Bone Idol: A Game of Bones

Bone Idol

Written Review

I streamed this game for this review. The link will be below.

Bone Idol is the rare Halloween game, the much celebrated, yet still a holiday lacking good games for it. Overall, this game surpassed my expectations; going off the screenshots I figured it was pretty standard, low-effort indie RPG game, but turning out to be quite the joy to experience.

The game begins with a black screen, again, setting expectations that this will be a typical indie RPG. However, the writing itself is quite captivating and is clearly the strongest part of the game.

The story is about the fact that you are dead, but have decided to resist dying, and thanks to the Halloween curse, you get to rise from the grave once again. This is already quite the enjoyable premise on its own; no magic elemental crystals holding the kingdoms in balance, no dark lord acting up, no "rich lore that no one is going to care about but I am going to spend 10 hours telling you about why Barfizal The Great fought in the Bilebut war when all the nations were fighting each other because the Not-Tolkien Elves were too in tune with nature or something"; no, there is actually a genuinely interesting concept here.

It is a little bit heavy on text, overall, but it's paced out well enough that the player will be diving into the action in no time (see above rich lore dump).

The game is informative about what to do and where to go, without being condescending to the player's intelligence; briefly telling the player where to go (and providing a few hints along the way) but never interrupting your free exploration to go and do whatever you want.

From my brief time playing this game, the combat doesn't seem particularly exceptional, but props still need to be given to the fact that enemies are animated and do have a few surprising unique behaviors.

There is some minor back-tracking, but again, this is tastefully done and doesn't condescend the player's intelligence.

It seems like Bone Idol set out with a goal, and the dev knew exactly how to execute it without unnecessary bloat and comprehension of what makes a game fun.

If I had any advice to give the dev is that this game really deserves better effort put into its marketing; the store page, screen shots and (first half) of the trailer really don't sell people on what makes this game so great. I imagine if this game refined its marketing material and was placed on Steam for $10, it may very well do pretty well for itself.

Finally, the game lacks some necessary modern accessibility options such as rebindable keys. At the very least, I would hope for an option to let me toggle between the old skool arrow keys and the more modern WASD layout (though ideally, full rebindability would be preferred).

If you'd like to watch my experience with the game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing.