Reviews View More
Guys complaining about Hotline Miami 2 when a real enemies killing you off screen is right here
A side scrolling action adventure mood piece about a hitman in the 1970s. The developer's previous game The friends of Ringo Ishikawa dealt with Japanese Yankii culture and a lead with friends and events to interact with and at times and still at a point where there could have been a chance for his future to lead him in a different direction than the gang brawls he is drawn into as his friends begin to abandon that lifestyle through misfortune or wanting something better. The protagonist here begins as a man who has nothing and no longer cares for anything except for the time when he is doing a job that briefly pulls him away from the meaninglessness of his life. In between jobs you spend your time wandering through a lonely city with the only abilities being to take out and light a cigarette, put on sunglasses, wander the town, visit a lover who is never shown spoken to or doing anything to change the music or atmosphere presented, or to buy a drink, cigarettes, a new coat, and sleeping pills. There are no friends to interact with, books to read, new fighting moves to learn, or teachers attempting to make you work towards a different life for yourself all you have is the wait until your next job, just lying on your bed staring at the ceiling watching the smoke come out of the cigarette until there is nothing left of it.
Each job begins with you and your target, seemingly someone in a position of power, before you raise your gun and shoot them then work your way to the exit of the areas or to your escape vehicle. In your paths are never-ending waves of enemies coming from both sides. You maintain your slow movement pace but can rapidly shift your aim in front, behind, or on both sides of you as you continue to push your way forward as the action becomes a slower moving John Woo film. You can walk forward while firing your gun or guns at a slower rate, hold up to remain still but fire your guns much faster, or crouch down to prioritize enemies that are currently aiming at you. You start with a pistol and when you need more ammo your only way to get more is to break the arm of a nearby enemy before taking their gun, doing this can get you a pistol, a second pistol, or a shotgun that can hit multiple enemies at once. Some enemies will rush towards you being the ones you want to leave alive to disarm while others will draw their pistol or shotgun sooner and will remain station to aim or slowly walk towards you while aiming, enemies with rifles that try to aim and shoot shortly after appearing at each end of the screen are also frequent threats. There is no health bar or indicator of remaining ammo and while every shot you fire will kill an enemy that may or may not be true for them.
When a job ends it's back to a life of nothing. Only brief conversations with the man who gives you your assignments over time revealing that they both consider that they aren't living life how they thought would or ever want to, that there is nothing but the work, and what they will do once there are no more jobs left to take.
The developer keeps a somber atmosphere outside of the moments of actions while also giving a well detailed city environment and an excellent and mood fitting music. When fighting starts it is a simple but fun and fast and while your movements are limited there is a variety of ways that you maneuver your gun and arms while aiming that reminds of a variety of action film shootouts.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCFVVd0MRWc&ab_channel=Legolas_Katarn
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1740050010077831666
Each job begins with you and your target, seemingly someone in a position of power, before you raise your gun and shoot them then work your way to the exit of the areas or to your escape vehicle. In your paths are never-ending waves of enemies coming from both sides. You maintain your slow movement pace but can rapidly shift your aim in front, behind, or on both sides of you as you continue to push your way forward as the action becomes a slower moving John Woo film. You can walk forward while firing your gun or guns at a slower rate, hold up to remain still but fire your guns much faster, or crouch down to prioritize enemies that are currently aiming at you. You start with a pistol and when you need more ammo your only way to get more is to break the arm of a nearby enemy before taking their gun, doing this can get you a pistol, a second pistol, or a shotgun that can hit multiple enemies at once. Some enemies will rush towards you being the ones you want to leave alive to disarm while others will draw their pistol or shotgun sooner and will remain station to aim or slowly walk towards you while aiming, enemies with rifles that try to aim and shoot shortly after appearing at each end of the screen are also frequent threats. There is no health bar or indicator of remaining ammo and while every shot you fire will kill an enemy that may or may not be true for them.
