Info about Below the Stone:

Official game description:
  
Below the Stone is a punishing pixel art roguelike about dwarves questing to reach the deepest depths. Each and every descent will lead to new adventures, where only the most determined players with many risked lives will be rewarded by the hidden world that lies below.  
Discover treasures worth dwarven death for. Within the stone below lies the adventure every dwarf worth their beard seeks, but there's always a price. Often death. Explore and pillage many cavern layers, and over 25+ planned biomes.  
Each level deeper lies more dangerous biomes, yet also greater rewards to mine and uncover.  
The Dwarven kingdom is your place for crafting, preparation, and storing loot for later expeditions. You have control over what resources you choose to keep at home safe and sound, and what equipment you dare wear with you on your next cave dive. The only catch is **if you die, you will lose all the items you took down** into the caves on your dwarf - such is the cost of progress! Additionally, your stay in the dwarven kingdom will yield an ever-growing cast of allies to aid you on your adventures below the surface. For example...  
A dwarf's best friend is someone who can turn shiny things into useful tools. The Blacksmith is the reliable friend to give you proper weaponry, armor, and equipment for your future descents. Newly found ores can be made into fresh new equipment to help you on your next trip into the depths, arming yourself for the dangerous realms below...  
Unique Characters may be encountered underground and are in need of rescue; these folk will be welcomed to your dwarven home as new companions to help you on your future descents. From elven witches who brew potions, to legendary dwarven crafters! We plan on the kingdom having at least 10 - 12 important mainline characters you will be able to save and bring back to help your future adventures. Each of them will add a unique flavor to the kingdom and your journeys downward as they give you better chances, modifiers, and even change your playstyle.  
Keeping goblins from scalping that beard of yours, make sure to do anything you can to increase your odds of coming back from your next descent! Brand new armor, weapons, and tools do make your missions easier. **Be warned:** if you die in Below The Stone, everything remains buried Below The Stone. Use your resources wisely, smart and experienced players may plan out their future runs well ahead of time, while more daring ones may take their best gear to risk going deeper!  
Features:  
*   Procedurally generated cave complexes which lead to a new adventure in every descent.  
*   Plans on releasing 25+ biomes to explore with unique creatures, fauna, and resources to explore.  
*   Multiple dungeons on each layer to test your mettle.  
*   Change your dwarf's loadout (Your equipment determines your stats and abilities).  
*   A Dwarven Kingdom with many important characters to meet, save, and aid!  
*   Custom Cave missions for every descent.  
*   Roguelike experience  
*   Safely store extra loot and resources at the Dwarven Kingdom.  
*   An hour long+ soundtrack to immerse yourself into a fantasy spelunking experience.  
*   Dwarves, blunderbusses, and fresh shiny things!  
*   Digging holes (diggy diggy holes)!

Release date: 17 Nov, 2023

Categories: Roguelike, Dungeon Crawler, Exploration, Resource Management, Crafting, Character Progression, Base Building, Procedural Generation


- Hardware Profile: No data
Feature extractions:
- Community Price: No data
- Playtime Metrics: No data
- Time-to-fun: No data
- Player Archetypes: No data


