A Rock's Tale

With strong and amusing writing, an interesting cast of characters, along with plenty of charm and whimsical humor, A Rock's Tale was certainly fun to play.

Well, you're a rock. Along the way, plenty of people will stop by. You can choose to say nothing, like a real rock would, or engage in some funny conversation. Lots of these people have all sorts of different problems, and along the way, you'll find out that some of these problems are interconnected as you try to solve them.

Still, all that glitters is not gold. There will also be times where you might presume a connection and try to solve someone's problems, only to realize that you misunderstood the situation and everything is now backfiring spectacularly. Plus, some folks here just seem irredeemably lazy when you try to get them to help another.

There are no complex stat systems here. What really stood out for me was the dialogue and writing.

There are twenty endings, and I unlocked about six before I started writing this review. Nevertheless, the game was really fun to read. Even if you don't finish it, there is also plenty of fun in a partial playthrough.

I feel like I should have a clever and witty when reviewing a game like this, where you're a talking rock who just sits there and talks to people in a forest as they go by. Alas, I don't. Alas, I do not, so I will go with the mechanics. They are straightforward enough, and the game's engaging that you never really worry about how a rock can talk in the first place, or whether you, if given a choice, would be able to walk or talk, but not both. Based on this effort, though, I'd play a game by this author that featured a mute rock-monster running about a forest.

You first have to wait for random people to come by. The main hub choice has this, as well as seven dark "you cannot call this character" links. These links become clickable once you hit it off with people who stop by. You can even be a bit of a jerk, too, saying "Sounds pretty boring, not gonna lie." As someone who loathes "not gonna lie," because it implies the speaker lies a lot, I found this well-used. (You get a chance to apologize afterwards. The game lives up to its "heartwarming" promise on the blurb.)

Whom you see is all pretty random, though you start off with a miner who doesn't have much to say. Interacting (in)correctly with them offers up the possibility of two of twenty endings, with basic actions. The ending list is cute. You can ask for hints, and I went to them early, even though I was enjoying the story. The people's lives intertwine if you make certain choices, though there are also some fun interludes. There's a king who asks you to kneel, but you're a rock. There's a sentient stump, too, and a running gag about cats and dogs that worked for me.

At least half of the endings are pretty straightforward or can be stumbled onto by accident or by clicking through sensibly. There's a bard who forgot a song they composed, but someone else remembers the words even though they didn't want to. Two characters have a crush on one character, who has a crush back on one of them. A circus ringleader, and the circus freak she fired, stop by, too. There's a sad kid who calls you "Rockinator" once you befriend him, and a lazy cobbler, too. Bringing them together correctly or incorrectly gets you different endings.

As does failing and disappointing them. Some of these endings are very funny, but I spun out on the hints after fifteen or so. You see, some conversations block certain endings, so you have to restart the game. This allows for interesting strategy, although it would be nice to have something in the hints saying a certain ending was not achievable. or the option to list it as such.They all make sense on their own. For instance, in the love triangle, if A and B are together, the game rejects you trying to tell C "tell A about your crush," unless you click RESTART, which means you need to find everyone again. So it sort of forces you to know and not know that A and B would be happy together. Schrodinger's Rock. And it's emotionally hard to do this after helping other people figure things out.

(This criticism may not apply to future versions. The author mentioned in the subforum they wanted to fix this.) Having to restart to wipe all the links to call people is more than an inconvenience. You have to wait for them to come by again. You'll face the miner, whom you can't do much with, dropping by a lot. There will always be one person straggling, due to coupon problem-like randomness. Hopefully you won't need them if you replay through, though from my own experience, ignoring certain people walking by didn't stop them from dropping by soon after (If it does, author, let me know! But it might help soften any bad RNG.) It would be nice for the reader to have the option to zone people out if you were totally done with them, but that's nontrivial coding.

So there is a small damper for completionists on the quick fun you can just enjoy, since the characters you meet are likeable. Especially since there is no direct indication you (likely) need to restart to get all endings. But that's my biggest complaint. Also the endings sprawl a bit, so non-spoiler guidance might be nice. But it's tricky. Still, it's something you'll want to do, because the fuzzy text at the bottom made me REALLY want to see who the last guest was. And when I look back on my time as a rock, it's much easier to focus on that. I wound up poking through longer than I expected after getting the Big Good Great Ending. And I sort of missed the people I'd encountered, even the miner who showed up too much.

There’s a subgenre of Japanese portal fantasy/isekai in which the main character finds themself in a fantasy world transformed into some sort of non-human being. This started out reasonably enough with monsters and animals, but in the endless pursuit of novelty in a rather crowded genre, somewhere along the way it got weird, and now we have series like Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon (no, I’m not making this up). The focus is often on how the MC circumvents their limitations or even manages to turn them around into advantages, inevitably becoming super powerful and probably impressing some cute girls.

This tale of waking up in a fantasy world as a rock seems like it would fit right in—except that instead of unlikely power-leveling, you solve everyone’s problems with plain old social skills. (It is possible that the PC being a rock makes people more likely to open up, though—it seems safer as they’re not a humanoid creature and don’t live in the town, perhaps?) Also, while there are cute girls, they’re more interested in (Spoiler - click to show)each other than in the PC, which is refreshing to see. (One of them is a tough woman who secretly loves cute things, which is a classic anime character beat, but I like it better in this context.)

The main substance of the gameplay has two parts: one is successfully navigating conversations with characters, and the other is figuring out which characters to talk to in which order so as to nudge people towards those who might be able to help them. The latter worked nicely; the former was mostly good, but there were times when the conversation options were fairly similar and I couldn’t tell if there was a meaningful difference and if so, what it was.

The game also has a lot of endings, and the way they're presented as unlockable achievements on the final screen gives the impression of this being an "ending chase" game in the vein of Insomnia; I've since learned it's not meant to be, but as we players are easily led astray by "here's a list of things to unlock", I feel compelled to note that actually chasing those endings winds up feeling unrewarding because they're somewhat repetitive. They can have amusing moments (I think the one where you get thrown in a lake is my favorite, even if it’s mostly kind of an expanded version of the “forgetting you’re a rock” joke that gets made in a number of other contexts), but the majority of the non-ideal endings are “someone takes you somewhere and you just have to sit there because you’re a rock”.

A related issue is that there is, as far as I can tell, exactly one non-ideal ending that you actually need to see to make progress, so you have a bit of a “doing X is not useful except in the one case where it’s essential” problem.

These hiccups aside, though, it’s a charming game with cute characters and most of its structural choices are solid, and I had fun playing it.