When a job ends it's back to a life of nothing. Only brief conversations with the man who gives you your assignments over time revealing that they both consider that they aren't living life how they thought would or ever want to, that there is nothing but the work, and what they will do once there are no more jobs left to take.
The developer keeps a somber atmosphere outside of the moments of actions while also giving a well detailed city environment and an excellent and mood fitting music. When fighting starts it is a simple but fun and fast and while your movements are limited there is a variety of ways that you maneuver your gun and arms while aiming that reminds of a variety of action film shootouts.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCFVVd0MRWc&ab_channel=Legolas_Katarn
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1740050010077831666
This review contains spoilers
Arrest of a Stone Buddha is a side scroller "lonely hitman" simulator developed by yeo, whose previous game before this was The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa. I’m not sure what the dev time was like on this game per say; however, my history with the game came from seeing it on a buddy's wishlist around Christmas in 2020. I didn’t know who yeo was before this, nor his other games in development. Influenced by the likes of French New Wave (Jean-Pierre Melville and Louis Malle) and Hong Kong Action (John Woo), I was heavily intrigued and wanted to try it; and with my birthday recently coming around my buddy Regent got me copies of this title and Ringo, so I decided to give this game a run and I have my thoughts.
The plot is a minimalist one: you play as a French hitman whose name is unknown as goes through the motions killing people and escaping. From here, it delves into conversations with his employer where they small talk life, after which you roam the streets of France wasting time before the next job, rinse and repeat over a month's time. I’m about to go “pretentious movie critic” here but between the emptiness/monotony of the open world segments, the lack of dialogue, the insomniac hitman; it’s just a journey of someone who's depressed with no direction in life, who doesn’t feel alive unless he’s on a job. In between jobs the guy just watches movies, gets clothes, drinks, picks up meds and visits his girlfriend and/or the museum. Even with a high octane life he has nothing, so the question is this: What is the purpose? Is there any? For this guy it’s just trying to distract himself, though eventually it comes to a close in the final scene, where you’re forced to hold a gun to your head and you have one or two choices: Pull the trigger or don’t. I didn’t and it ended with the hitman sobbing, living another day but what his life is after that is unknown.
While I’m sure a lot of art film fans will get a kick out of the post-modern display of being a miserable hitman, watching as time wastes away and only getting a kick out of jobs, the actual gunplay itself can be a miserable kick in the teeth. See the whole concept revolves around moving in one direction as goons with guns attempt to approach you and kill you. You walk at a slow pace, almost nonchalant and uncaring, as you let off rounds that take dudes down coming at you at max speed. What happens if you run out of bullets though? Do you pick guns up off the ground? No, you have to disarm them. See the combat feels like a randomized rogue-like puzzle of sorts: each run is randomized so sometimes they’ll get really close and sometimes they’ll hang back a bit as you slowly walk towards them and pray to god you don’t die trying to disarm them. Enemy spawns are random so don’t expect to master the game as much as flow with it and you have to both balance the amount of shots you have, the potential distance that they’ll get to you, and when they’re going to fire from both directions. The only real movements you can make in combat are to move left, right, duck, disarm and shoot. I had used the controller (with RB to hold up the gun, X to shoot, Y to Disarm as your main controls other than thumbsticks and the pause/select buttons) as the keyboard setup didn’t jive with me as much.
Most importantly, you’ll need quick reaction times. This is easier said than done balancing all of this PLUS your personal animations. Sometimes you’ll smoothly double tap everyone and it feels slick, while sometimes I’ve noticed instead of moving left or right that I’d get stuck mid-animation (you can do the arm cross shooting from action movies) instead of moving straight in a direction that I could never really react fast enough to disarm certain enemies and this would cost me time and I’d get shot. The game also has some glitches and/or hang ups that I didn’t appreciate in the slightest: when I was on the last level of the Yacht job, I had enemies who wouldn’t spawn into the map and would just hang out behind the invisible wall at the very beginning or very end of the level. If you had killed everyone before leaving except this guy AND had run out of ammo, it’s a guaranteed basic restart. A much more rare problem was that sometimes when I had brought a shotgun to the next screen, the game wouldn’t let me hold it up and shoot it while other times it did which isn’t a huge problem because I can disarm others but it was kind of annoying.