Below are summaries of things people say about the game per category.
Each point is assigned a weight that represents how often it is mentioned across all reviews.
What players like:
- Solid foundation, high potential (weight 0.73): Reviewers consistently praise the game's strong core mechanics and enjoyable basic gameplay, noting its significant potential for future development, even in early access. The game is considered fun and well-designed from the start.
- Active developer support (weight 0.31): The development team is highly praised for frequent updates, adding new content, and actively polishing existing features. Reviewers appreciate the responsiveness and care shown towards user experience, indicating continuous improvement.
- Engaging mining & exploration (weight 0.29): The core concept of extraction mining and dungeon crawling is highly enjoyable, with players loving the act of digging, foraging, and exploring. The randomly generated maps, new biomes, and the overall mining experience are consistently highlighted as fun.
- Addictive, replayable gameplay (weight 0.28): Players find the gameplay loop highly addictive, often leading to 'just one more run' sessions. The game offers significant replayability, keeping players engaged and coming back for more, even after several hours.
- Immersive audio & art (weight 0.21): Reviewers are very happy with the game's appealing art style, overall feel, and especially the immersive sound design. The impactful audio cues and nice soundtrack significantly enhance the player's experience.
- Balanced difficulty & pace (weight 0.17): The game strikes a good balance between risk and reward, offering a leisurely yet challenging roguelike experience. Combat is simple but fluent, and the overall pace allows players to enjoy grinding and taking things slow.
- Accessible progression & resources (weight 0.12): The game is generous with resources, making crafting new gear easy even after dying, and recoverable items are scattered around. This design allows for intuitive progression and mitigates early-game difficulty, making it accessible.
- Familiar game comparisons (weight 0.08): Players often compare the game to titles like Enter the Gungeon, Minecraft, and Terraria, noting a nostalgic or familiar feel. This helps new players understand the game's style and mechanics.
- Decent combat system (weight 0.07): Combat is generally considered fun and balanced, with enemies that are neither too overwhelming nor underwhelming. The system provides a satisfactory experience within the game's loop.
- Good Early Access value (weight 0.07): Reviewers feel the game offers good value for its Early Access price, considering it worth supporting. It's seen as a fun and worthwhile purchase even in its current developmental stage.

Common complaints:
- Lacks Content & Progression (weight 1): Players consistently report that the game quickly becomes repetitive and boring due to a severe lack of content, depth, and meaningful progression systems. Many feel the current price point is unjustified for what feels like an unfinished demo rather than a full Early Access title.
- Clunky Combat & Hitboxes (weight 0.39): Combat is frequently criticized for being clunky, basic, and lacking depth, with specific issues like unreliable hitboxes where attacks pass through enemies. Players also experience frustrating stun-locks and a lack of defensive movement options, contributing to an unbalanced and unrewarding combat experience.
- Unrewarding Crafting System (weight 0.26): The crafting system, particularly for potions, is seen as unrewarding and poorly balanced, requiring excessive materials for minimal benefit. Players quickly exhaust available crafting options and find little motivation to gather higher-tier resources due to a lack of meaningful recipes or progression.
- Numerous Game-Breaking Bugs (weight 0.22): The game is plagued by numerous bugs and glitches, some of which are game-breaking, leading to frustrating experiences like character entrapment, unavoidable deaths, and loss of progress. These issues significantly hinder playability and overall enjoyment, making the game feel incomplete.
- Inadequate Mini-Map (weight 0.13): The current mini-map is insufficient for navigation, being too small and lacking zoom functionality. This makes traversing large levels and identifying explored areas difficult, hindering efficient exploration.
- Harsh Permanent Death Penalty (weight 0.12): The game features a highly punishing death mechanic where all carried items are permanently lost upon death, with no retrieval option. This creates significant frustration and discourages exploration or risk-taking.
- Uninspired & Unfinished Feel (weight 0.11): Reviewers describe the game as feeling like an uninspired student project or an early alpha, lacking the depth, replayability, and engaging enemy design expected for its price. This contributes to an overall 'unfun dying simulator' experience.
- Overly Aggressive Enemies (weight 0.1): Enemies are consistently described as aggressive, relentless, and fast, often employing quick lunge attacks or accurate ranged abilities. This, combined with respawning enemies, contributes to a frustrating combat experience.
- Full Game Lacks Demo Progress (weight 0.1): Players feel that the full Early Access game offers little significant improvement or new content compared to its demo. This creates a perception that the demo misrepresents the final product's current state and value.
- Missing Language Localization (weight 0.09): The game lacks localization for several languages, specifically Japanese and French, making NPC dialogue and game understanding difficult for non-English speakers. This limits accessibility for a significant portion of the potential player base.

