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/