Overall keep in mind, YOU WILL DIE in this game and every difficulty should be considered hard. The three enemy types (and the only ones) you’ll be facing are the pistol goons, the shotgun goons and the rifle goons; the pistol and shotgun are the only weapons you’ll get as the rifle ones stay as far away from you as humanly possible and will always move away. I’d complain and say I’d like more weapon variation, but with how the game operates (such as enemies for 98% of the time waiting a bit before firing at you), the last thing I need is a machine gun or something high powered to kill me instantly. In its base form while difficult, it was also honestly kind of addicting to go for run after run even with hangups.
The Art Direction/Sound Direction follows along with the plot nicely. Graphically it’s an 8-bit sidescroller, but the atmosphere surrounding it is astounding. Reflecting off of the depressing nature of the hits, you’ll mostly see grays and washed out colors during your times roaming in France while on the jobs you’ll see a lot more colors and environmental variation which fits into the “I only feel alive killing people” mini-narrative they have going on. These backgrounds by Artem “Wedmak2” Belov go hard with the set dressing, with my favorite of them all being the autumn forest near the end of the game as something I would just get lost in.
The sound design is solid as well; there isn’t much in the way of it however. The gun sounds from the pistol and shotgun are impactful and sound phenomenal, straight out of an action movie almost with how powerful it is while the rifle sounds irritating, which really formulates how both afraid I was and how frustrating it gets during gameplay as well. As for the soundtrack: the soundtrack is done by a guy named “danny spider solitaire” mixed in with some royalty free tracks (both links below) and they just slap and REALLY solidify the experience between cool action music and really melancholy acoustic singing that I enjoyed heavily. To finalize the sound design, there’s no voice acting so don’t go in expecting it.
Arrest of a Stone Buddha for me was one of those fascinating titles that held (and still has) a strange grip on me, that I wanted to try one day but hadn’t bothered til' now. Playing through the game, my time ranged from “dude this feels sweet” to “Just shoot me now”. Truth is, out of 6 achievements I had only gotten two; one for beating the first level and one for getting one of the endings. Other achievements apparently consist of playing on hard and insane difficulty, which I WILL NOT do for a very long time if ever. I don’t know if I would play this again, nor do I know if I could recommend it to most people with the sheer difficulty. I would maybe recommend it under the guise that you have A LOT of patience for both the empty world and the game mechanics. This is the definition of an art film in video game format; anyone else I would say kind of steer clear from the title. This is the definition of an art film in video game format; anyone else I would say kind of steer clear from the title. The developer would go on from this game to create Fading Afternoon, which released in September and and has to do with an aging Yakuza that I would love to give a try one day.
Links:
https://www.jamendo.com/playlist/500476262/arrest-of-a-stone-buddha
https://spidersolitaire.bandcamp.com/album/arrest-of-a-stone-buddha
https://twitter.com/shin_yeo
http://by-yeo.ru/c
From Steam Reviews: https://steamcommunity.com/id/gamemast15r/recommended/
The plot is a minimalist one: you play as a French hitman whose name is unknown as goes through the motions killing people and escaping. From here, it delves into conversations with his employer where they small talk life, after which you roam the streets of France wasting time before the next job, rinse and repeat over a month's time. I’m about to go “pretentious movie critic” here but between the emptiness/monotony of the open world segments, the lack of dialogue, the insomniac hitman; it’s just a journey of someone who's depressed with no direction in life, who doesn’t feel alive unless he’s on a job. In between jobs the guy just watches movies, gets clothes, drinks, picks up meds and visits his girlfriend and/or the museum. Even with a high octane life he has nothing, so the question is this: What is the purpose? Is there any? For this guy it’s just trying to distract himself, though eventually it comes to a close in the final scene, where you’re forced to hold a gun to your head and you have one or two choices: Pull the trigger or don’t. I didn’t and it ended with the hitman sobbing, living another day but what his life is after that is unknown.