Gameplay feedback:
- Mining, Combat, Extraction Loop (weight 0.3): The game centers around mining and combat in randomly generated caves to collect resources. Players undertake missions with objectives, and upon completion, can extract via a lift, sometimes requiring defending a pod from enemy waves.
- Resource-Based Gear Progression (weight 0.2): Gameplay involves collecting resources from mining and enemies to craft and upgrade armor, tools, and weapons in a hub area. This progression is tied to different tiers of ore, requiring prior tier tools.
- Multi-Layered Dungeon Exploration (weight 0.2): The game features a multi-layered cave system, with at least two distinct layers to explore. Some players found reaching the second layer challenging or felt the overall content was limited to these layers.
- Roguelike Dungeon Crawler (weight 0.19): The game is identified as a top-down roguelike dungeon crawler. It features randomly generated maps and roguelike progression, where players descend into depths and upgrade gear in a hub.
- Full Item Loss on Death (weight 0.16): A significant penalty for dying is the loss of all equipped and collected items. There is no item retrieval upon death, unless an expensive fee is paid to a specific merchant.
- Limited Combat Evasion (weight 0.12): Combat feedback highlights issues with weapon hitboxes, where only the tip of weapons registers hits, and enemies are often knocked back significantly. Players also note a lack of dedicated evasive options, relying on slow movement.
- Grind-Heavy Difficulty Curve (weight 0.09): The game is described as having a slight difficulty curve and being quite grind-heavy. Players cannot easily over-prepare or tank damage, suggesting a challenging progression.
- Scarce Healing Resources (weight 0.06): Healing is primarily dependent on finding specific items like mushrooms and potatoes. These healing items are noted to have a low drop chance, making healing scarce during runs.
- Varied Enemy Attacks (weight 0.05): While some feedback suggests repetitive enemy attacks, more specific points indicate a variety of enemy behaviors, including charging, creating terrain/walls, running away, and big telegraphed attacks.
- Solo Play & Control Options (weight 0.04): The game supports solo play and offers flexibility with control inputs, allowing players to use either a controller or keyboard.

Performance notes:
- Character collision & minor bugs (weight 0.06): Players frequently encountered bugs related to character movement, specifically getting stuck on wall or block corners. Additionally, other minor issues like text not disappearing and music stopping unexpectedly between biomes were noted, impacting overall gameplay flow and immersion.
- World rendering/spawning issues (weight 0.06): Players reported issues with environmental rendering and world generation, such as static objects appearing incorrectly under walls and world borders failing to connect properly, especially when water is present. These bugs affect the visual integrity and seamlessness of the game world.

Recommendations:
- Wait for Further Development (weight 0.6): Many reviewers strongly advise waiting for the game to receive more content, quality-of-life fixes, or reach a more complete state before purchasing. There's a consistent sentiment that the game has significant potential but is not fully realized yet, with players eagerly awaiting future updates and the final release.
- Try Demo Before Purchase (weight 0.43): Reviewers frequently recommend playing the game's demo version first. They highlight that the demo provides a good representation of the full game's current content and experience, enabling players to make an informed buying decision.
- Improve Death Penalty (weight 0.06): Reviewers expressed frustration with the current death penalty, specifically the need to 'grind back' to previous progress and suggested retaining some gear upon death. This indicates a desire for a less punishing progression system.
- Enhance Accessibility Options (weight 0.06): Specific requests were made for improved accessibility features, including proper control over screen shake and the addition of an 'easy mode.' These suggestions aim to make the game more inclusive and reduce frustration for a wider range of players.
- Support Developer Purchase (weight 0.05): Some players explicitly stated they purchased the game to support the developers. This highlights a positive sentiment towards the development team and their ongoing efforts, indicating a community willing to invest in the game's future.
- Consider Purchase on Sale (weight 0.03): One reviewer advised purchasing the game only when it is on sale. This implies that for some players, the current content or state of the game might not justify its full price, making a discounted purchase more appealing.

Other player notes:
- More Content & Variety (weight 0.17): Players desire a significant expansion of game content, including more unique items, varied points of interest, environmental hazards, diverse armor with effects, and additional mini-bosses. There's also a strong desire for more craftable items, equipment, and new areas like Floor 3.
- Anticipation for Updates (weight 0.11): Players are actively looking forward to future updates, expecting significant additions and improvements to the game. There's also eagerness for the modding community to grow and contribute content.
- Game in Early Access (weight 0.1): Reviewers frequently note that the game is clearly in an early alpha or Early Access state, indicating that significant development and content additions are expected over time. This context is important for understanding current limitations.
- Combat Needs Development (weight 0.06): While current combat is considered serviceable, players note that its future quality heavily depends on the introduction of new mobs and their unique attack patterns. This indicates a desire for more depth and variety in combat encounters.
- Missing Key Binding (weight 0.03): A specific usability issue was noted regarding the lack of a key binding to open the inventory bag, requiring players to click an icon instead. This is a minor but specific quality-of-life improvement.
- Direct Layer Access (weight 0.03): Players desire a system that allows them to directly re-enter previously discovered lower layers of the game. This would improve progression and reduce repetitive traversal.

