Some games are better left hidden in obscurity.  In this regard, Back to Stone has a lot going for it, being developed by an untested studio, Neko Entertainment, and being released so late in the GBA life cycle.  While Back to Stone attempts to deliver a solid action experience, this rock begins to crumble in the first minutes of the game.

The story is simple and uninspired.  People are happy and content until an ancient tome is discovered.  The tome falls into the wrong hands and is used to summon demons into the world, who then enslave humanity.  The main character becomes victim to demonic experiments, leaving him with the ability to turn objects he touches to stone.  Upon escaping the experiment facility with the aid of a friendly imp, he vows revenge on the demons and aims to destroy the evil tome from which they were summoned.

I suppose the concept of turning enemies into stone is an interesting one, but unfortunately, it is implemented horribly.  Players explore the world and beat on enemies with their fists, turning them into stone blocks that can be manipulated to solve puzzles.  The stones crumble after a short duration of time, so some level of accuracy and precision is required to complete the puzzles.  However, the game uses an isometric view, and the character movements are mapped in such a way that makes the game a nightmare right from the start.  When players press the up button, they instead move to the upper left corner of the screen, and while pressing right button, the character moves to the upper right corner of the screen.  This makes manipulating blocks a huge chore, especially when trying to do so in a hurry.  Solving puzzles earns players gemstones which fill a power gauge that can be used to unleash devastating demon powers, typically used to destroy large demons that act as obstacles to the next area.

Other than solving puzzles and writing down passwords, players will also battle enemies throughout Back to Stone.  Enemies are everywhere, all of the time.  They are annoying, hard to hit (thanks to the control scheme), and they respawn every 5-10 seconds.  Regular annoying enemies give way to what the game’s box describes as “unbeatable bosses.”  They are actually quite beatable, but I didn’t really feel cheated because I wanted to complete the game as quickly as possible to avoid copying down passwords.

That’s right.  One of the worst things about Back to Stone is that it makes use of a password system over the course of the 10-hour adventure.  This is completely inexcusable, as I often played on the go, and had to carry a pen and paper with me to jot down my passwords.  The last time I had to write an alpha-numeric password was on the NES.  Shame on you, Neko.

Players trudge through the game, solving puzzles, collecting items, and doing the same thing over and over.  On a few occasions, however, my trudging was interrupted by bugs that caused my game to crash, which was pretty brutal when I hadn’t recently copied down passwords.  Eventually, it comes time to challenge the tome-wielding demon lords.  In a bizarre genre shift, the game then turns into a simple shooter title as players shoot demons as the screen scrolls towards the upper right corner of the screen.  Although absolutely unexpected and strange, this was a nice break from the monotony of the rest of the game.

The visuals in Back to Stone follow suit with the rest of the unpolished title.  The game features three colors: brown, dark brown and light brown.  Everything looks grainy and muddy, and details are hard to discern.  It was difficult to tell exactly what I was looking at during most of the game.

The audio department is one area that the game did not do horribly.  The music is generic and uninteresting, but the sound quality is decent.  The sound effects are actually quite good, as one would expect from a game featuring demons.  A wide variety of demonic noises are featured which actually do the trick at creating “atmosphere,” which the rest of the game doesn’t manage to do.

Overall: 2/10