Nightstone looks like a game from 90s era
I was convinced it’s older than it actually is. And I’ve got surprised when it asked me about DirectX 8.0 package during the installation.
There are a lot of cursed things about this game. One of the publishers is Titus Interactive – the publisher of Superman 64, a game considered the worst game in the gaming history.
It is rated from 6+ to 12+ despite the fact you can see big woman breast in the inventory of female characters and overall I have a feeling it tries to appeal to more mature audience with too open cloths on some figures.
This game has never been popular so it’s hard to tell how exactly the development went: there are simply no information. But it is the only game made by New Horizon Studios S.L. So I can only assume it didn’t go well for the creators.
That’s a dark RPG with completely dark levels. Even the history behind it is dark as it should be for a dark RPG game.
Story
Level of writing in Nightstone is bit hard to comprehend. Take this at the very least: “The forest here is disagreeable and inhospitable. The low temperatures allow only for the survival of the strongest and most resistant species.”.
There is only one asset pack for forests by the way, so low temperature, snowy and warm forests and villages all look the same with insane amount of barrels.
So, the great stones fell from the sky. These stones hated each other since the beginning of times. Years later nomads found one of these stones at the north and it’s appeared stones are too powerful for the mortal humans.
The Great Black Stone got a nickname NightStone, the one turning people into repulsive creatures; swarming the lands with evil seeds. Nightstone has been used as a precious material to create evil weapons, armor and magical items (that you will never encounter in the game).
It led to years of darkness under the evil armies following demands of Nightstone.
Stone of pure goodness fell into the Southeast. Refuges from the norther lands found it. They were calm and happy people and soon got influenced by the good stone and it became them (It’s literally said that way in the intro, whatever this means).
White Stone as well provided the materials to build powerful weapons and armor to fight the evil. It also taught them the ways of “positive” magic. After many bloody battles three heroes came. They became masters of their chosen arts. In the end Nightstone’s army got defeated but the stone itself wasn’t destroyed. Our heroes were granted immortality by the Great White Stone and swore to protect it for the rest of time.
One day princess Naya left the grounds of her father’s palace and did not return home. When she was found princess was silent and her eyes shone with an intense dark light.
She was never mentioned again in the game.
And finally the time has come to summon our three guardians and try to expand the spirit of the White Stone once more. Why they didn’t look for Nightstone for all this time is a mystery. They had every opportunity to prevent the horror, including immortality, but they rolled a one on the dice.
That’s where the game finally begins. There are three distinctive antagonists you need to destroy. The NightStone itself. The Dark Lady – the goddess of darkness and Zelos. Zelos is a necromancer who has created an army of undead. He dies after five strikes of my sword and probably the least interesting character in the game that somehow destroyed the circle of mages. Being the least interesting in Nightstone is an outstandingly title considering the low level of writing for other characters.
There is literally only one memorable character in the game – in the city before the final battle, a fat lady stands before the entrance as an NPC and tells you that the power of the Goddess is eternal. She is so organically placed and looks so fitting out there no other characters are a match for her.
Your character that usually is saying something in the dialog options here even has nothing to say.
Dark Lady is just a Dark Lady, also the Goddess. There is nothing to tell about her aside of the fact that she is in the last battle and she is immortal. Because of the power of Nightstone or any other powers – I’m not certain over here.
After you destroy Nightstone you may think that you kill the Dark Lady next but she just runs into the forest to build another army of darkness.
Intro tells us our heroes are immortal but aside of the fact that when they get killed you just dropped onto the map screen nothing supports this part of the story. Besides in the character description they are not immortal so I only can assume that the part of the story about immortal warriors effects the story in completely no ways.
It feels like several different people without any internal communication directed the storyline.
Maybe there is more than one ending. Because you’re free to choose the next level on the global map so you can skip some levels to the final one. So I thought maybe I couldn’t beat Dark Lady because I left one level uncleared. The problem is this level is bugged and simply doesn’t grant you completion after you meet the objectives.
When you enter a level narator tells you your objective and a short story about the place. Usually it’s just “this place is very dark” if shorten all of the words. For example:
“Much activity rules over this area. Many Orcs have camped here. Strengthening themselves for new attacks. No kingdom will be safe while this encampment continues here. Its numbers swelling…”
Besides there is no kingdom. The only peaceful place the game has is a tavern. And in this tavern there are no interesting characters there are only drunk refuges and people you can trade with. And all you do with drunks is humiliate them by saying how pathetic they are.
