From California-based indie studio, Orc Chop Games comes the turn-based RPG ‘Goblin Stone’. MKAU has been lucky enough to try out this title ahead of its March 12th, 2024, release on all platforms. I love a good RPG, and you can tell Goblin Stone has been a great passion project crafted with a labour of love.

Set in a fantastical land where Goblins are considered weak and disgusting creatures, you are put in control of a group of goblins just trying to live in a world where almost everything wants to see their demise. The game is completely narrated, telling the story of the goblin’s quest for survival.

The game starts off with you playing as a small adventuring party of humans, scouring through some ruins to look for hidden treasure. Whilst learning how to interact with the world around you, you come across a few different enemies to learn about the turn-based combat which is pretty easy to get your head around. Eventually, you attack a group of unsuspecting goblins that are also scavenging the area.

Defeating most of the goblins, a few manage to survive and escape. From here, you are now in control of the surviving goblins, and fight your way back out to the overworld, but not before finding a mysterious Goblin Relic which leads the group straight to a long-lost Goblin Lair.

The Goblin Lair is your home base for the game, with unlockable rooms that serve different purposes. Above the lair is a campground, where you can find new goblins to recruit or sell the spoils of your journeys to collect gold from the friendly merchant. You can also store the resources you collect, such as wood and stone, to upgrade your Lair and the usefulness of the rooms within.

The combat focuses on the position and speed of both parties in battle. Certain attacks can be used to slow down the participants, or buffs can make them stronger or faster with haste, allowing them to attack quicker in the queue. The moves available to you are shuffled and change throughout the battle, comparable to a card game, with 3 different abilities available each turn. Enemies can range from beast creatures to undead zombies, with a boss battle somewhere in the mix, testing the abilities of your party.

The game sports procedurally generated levels throughout 9 narrated chapters across the 3 different regions of its vast map. This allows for a unique experience within each level, even if you decide to replay one to collect any needed resources. Harvestable resources are scattered across the levels which can range from health items or resources needed to upgrade the Goblin Lair. Forks on the roads can lead to different events such as treasure loot, temporary upgrades, abilities, weapons, or just a camp to heal your battle wounds.

With up to 6 goblins in a party at one time, you can carefully craft your party to play to each other strengths, as there are 9 different classes of goblins to utilize. Ranging from unclassed, and trainable Peons, to Shamans, each class has 8 unique unlockable abilities that can be customized and upgraded throughout your travels. Stronger peons can be trained through Guild rooms built in the lair, and any with particularly helpful traits can be bred in the warrens to unlock new traits and make your party stronger.

Death to a Goblin is permanent, but that’s okay. When a goblin dies you collect a soul which can be used to further upgrade your base, and during the next turn of the surviving goblins, that attack stronger out of their own fury. You’re never short on goblins, with the campground always having new recruits available.

The art style is cute and has a cartoonish charm to it, but you can see the budget limitations of this game. When a fork in the road is discovered for instance, sometimes the camera will zoom in making it glaringly obvious the Goblins are independent sprites against the 2D background. It can look a little weird sometimes, but the sound design makes up for this. The narration is engaging and tells the story in a way that could put you to sleep if it was told to you at bedtime.

Coupled with the wood flute background loop and small noises like bags being pulled open or the rustling of bushes as you collect berries for health, really makes for a cozy feeling to the game and complements the graphics when they’re not doing anything noticeable.

Overall, I really enjoyed playing Goblin Stone. The premise is cute, putting yourself in the shoes of a group of goblins you would usually consider to be a nuisance. It almost makes me feel bad for how I treat them in other RPGs I’ve played. The generated levels help with the game not feeling repetitive and stale, and upgrading the Goblin Lair feels rewarding when the resources you need can be a bit scant. I can see the passion that has gone into creating Goblin Stone, and the potential it has for any future development.

Written by: Emily France