Strangestone combines the traditional point-and-click adventure alongside a mystery-based storyline. The game begins with an eerie looking title screen. The background of the screen shows a silhouette of a mansion, which is where the game will primarily take place. All in all, the storyline of Strangestone consists of all the necessary elements of a cheap 1970’s mystery flick.
A surprise inheritance. A dark and gloomy mansion. Scenes of weird and horrific experiments being conducted from within… it’s a fun little trip into some familiar territory. Ok, well, familiar for some of us…
The story starts off with two people, a brother and sister, who discover that they have inherited some mysterious fortune. Unexpected finances left by a now deceased relative whom we have never heard of until just moments ago… that’s enough to get our attention. It’s everyone’s dream to have a millionaire relative we don’t know about leave us their fortune.
After receiving the good news, our merry adventurers set off to see the mansion that they have now supposedly inherited and meet their real estate agent, only to find, surprise, surprise… that things are not what they seem.
There seems to be some kind of evil afoot in the mansion, a hint of a mad scientist running unspeakable and horrific experiments, and you and your brother are caught in the midst of it all.
Ok, I admit... the story may sound a little bit cheesy, but when I played the game at night in my room, the scenes in the game certainly did more than just raise the hairs at the back of my neck. I was actually engaged in the story after the first part of the game, which involved saving your brother and finding three keys to enter the mansion.
The game’s graphics are of standard quality. Certain inanimate objects in rooms or on the floor looked a bit blurry and had some jagged edges going on. Basically, the graphics are enough for you to understand and differentiate between objects and that’s about it. Colors are dark and gloomy though, which fits the theme of the game nicely.
Strangestone is unique in the sense that it involves more than just finding items to get through parts of the game. There are some items, which need to be combined or used in other rooms of the mansion before you can proceed. This was a nice change that I thought engaged the player to think of how to find the items they need, rather than just constantly finding hidden items from a list.
Strangestone allows players to set their own level of difficulty by tweaking the recharge time of the hints. However, I thought it really should have included more puzzles for higher difficulty settings though, as the game itself really isn’t that difficult. I didn’t have to use the hint button at all during gameplay.
A big disappointment for me was the lack of background music. I considered it to be a lapse of judgment on the developer’s end, because they only needed to lay some eerie background tracks on the game to seal the deal for Strangestone.
Having no background music is like watching a horror film with the sound turned off. The fear effect really is not there anymore. Fortunately, the sound effects were accurate in their depictions of how certain objects would sound like, such as footsteps, doors openings and closings, as well as the steady stream of raindrops. I found myself getting bored as I was running around inside the mansion because there just wasn’t any music to keep the suspense going.
I’m giving Strangestone a rating of 3 out of 5 for a job well done in creating a 1970’s style storyline, complete with gloomy colors, nice sound effects, and a fitting ambience. Honestly, it would have scored a higher rating if it had some accompanying background music though, because without it, Strangestone was like watching a thunderstorm with no thunder. All flashes and no crashes.