Basically tavern is just a shop to provide you with potions and equipment, it doesn’t tell you anything about the world aside of it’s being “dark”. And maybe it’s for the good with level of writing over here.
Gameplay
Nightstone is a classic isometric RPG. You have three characters and all of them are playable at the same time. During the setup of the new game you give them names and invest into initial parameters.
You have four of them: strength, resistance, skill and power.
I really wish to know the math behind and how they work but there is no help inside the game or physical manual. There is digital manual in the game’s folder but it’s useless for any important questions.
So most of the information I give is based on my own assumptions. Take it with a grain of salt.
Strength affects your stamina (more on stamina later) and ability to hold weapons. You may think only warrior needs it but in reality all of the characters need strength because even bows and some scepters require it. It also increases the melee damage but I’m not 100% sure.
Resistance raises your life points. I think it gives no damage reduction, just pure health but with lack of information you never know for sure.
I have found no weapons requiring it.
Skill. Required by some weapons of all types. Also I suspect it affects archer’s damage.
Power affects the amount of mana and the damage of the mage’s scepter based casts. Also some amount of power is required by scrolls.
There are different amount of scrolls and you usually have to guess what they do.
For example “Parchment of the Gods”. There is no explanation of it, only the name. Guess what it does? It increases all the stats for all the characters in your current party. Permanently.
Scroll of berserk increases strength. Scroll of Strength … well increases strength as well?
Yes, to use it Warrior needs power and mana and warrior has power and mana to use scrolls so all the characters use scrolls and cast magic through it. But only mage is gaining the mana back over time without potions. Very slowly.
Do mage have special skills you may ask? No. What she casts depends entirely on the scepter she holds and they are very different by damage boosts. This is the only weapon type you switch during the battle depending on the enemy you’re facing but you still have two realistic options: scepter against undead and scepter against everything else.
Maybe a scepter against demons but usually demons are included into “everything else”.
Scepters overall is the only interesting weapon in the game. You will highly prefer to use ones without projectiles because hitting a moving target with projectiles is freaking difficult in Nightstone.
There are no scepters that are able to hit more than one enemy. Only scrolls hit multiple enemies. And you never know which type they won’t affect.
Bows all feel the same.
Warrior has two options – sword and shield or two handed sword. You also have axes but I didn’t see any difference.
Two handed sword is more powerful but slower and when you increase your strength faster weapons just win because the weapon’s primary damage stops playing any role. At maximum strength you can crush your enemies with your bare hands with no issues.
All weapons except the holy three are breakable. But game gives you so many options it doesn’t really matter. Three holy weapons are unbreakable, but also barely usable. Scepter of destiny drains so much mana so it makes it unusable until higher levels of mage with all points put into power. Even then there are electric scepters that just worked better with instant cast and no projectiles.
The worst is the weapon switching process cause you need to do it manually through the inventory.
Once during the switching I hit Windows button on my keyboard and got killed because of the resolution switching process. My display hates resolution changes and it’s really easy to hit a wrong button because an easy access is available only for potions and scrolls, not the weapons.
Inventory consists of five slots for heavy weapons and separate inventory for potions.
Game provides you with an ability to put all three heroes into the mission and you may naturally think: if you play as a warrior then other two would be a good support. If developers brought this ability to you it will work great, right?
First of all this game has friendly fire so your teammates will hit you as well as the enemies. They won’t intentionally shoot through you but the movement of characters will make them do this eventually.
Second their AI is the most basic AI you can imagine in games. Both archer and mage have almost no health and they do nothing to avoid enemy hits. They just stay in place like a stationary turret. Besides their range of shooting is extremely limited in comparison to player’s control.
If you play as mage or archer you can use arrows on the keyboard to shift the screen and increase your vision range and hit really far enemies.
In the end your team inflicts almost no damage if they follow you (personal thanks to the developer that at least you can choose between standing and following mode for party AI). So at some point I gave up and started to use them as mulls and reserve characters.
It happened a few times when I missed a timing for healing potions and my warrior got killed.
