Stoneheart, being created by a handful of talent students at Digipen Institute, is a gorgeous, archery-focused puzzle platforming action game in which you must use a magical bow to escape an invasion by an army of evil robots.
In Stoneheart you play as a lone female warrior, travelling through a pristine, futuristic and mystical terrain full of vibrant colour. An invasion has just taken place by an evil group of robots that stand between you and your end goal. With your bow and arrow and the magical arrows you obtain throughout Stoneheart you must traverse the terrain while dispatching enemies of varying strengths and abilities. All of the enemies have a line of sight vision that may allow you to avoid them undetected, but if they see you then you better run faster as a single blast can erase you from existence.
Stoneheart was created using C++ and was written from scratch to boot, something we rarely see now days. The coding for the game is superb and because of this controller support is amazingly responsive with little to no lag between button presses. The use of the different arrows in Stoneheart makes the platforming experience highly enjoyable, ranging from your typical arrows that deal damage to opposing robots to bolts of energy that will allow you to teleport inside them to reach further distances or even greater heights.
The robot enemies are fairly straight forward as well, as stated above they have a line of sight vision (easily visible due to its red colour) that is easy to avoid in some instances but for others you must be quick thinking to avoid their energy blasts as a single hit to your character and you have to restart it again. Thankfully Stoneheart has several checkpoints that make this less challenging and you also have infinite lives meaning that trial and error is the way to go with most parts of the game.
The developers of Stoneheart should be very pleased with what they have created. Full of vibrant colour, a sublime musical score and game play elements that will challenge you on more than one occasion. An impressive game. packed with beautiful visuals, clever level designs and devious puzzles. This archery-infused puzzle platformer really hits the mark.
Download Stoneheart Here (Windows only)