While I’m sure a lot of art film fans will get a kick out of the post-modern display of being a miserable hitman, watching as time wastes away and only getting a kick out of jobs, the actual gunplay itself can be a miserable kick in the teeth. See the whole concept revolves around moving in one direction as goons with guns attempt to approach you and kill you. You walk at a slow pace, almost nonchalant and uncaring, as you let off rounds that take dudes down coming at you at max speed. What happens if you run out of bullets though? Do you pick guns up off the ground? No, you have to disarm them. See the combat feels like a randomized rogue-like puzzle of sorts: each run is randomized so sometimes they’ll get really close and sometimes they’ll hang back a bit as you slowly walk towards them and pray to god you don’t die trying to disarm them. Enemy spawns are random so don’t expect to master the game as much as flow with it and you have to both balance the amount of shots you have, the potential distance that they’ll get to you, and when they’re going to fire from both directions. The only real movements you can make in combat are to move left, right, duck, disarm and shoot. I had used the controller (with RB to hold up the gun, X to shoot, Y to Disarm as your main controls other than thumbsticks and the pause/select buttons) as the keyboard setup didn’t jive with me as much.
Most importantly, you’ll need quick reaction times. This is easier said than done balancing all of this PLUS your personal animations. Sometimes you’ll smoothly double tap everyone and it feels slick, while sometimes I’ve noticed instead of moving left or right that I’d get stuck mid-animation (you can do the arm cross shooting from action movies) instead of moving straight in a direction that I could never really react fast enough to disarm certain enemies and this would cost me time and I’d get shot. The game also has some glitches and/or hang ups that I didn’t appreciate in the slightest: when I was on the last level of the Yacht job, I had enemies who wouldn’t spawn into the map and would just hang out behind the invisible wall at the very beginning or very end of the level. If you had killed everyone before leaving except this guy AND had run out of ammo, it’s a guaranteed basic restart. A much more rare problem was that sometimes when I had brought a shotgun to the next screen, the game wouldn’t let me hold it up and shoot it while other times it did which isn’t a huge problem because I can disarm others but it was kind of annoying.
Overall keep in mind, YOU WILL DIE in this game and every difficulty should be considered hard. The three enemy types (and the only ones) you’ll be facing are the pistol goons, the shotgun goons and the rifle goons; the pistol and shotgun are the only weapons you’ll get as the rifle ones stay as far away from you as humanly possible and will always move away. I’d complain and say I’d like more weapon variation, but with how the game operates (such as enemies for 98% of the time waiting a bit before firing at you), the last thing I need is a machine gun or something high powered to kill me instantly. In its base form while difficult, it was also honestly kind of addicting to go for run after run even with hangups.
The Art Direction/Sound Direction follows along with the plot nicely. Graphically it’s an 8-bit sidescroller, but the atmosphere surrounding it is astounding. Reflecting off of the depressing nature of the hits, you’ll mostly see grays and washed out colors during your times roaming in France while on the jobs you’ll see a lot more colors and environmental variation which fits into the “I only feel alive killing people” mini-narrative they have going on. These backgrounds by Artem “Wedmak2” Belov go hard with the set dressing, with my favorite of them all being the autumn forest near the end of the game as something I would just get lost in.
The sound design is solid as well; there isn’t much in the way of it however. The gun sounds from the pistol and shotgun are impactful and sound phenomenal, straight out of an action movie almost with how powerful it is while the rifle sounds irritating, which really formulates how both afraid I was and how frustrating it gets during gameplay as well. As for the soundtrack: the soundtrack is done by a guy named “danny spider solitaire” mixed in with some royalty free tracks (both links below) and they just slap and REALLY solidify the experience between cool action music and really melancholy acoustic singing that I enjoyed heavily. To finalize the sound design, there’s no voice acting so don’t go in expecting it.