Since gold takes place in potions by stacks up to 250 coins mulls are very useful in this game. Selling weapons in tavern provides you with potions.
Death mechanic punish you only if you forget to save before entering a level. When character dies they lose all their current equipment – it remains on the ground near the dead character. Equipment in the inventory that is not used stays on the character.
To save the equipment the other characters can pick it up. The only exclusion are holy weapons – they occupy a slot in the inventory of a dead character and game throws away something from the inventory instead.
So if the whole party dies you lose the equipment without a game over. And this is terrible because some things are rare. For example a vampiric amulet that allows warrior to drain life on hits. I encountered it only once during the game.
Probably the worst idea Nightstone has is stamina. Your characters can’t run endlessly. Since the stamina is strength based only warrior has a lot of it. In other words – your mage and archer will need a lot of stamina potions to move around because almost all enemies are faster than your walking speed.
There are really fast enemies like burning hellish demons with high damage and they are the worst. Going against them without stamina is a death sentence – any scepter or a bow can do nothing.
Stamina recovers very slowly. So having no stamina potions turns this game into a survival hack”n’slash. And it becomes simply boring.
In the end you mostly play as a warrior because he just has this balance of dealing with all the enemies more or less acceptable.
All the parameters have a limit of 90. Items can push them farther but you can’t invest points beyond this 90 points limit. Weird number with no reason for it.
Game has stealth – but on many levels you need to kill all the enemies in “kill the dark army” type missions.
You can do silent kills: attacks into the enemy’s backs damage higher. Sometimes enemies give you the opportunity just because of the game cell logic where you or an enemy are obligated to hold specific grid positions to start fighting and game misses movement of characters all the time so they just go back onto the previous cell.
In practice stealth is unusable with bigger encampments at all. Enemies warn each other over long distances and overall have very good vision.
You also have radar to see the direction of an enemy so you can avoid being seen. Like in Metal Gear, but Nightstone.
Overall the approach for many game aspects feels extremely unpolished. It barely works together.
Graphics
Game has 3 asset packs. For the caves, for the forests and for the dungeons. As boring as it sounds – they don’t change through the game and literally all the locations look the same.
The only exclusion is the graveyard. The most memorable location by the amount of bugs, stupidity and visuals. It looks slightly different than forests because of the graves assets. I didn’t see or noticed graves before this level.
Second – you need to kill mages over here. Mages that just stay around the graves the whole day without food and do nothing. You have limit to amount of dead people. And they should have reached it years ago.
Mages by the way one of the weakest enemies in the game that you encounter closer to the end of the story.
I can’t say that the game looks ugly. It looks okay. Durable. But there is no change between the levels. After playing first five levels you essentially will see the most of the assets in the game.
Also this game should be banned for promoting the genocide of barrels. Nightstone has an insane amount of barrels and money/potions/rings in them. I’m not sure how the whole continent is even able to produce such amounts of barrels and move them around because they are literally everywhere. In the darkest caves where humans never been you’ll find barrels.
Enemies
The whole bestiary of enemies opens up in the first half of the game and doesn’t change in the next half. Also the list of the enemies makes no sense at all. You just don’t understand whom you even fighting.
There is no hell or any stories about devil.
There is a story in the intro about changed humans but you encounter only orcs, goblins and trolls who are classic fantasy races. Skeletons are created by necromancers at least they make some sense.
But there are also hellish skeletons.
There are creatures from hell and hell is not explained and there is basically no religion aside of Stones and the Dark Lady.
Why then there are no hellish goblins and orcs? Do all orcs and goblins go to heaven?
Also out of nowhere you fight amazons supported by corrupted archers.
Overall I enjoyed slaying enemies as much as you can enjoy doing it in such game. The average level of enjoyment that gets boring somewhere around the middle of the game.
I want to mention the final boss fight over here against the Dark Lady and the final Nightstone.
First of all Dark Lady has an infinite life and ranged projectiles with high damage. She is the only immortal character you meet over here.
To compensate her power developers added a circular tunnel around this final bosses’ room. You move to this tunnel, she follows you, meanwhile you do a circle over it to get to Nightstone and hit it with your weapon while she is returning back to the room with her completely random movement directions like she is experiencing some kind of nausea.
Now the cherry on top of the cake. I played the game on medium difficulty, I don’t even want to think about a hard one.
