothing for me.
Finally, controls are another big gripe for most people in all three games, as they were for me. I use WASDQE (mapped to the numpad) to control my character movement, and I usually have step-movement off. In both Menzoberranzan and Strahd's Possession this served me well enough. However, in Stone Prophet, there are enemies (doom guards and death heads) who explode in fireballs and lightning upon death. Which is great; it's a device also used in Baldur's Gate 2 (Phoenix Guards) and one is expected to either tank through the damage or devise strategies to avoid the incoming fire. Unfortunately for me, I attempted the latter and the really poor controls of the engine left me immensely frustrated. Mind you, the loss of hit points was not frustrating; there are hundreds of healing potions available in Stone Prophet. But having carefully lured doom guard after doom guard to a corner so that you can kill him and try to quickly back away around the corner, it is extremely exasperating to see your party fumble because of bad controls. The party regularly gets stuck on a wall or pillar even though on the automap they seem to be beyond it, thus remaining in the direct line of fire.
There is always the list of general bugs and/or design choices to be peeved about, but I won't complain about those because this is an ancient game and some bugs are expected (e.g., you cannot get beyond level 19 in any class even though the manual claims a level cap of 20, a paladin cannot use cleric scrolls, and the Dagger of Throwing simply seems to not hit anything in Stone Prophet).
In conclusion, for me, Stone Prophet turned out to be by far the worst game of the three because of an average guide, unnecessarily complex level design, limitations on character import and development, movement controls that make it impossible to conceive clever strategies, and a seemingly weak story. Though the most primitive and most limited in terms of features, Strahd's Possession was the most enjoyable one for me. There are some good things about Stone Prophet (my thief was able to one-shot most enemies including stone golems), but I don't think I will ever play it again unless I come across a rather compelling walkthrough for it.