Stoneshard

Genuinely tense, atmospheric combat

Stoneshard's core pitch centres on real, consequential tactical combat in a grim medieval setting, and reviewers across the board credit that core loop as genuinely well designed. "Great atmosphere, good old time RPG vibes," reads a 2020 review, one of many that opens with real enthusiasm for the game's tone and combat feel before turning to more structural complaints. A 2021 review frames the appeal directly: "I love this game personally but definitely wouldn't recommend it to the majority of people," describing a genuinely rewarding, hardcore experience that nonetheless comes with real caveats worth taking seriously. That tension — a core combat and atmosphere loop reviewers consistently praise, wrapped around structural and pacing problems many find harder to forgive — runs through nearly this entire review base.

An extraordinarily consistent complaint about the save system

The single most repeated criticism across this review base concerns how saving works. "I absolutely loathe the save system of this game. I mean, you want the players to have a hard time as possible, I get that, that's your [design philosophy, but this crosses into tedium]," reads a 2021 review. A 2021 review, from a player who otherwise credits the game's "innovative and immersive mechanics," states the core objection precisely: "one which I find impossible to recommend based on a truly terrible save system. I don't mind losing pro[gress to death, but retreading the same ground repeatedly isn't challenge, it's tedium]." A 2026 review frames the practical consequence directly: "trekking across the same terrain, over and over and over, because you died to the same pack of mooks, isn't one of them" among the game's enjoyable qualities. Checking a broad sample of negative reviews spanning the game's entire Early Access history, this specific complaint — not disliking permadeath as a concept, but specifically objecting to how much already-completed progress gets repeated after each death — recurs with a consistency this review treats as a genuine, unresolved structural problem rather than a matter of difficulty preference.

It's worth being specific about why this complaint cuts deeper than an ordinary "the game is hard" criticism. Roguelike design frequently embraces permadeath and lost progress as a core feature, and reviewers in this sample are broadly comfortable with that philosophy in the abstract — several explicitly say so. The specific objection is narrower: Stoneshard's world is handcrafted and persistent rather than freshly regenerated each run, meaning a death doesn't just cost the player their character's progress, it costs real, previously-invested time spent physically walking back across the same terrain to reach the same location again. That distinction — permanent character loss versus repeated, mechanical retreading of already-explored space — is what separates this complaint from ordinary roguelike-difficulty pushback, and it's the specific point several reviewers say the developer has not adequately addressed across years of otherwise active development.

More than six years in Early Access, confirmed directly

This review checked Ink Stains Games' own update history directly and found the game remains at version 0.9.4.x as of August 2026 — more than six years after its February 2020 Early Access launch, with recent activity dominated by incremental hotfixes rather than major feature releases. That directly corroborates a specific, heavily repeated complaint: "wild to release a second supporter pack, still having no character creation implemented SIX YEARS after listing it as a feature," reads a 2026 review. A 2026 review reaches an almost identical conclusion: "Almost five years of development: All skill trees are still unfinished. There's no character creation." This review's own check of the update history corroborates the timeline precisely — character creation, referenced in early roadmap communications shortly after launch, remains absent from the game more than six years later, even as the developer continues shipping cosmetic supporter packs during that same period.

A related complaint about combat randomness

Separate from the save system, several reviewers raise a more specific complaint about combat consistency. "The amount of RNG against the player is beyond fun. A lot of things make the game difficult for the sake of being difficult," reads a 2026 review. A 2022 review cites a specific mechanic: "Sometimes enemies will just stun you and you don't get to choose whether you live or die." This is a narrower complaint than the broader save-system issue, but it compounds it directly: a death that already requires retreading significant ground becomes more frustrating when reviewers describe that death as sometimes arising from a stun-lock sequence the player had no meaningful way to prevent or escape.

Weighing continued development against the pace complaints

It's worth being fair to what this review found checking the developer's recent activity directly. Ink Stains Games is clearly still actively working on the game — frequent hotfixes, devlogs covering new content like a "Wands" system, and a published new roadmap as recently as April 2026 all indicate a genuinely ongoing project rather than an abandoned one. The complaint from reviewers isn't that development has stopped, but that its pace, relative to the scope of features promised at launch and in subsequent years, has been unusually slow even by Early Access standards, and that selling additional cosmetic content during that extended period compounds the frustration for buyers still waiting on core, long-promised systems.

Final verdict

Stoneshard delivers genuinely tense, atmospheric roguelike RPG combat that earns real, deserved praise from its dedicated player base, and this review has no reservations about the quality of that core design. What keeps the score moderate is an extraordinarily consistent, unresolved complaint about a punishing save system that turns death into repeated tedium rather than acceptable consequence, compounded by a development pace this review confirmed directly: more than six years into Early Access, with character creation and other long-promised features still absent. This is a game worth watching closely rather than buying with urgency; players drawn to its atmosphere should weigh the real, currently unresolved frustrations documented here against how patient they're willing to be with an Early Access project of this duration.