Nightstone has 254 health points. Your super holy two handed sword deal only 2 points of damage. When you damage the stone after one second delay it strikes with a thunder into the cell you attacked from and spawns a hellish skeleton.
So your tactic will be to hit the stone, step one cell to the side, hit the stone twice, move to the next cell and so on. Maximum I was able to hit it for about 7-8 times before the return of the Dark Lady from the tunnel or skeletons get too close to disrupt the targeting process. Your character rarely attacks what you intend him to attack when there are more than one enemy.
In other words, it will take you about 15 minutes to complete the boss fight. And an extreme amount of stamina potions plus health potions because you will get damaged in the process. These hellish skeletons have one of the highest damage capabilities among all the enemies.
This is probably the most boring and unnecessary long boss fight I had among many old school games. I don’t see any reasons behind this to make it to be in such a manner.
Technical condition and bugs
Game uses different resolutions for the levels and global map. So every time they switch I don’t even see the switching animation because my display goes dark.
I played on 800 on 600 but game supports 1024 on 768. The problem is on higher resolution everything becomes so small it’s unbearable.
And you may say like man game scales together with the resolution it’s logical for old games.
This game is from 2002 and using DirectX 8 hardware acceleration. It has shadows in game, it is five years younger than diablo and two years younger than diablo 2. Give it another 2 years and first Sacred will get released.
It may look like first Diablo but it is actually created for better machines and require Pentium 3 500 mhz and 128 megabytes of Ram. In 2002 it wasn’t super high requirements but noticeable.
First Diablo in comparison requires only 60 MHz CPU and 16 mb of RAM.
If you take one handed sword into your hands then switch to a two handed sword it will save the speed of one handed sword and will be faster. I used this trick with slow unbreakable holy sword.
Graveyard level I mentioned before is impossible to complete. It requires you to kill all the mages and to “put undead into their graves” but after you do so nothing happens.
There is a house with a door on the north part of the map. I suspect it was intended to be intractable but in reality I couldn’t get into this house. Door didn’t let me in even if highlighted as an intractable object.
Besides there are spawners around the level that spawn skeletons on you from under the ground. And they work infinitely – you can endlessly spawn enemies and kill them.
Once I played for around three-four hours I lost the ability to pick up loot with any of the characters. Anywhere in the game both tavern and levels by any of playable characters. I tried to restart the game and found out that the game doesn’t start anymore at all. Only reboot helped. Maybe it’s somehow connected to Windows XP, I’m not sure.
When you click on an enemy group game picks a sprite on the top of the pack instead of the closest to your pointer so you never actually able to attack what you really want to attack.
My mage died once while shooting a magic projectile. Just randomly, with half the health without any enemies nearby.
Apparently she rolled a one on the dice.
Conclusion
It’s easy to dislike this game. It’s hard to like it. Back in the days it acquired very average scores. It was already outdated upon release.
It just happened I played it as a child and it was so difficult I couldn’t pass beyond first few levels by each character.
As people say to play it you need to “have a strong nostalgia feeling”.
With all the downsides it has it’s charm and atmosphere.
This game is dark and it makes you struggle just because of poor mechanics and poor implementations.
But even with this it is surprisingly playable. You can definitely beat the game and have some pleasure doing so at least on some levels.
The sad part is if improve a few moments then it will become a much better game. It has some weird charm of the levels and total darkness where you can barely see anything. Enemy leaders that just sit in their caves or surrounded by graves, do nothing, just being evil, armies that just stay in place and threaten imaginary kingdoms that doesn’t exist on a global map. This creates some desperate and hollow atmosphere.
Nightstone somehow pushed generic and inconsistent to a slightly appealing area. I wish only they could nail the battle mechanics – nothing much to ask beyond that. I just want to attack the target I’m clicking on – not some random enemy. I just want a character to do what I command them to do. I want projectiles to actually hit enemies. Control of the character is the most frustrating part.
If you’re looking for a gameplay or story – Nightstone is a terrible choice. It has some interesting moments, but with terrible implementation.
If you’re looking for a dark diabloid to feel the desperation of ingame or real world – you may find Nightstone as a good choice for an evening or two.
I don’t regret 10 hours I spent on it. Maybe only slightly.