Arrest of a Stone Buddha for me was one of those fascinating titles that held (and still has) a strange grip on me, that I wanted to try one day but hadn’t bothered til' now. Playing through the game, my time ranged from “dude this feels sweet” to “Just shoot me now”. Truth is, out of 6 achievements I had only gotten two; one for beating the first level and one for getting one of the endings. Other achievements apparently consist of playing on hard and insane difficulty, which I WILL NOT do for a very long time if ever. I don’t know if I would play this again, nor do I know if I could recommend it to most people with the sheer difficulty. I would maybe recommend it under the guise that you have A LOT of patience for both the empty world and the game mechanics. This is the definition of an art film in video game format; anyone else I would say kind of steer clear from the title. This is the definition of an art film in video game format; anyone else I would say kind of steer clear from the title. The developer would go on from this game to create Fading Afternoon, which released in September and and has to do with an aging Yakuza that I would love to give a try one day.
Links:
https://www.jamendo.com/playlist/500476262/arrest-of-a-stone-buddha
https://spidersolitaire.bandcamp.com/album/arrest-of-a-stone-buddha
https://twitter.com/shin_yeo
http://by-yeo.ru/c
From Steam Reviews: https://steamcommunity.com/id/gamemast15r/recommended/
When it comes to atmosphere, this is just as good as yeo's previous game. However unlike Ringo's adventures, it suffers from a lot of problem.The game is really devoid of content and I find it hard to justify its price. Where Ringo had a lot of things to explore in town, it'll take you maybe 20min to see everything this game has to offer. There's really nothing much to explore. You can't talk to anyone but one character and all the dialogue with that guy never ends up making sense.Ringo allowed you to interact with characters and do activies, while still being a very depressive game where you felt emptiness in a similar manner. AoSB feels like a huge downgrade : smaller world, literally nothing to do in it except try to get to the evening. Perhaps this is the feeling the dev wanted to make you feel, how to waste away your days and the protagonist's despair? But I feel like we could still have had more to do or at least more places to explore, to just look at. The city feels way too dead and empty. The game could have been shorter to justify the lack of anything to do. You don't need to do 3 hours of this nothing.The other gameplay part is a side scrolling shooter which is quite fun and has an interesting "lucky hit" mechanic where you die in one shot, but only if a bullet randomly manages to hit you. Unfortunately it feels extremely unfair, I've been shot close to the end of the level so many time that I'm pretty sure there's something unnatural about it. Also there are enemies outside the screen AND the entire map that can shoot at you, in some levels they'll even spawn right at the beginning and you won't realize they're there until it's too late.I liked the game overall but it's even more frustrating than it should have been.
Started, thinking this was a worse No More Heroes.
Finished, thinking this is a better No More Heroes.
Finished, thinking this is a better No More Heroes.