Emotions:
- Disappointment (weight 0.22): Players are disappointed by the game's perceived lack of content, depth, and meaningful progression systems, which makes the gameplay loop feel repetitive and unrewarding. This is exacerbated by infrequent updates and a high price point for what feels like an unfinished or demo-like experience, alongside performance issues and bugs.
- Satisfaction (weight 0.19): Players express satisfaction with the game's core gameplay loop, well-implemented mechanics, and engaging combat. The immersive sound design, appealing art style, and overall polish contribute to a positive experience, often noted as impressive for an Early Access title, along with responsive developers.
- Excitement (weight 0.16): Players feel excitement primarily due to the game's significant potential for future content and development, building on its already enjoyable core mechanics and challenging gameplay. The anticipation is fueled by the promise of future updates and the game's intriguing concept.
- Frustration (weight 0.15): Frustration stems from highly punishing death mechanics, particularly the loss of all gear and progress, which players feel disrespects their time. This is compounded by clunky or unfair combat, frequent bugs, slow or blocked progression, and various quality-of-life issues like poor UI or hitboxes.
- Enjoyment (weight 0.07): Players experience enjoyment from the game's overall fun and engaging gameplay, characterized by a solid core loop, rewarding exploration, and smooth controls. The balanced enemies, pleasant music, and appealing art style further contribute to a positive and enjoyable experience.
- Hope (weight 0.03): Players express hope based on the game's strong underlying potential, anticipating significant future content additions and quality-of-life improvements. This sentiment reflects a trust in the developers' ability to evolve the game.
- Boredom (weight 0.03): Boredom arises from the game's repetitive gameplay loop and a perceived lack of meaningful content or progression paths. This leads to the game quickly feeling stale, especially if the gameplay is also too easy.
- Appreciation (weight 0.03): Players show appreciation for the developers' hard work, passion, and responsiveness to community feedback. This includes acknowledging their efforts in listening to reviews and caring about the user experience.
- Joy (weight 0.02): Joy is experienced due to the overall positive and delightful game experience, stemming from an engaging core concept that resonates well with players.
- Anticipation (weight 0.02): Players express anticipation for the game's ongoing development and the release of future content, indicating a strong desire for more experiences within the game.
- Anger (weight 0.01): Anger arises from critical gameplay issues such as unresponsive controls and inaccurate hitboxes, which lead to unfair deaths. These technical flaws, especially when combined with terrain issues, significantly detract from the player experience.
- Gratitude (weight 0.01): Players express gratitude specifically for the consistent and impactful updates provided by the developers, acknowledging their ongoing efforts to improve the game.
- Nostalgia (weight 0.01): Nostalgia is triggered by the game's mechanics or themes, which remind players of classic sandbox or crafting games like Minecraft's "diggy diggy hole" era or Terraria.
- Mixed feelings (weight 0.01): Players experience mixed feelings primarily due to a perceived imbalance between the game's price point and the amount of content currently available, suggesting it might be overpriced for its current state.
- Familiarity (weight 0.01): Familiarity arises from the game's concept or specific elements, such as equipment, feeling recognizable and intuitive to players, possibly due to similarities with other games.
- Confusion (weight 0.01): Confusion stems from a lack of adequate in-game guidance, leaving players unsure about mechanics, objectives, or how to progress effectively.
- Demotivation (weight 0.01): Players experience demotivation due to the game's severe death penalty, which can lead to significant loss of progress or resources, making continued play feel unrewarding.
- Understanding (weight 0.01): Players express understanding, often a realization, about the nature and expectations of games in the Early Access market, implying an acceptance of their current state or development process.
- Support (weight 0.01): Players express a desire to support the developers, often financially, indicating a belief in their work and a wish to contribute to the game's continued development.
- Fear (weight 0.01): Players experience fear due to the constant threat of dying within the game, suggesting a high-stakes environment or punishing consequences for failure.}