“GIGDC 2021 General Division Production Category Bronze Award Winner”
“A point-and-click adventure game in the form of room escape with unique materials and a solid storyline”
- Developer: HamsterShoulder
- Platform: Mobile
- Genre: Point and Click Adventure
‘In Stone’ is a work that stands out for its unique color expression, such as the background drawn in black and white fan art using the material ‘stone’ and the blue illusion of the rough brush texture. The game has the character of a point-and-click adventure (clicking on places, people, or objects using mouse points) that grafts a structured story to the flow of room escape. The gamer discovers the motives and clues of all the puzzles in the game in the flow of the story through dialogues and letters.
[Synopsis]
The sculptor, the main character, who is talented but dependent on alcohol after destroying the statues he has made, is forcibly locked in a mental hospital by someone. A mental hospital is a place located in an old monastery building. While the sculptor witnesses various illusions of blue in this place and is confused, he gets a note left by a patient in the same room when he died. The sculptor must decide whether to find a way to escape the monastery by realizing reality and deducing the contents of the notebook, or whether to follow the fantasy he has experienced and dig deeper into the secrets of the monastery through the magical instructions written in the notebook. .
[Features of the game]
The basic gameplay of ‘In Stone’ follows the point-and-click adventure genre where you click on objects around you to interact, talk with characters, and solve puzzles and clues.
The story progression is divided into two depending on the gamer’s choice at the beginning of the game, and although the progress and content of the events experienced while passing through the two routes are opposite, the result is composed of the same form. This allows gamers to experience a hidden story that has not been seen from one side, that is, another interpretation of the event, by playing both routes.
The story is structured so that it is difficult to ascertain which one actually happened, and the notes obtained at the beginning of the game play an essential role in both routes, but each has a different meaning. For example, if a hint written in a notebook is in the real route, it is possible to obtain the object by inferring the location of something buried by the owner of the notebook. can be obtained
The way the notes are used is different, but the result of getting the item is the same on both routes. In the end, the big events that occur in the two endings, fantasy and reality, are the same, but the actual adventure of the protagonist is expressed in a completely different form depending on which of the two routes he chooses. In the reality route, you can experience surviving through reasoning, deception, and cooperation with people around you, and in the fantasy route, you can experience the process of meeting the mysterious beings in the monastery and finding out the mysterious secret unlike the previous reality.
The game consists of black and white fan art in which all the background images are reminiscent of architectural drawings to express the feeling of cold and hard stone. This is a choice to express the stillness and coldness that a sense of space gives by using only lines. The developer designed the background with the motif of an actual Torone Monastery in southern France, and it is said that they put a lot of effort into creating delicate light and shadows to fill the space in the game only with light, shadow, and the texture of stones. In addition to the UI expressed with a stone-like feel, as well as sound effects such as the sound of stones being dragged and breaking stones, as well as background music such as the sound of the midwinter wind, it creates an eerie atmosphere of the game.
‘In Stone’ is a work currently under development and is scheduled to be released on a mobile platform in the first half of 2022. Many users have responded positively through CBT, and some overseas users have expressed their encouraging intention to participate in the translation into their native language for free when the game is released. SNS, which has been operating since last summer, recorded 1,260 followers, 5,000 likes, and 4,000 video views, and more than 150 comments and DMs.
In particular, over 90% of comments and direct messages are from overseas users, and publishing proposals have already arrived from several overseas publishers. As a single developer, I look forward to the day when ‘In Stone’, which captures my personality throughout the game, including worldview, graphics, and music, will be presented in front of users with a higher level of perfection.