https://i.gyazo.com/76525f4af06a9a6194b6128055fe48d8.png
yeo's environmental design, soundtrack direction, and laissez-faire approach to 'structure' elevates the somber and dour proceedings here and the title's very much so animated by its refusal to guide the player in any strict sense. it's commendable how driven yeo is towards theme and feeling and the world has just enough in the way of flourishes to stimulate a sense of role-playing but too little to fully and succinctly become immersed in; yeo does well to play with this disconnect, causing the complete and utter listlessness of the game to swell and swell and continue to swell prior to the game's climax (if you could call it that) on a frigid november day
on the other hand...there's a dearth of particulars here for me to really feel invested in or compelled by. backtracking here: ringo ishikawa's ultimate success lies in a delicate marriage between the formal & aesthetic language of a kunio-kun game, and the - you'll have to forgive the reductive if undemanding comparison - exploratory, life-sim mechanics of something like shenmue. and the idea's so obvious, so axiomatic even in the kunio-kun games that ringo does little to iterate upon that idea, with certain environmental backgrounds and even mechanics feeling directly lifted from its NES progenitor. thrusting the lifesim framework to the forefront, then, is the most transformative quality of ringo and it achieves this by inviting players to test the boundaries of the world and create their own sense of meaning within that structure - that ringo obscures how tightly directed the game actually is only serves to further entrench just how well-considered and intelligent its design is as well. the game is also underscored by honest-to-god literary ambition which all eventually coalesces into an absolutely devastating ending but whatever i digress
point is, stone buddha...bit less going for it. it's a mood piece first and foremost - which, to its credit, its executes with total conviction and belief in the premise - but everything that you'd expect a game which probes into ennui would have is here, which honestly does it no favours. a lack of concrete narrative + good deal of economical prose invites some lovely interpretations, but you can see this specific ending coming a mile away and there's just too little that's actually transformative about it to really have the same sense of emotional resonance
sounds like im ragging but it's still a great time. unpolished sections and inelegant difficulty curve, sure, but it doesn't overstay its welcome and yeo's willingness to eschew conventional game design continues to delight. there's a lot to love about how the mechanics inform the atmosphere and how you eventually build an innate and instinctual feeling for exactly what you're supposed to do (and i particularly did enjoy how rote it felt when finally mastered - that contrast between what's supposed to be kinetic and improvisational versus the reality that you're a slowly advancing turret) but im also unconvinced that that part of the game was supposed to be intentionally monotonous like everyone says or whatever which does make me feel a bit of internal conflict. id bet my apartment on yeo designing the combat with a bottle of beluga going like 'yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa'. good for him
yeo's environmental design, soundtrack direction, and laissez-faire approach to 'structure' elevates the somber and dour proceedings here and the title's very much so animated by its refusal to guide the player in any strict sense. it's commendable how driven yeo is towards theme and feeling and the world has just enough in the way of flourishes to stimulate a sense of role-playing but too little to fully and succinctly become immersed in; yeo does well to play with this disconnect, causing the complete and utter listlessness of the game to swell and swell and continue to swell prior to the game's climax (if you could call it that) on a frigid november day
on the other hand...there's a dearth of particulars here for me to really feel invested in or compelled by. backtracking here: ringo ishikawa's ultimate success lies in a delicate marriage between the formal & aesthetic language of a kunio-kun game, and the - you'll have to forgive the reductive if undemanding comparison - exploratory, life-sim mechanics of something like shenmue. and the idea's so obvious, so axiomatic even in the kunio-kun games that ringo does little to iterate upon that idea, with certain environmental backgrounds and even mechanics feeling directly lifted from its NES progenitor. thrusting the lifesim framework to the forefront, then, is the most transformative quality of ringo and it achieves this by inviting players to test the boundaries of the world and create their own sense of meaning within that structure - that ringo obscures how tightly directed the game actually is only serves to further entrench just how well-considered and intelligent its design is as well. the game is also underscored by honest-to-god literary ambition which all eventually coalesces into an absolutely devastating ending but whatever i digress
point is, stone buddha...bit less going for it. it's a mood piece first and foremost - which, to its credit, its executes with total conviction and belief in the premise - but everything that you'd expect a game which probes into ennui would have is here, which honestly does it no favours. a lack of concrete narrative + good deal of economical prose invites some lovely interpretations, but you can see this specific ending coming a mile away and there's just too little that's actually transformative about it to really have the same sense of emotional resonance
sounds like im ragging but it's still a great time. unpolished sections and inelegant difficulty curve, sure, but it doesn't overstay its welcome and yeo's willingness to eschew conventional game design continues to delight. there's a lot to love about how the mechanics inform the atmosphere and how you eventually build an innate and instinctual feeling for exactly what you're supposed to do (and i particularly did enjoy how rote it felt when finally mastered - that contrast between what's supposed to be kinetic and improvisational versus the reality that you're a slowly advancing turret) but im also unconvinced that that part of the game was supposed to be intentionally monotonous like everyone says or whatever which does make me feel a bit of internal conflict. id bet my apartment on yeo designing the combat with a bottle of beluga going like 'yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa'. good for him