Time Stone

Wizards are usually portrayed as pretty edgy people, especially if they also happen to be old. Hence, most of them are pictured as cranky old men who are hesitant to teach others about their powers, yet they are always eager to show off their own talents and be heroes when the situation requires it. Granted, there are exceptions as well, especially if you played enough fantasy games.

Time Stone is a retro point & click adventure game in which you play the role of a young student trying to learn from a wizard how to brew potions and toy with various other magic spells. The game is designed to come as close to the old classics as possible, especially when it comes to humor, graphics and the way you have to approach the puzzles in order to solve them.

As such, you play as a young girl arriving at her teacher’s lab to learn about potions. When you step through the door, you see the professor tied to a chair in the middle of the room. As it turns out, an evil warlock is about to take him hostage in order to obtain something from him: the Time Stone. When the warlock returns and catches the girl in the lab, he seals the exit with a powerful hex spell and leaves her to starve.

Naturally, your goal is to find a way to break the spell and get out before you starve to death, and maybe even find a way to rescue the professor from the claws of that evil warlock. There’s only one scene to explore and examine, which means that the experience is very short, but at least it’s very well written and designed. There’s genuine humor in the dialog and the way the characters interact with each other, which is more than can be said about many triple-A productions out there.

As for the gameplay mechanics, it’s all about clicking on everything until you find something useful. After that, the next logical step is to try and combine the useful items with something else. It may sound boring, but you also get to have a conversation with a dragon in the meantime, so it’s definitely more fun than it sounds. On top of that, the graphics may be basic, but they have the power to trigger your nostalgia, at least if you were around for the classics back in the day.

In the end, it’s quite the bummer that Time Stone is so short, because it’s clear that there’s potential here, especially when it comes to the writing and the dialog. The puzzles are not particularly brilliant, but even those can be improved with a bit of effort and dedication.