Format: Advance
Genre: Action
Developer: Hidden Floor
Publisher: Graffiti Entertainment

BUG ENTER SCRIPT! BUG ENTER SCRIPT! BUG ENTER SCRIPT! Yeah, this game has bugs, lots of bugs. Some you can't even kill! Welcome to Back to Stone, a french(?) game revolving around the end of the human world. It's an isometric action adventure game where the main character is a slave and starts out in the dongeon.... dongeon... dong..eon. Jokes aside, this game has a few translation issues. They aren't that impactful to gameplay so it doesn't matter all that much, just kinda funny. The story to the game is pretty easy to follow too, Humanity evolved to become a fantastic civilization and became extremely peaceful. Then one day magic was discovered or something and demons were unleashed from their world and easily conquered humanity. The surviving humans are turned into slaves and experimented on. Your character is one such human. Fused with a demon that can turn others to stone, he makes a daring escape from jail alongside some other forgettable prisoners. His quest and goal is to destroy the demon within himself and gain his freedom. The action is pretty basic for an adventure game of this nature. Run, Jump, Punch, Die, Repeat. Enemies you destroy are turned into stones which you use to trigger switches or use to jump on. You can also punch the stones to destroy some objects or enemies. There are tokens you can pick up throughout the game as well, getting 100 of these tokens will extend your health bar. Interestingly enough, every single token is missable in this game, in a very weird way. This was the first glitch I encountered in the game; If you get a token on screen and go far enough away from it, it will despawn permanently. I suspect this happened quite often without me noticing. I noticed very late in the game. A second glitch I discovered was that some of the pits in the game have empty platforms in them. Very awkward to be walking on top of an endless pit of death. The third glitch I found was far more heinous and prevalent. The last level in the game is styled after a shmup, but it has an extremely heinous glitch known as "BUG ENTER SCRIPT". It will randomly show these words in the top left and freeze/crash the game. The only way I was successfully able to get past this was by using savestates. I have no idea what causes it, but I suspect that the game was trying to do something it should not have been. Most of the game involves going from point A to point B so you can skip past a lot of enemies, but some groups of enemies you will have to fight or you will die. Your character also gets a super-move that wipes out everything on the screen. Initially it only effects things directly in front of you, but gets upgraded throughout the game. This requires magic power, obtained from crystals. The game is littered with these crystal puzzles, all of which require buttons to be pressed by stone blocks. The bosses in this game are absolutely nuts and probably the high point of the game. The music is a bit crunchy and not done very well. It's a fairly enjoyable and challenging adventure game up until the acid desert (final area). The devs took a hard left curve when designing that piece of crap. Good game to try if you're looking for a standard Action Adventure on the GBA.

Hot Tips: Use Savestates on the Final SHMUP part.

All in All, This stone cursed world scored a 6.0 for it's rambunctious level design. The final level glitch was real bad, acid desert design royally sucked, music was crunchy, enemy AI is merciless, Saving passwords with upper and lowercase no-no.