Stonemachia makes each chess piece a different way to fight

You play Zefiro, a pawn, on a Dantesque journey through Medhelan — a land ravaged by the Plague of Angels. What is hunting you there is not a bestiary of monsters but armies of angels: statues and objects lifted from Italian art and folklore, given legs and sent after you. The goal at the end of it is to return to Heaven, and the route is a dark action-adventure with soulslike elements.

The verb is transformation. Zefiro is a pawn who can turn into the other chess pieces, and the game hands those over as armour — a set of forms with their own abilities, discovered and unlocked as you go rather than picked off a menu at the start. That is a different promise from an upgrade tree. An upgrade makes the same character stronger. A transformation replaces the character and asks you to learn it again.

Chess is a good place to take that idea from, because a chess piece is defined entirely by how it is allowed to move. A rook is not a stronger pawn, it is a different rule. So the moment a game calls one form a knight and another a bishop, it has promised the two will play differently, not that one hits harder. Whether Stonemachia keeps that promise is the whole question, and it is a more interesting question than most action games set themselves.

The developer also singles out the shield, saying it can genuinely change the outcome of every encounter. In a soulslike that is not a claim about a stat, it is a claim about timing — defence as something you commit to in a moment, with a price for being early or late, rather than a number quietly subtracting damage while you hold a button down.

Shovel Knight’s signature moves is the closest reference. It argues that a single signature verb can carry an entire game, and that swapping that verb between characters changes everything downstream — the routes, the difficulty, what the same room even means. Stonemachia is making that bet several times over, once per armour, and the failure it describes is exactly the one to watch for: forms that look distinct on the unlock screen and collapse into the same fight in practice.

What makes a good combat system covers the other half. Its argument is that combat stays interesting only while it keeps asking questions — where to stand, who to hit first, which move fits this moment, when to commit, and how to answer the attack coming back at you. A transformation system is a way of adding one more question above all of those: not just which move, but which piece should be fighting this at all. The shield sits squarely on the last one.

What’s the point of hard games, anyway? is worth reading against the soulslike label, because it takes difficulty apart into separate tools instead of one dial. A game that can hand you several bodies has unusual leverage there. It can make a fight hard because you brought the wrong form, which is a legible mistake you can go away and fix, rather than hard because the numbers are large, which is a wall you can only grind at.

Stonemachia is by Crossfall Games, self-published, out now on Windows — it released on 26 May, 2026 — filed under Action, Adventure and Indie. It is single-player, with Steam achievements and full controller support, and the store page recommends a gamepad.

The setting is the part that is hardest to fake and easiest to underrate. Building an enemy roster out of Italian statuary and folklore gives the artists a rule to follow instead of a mood board, and a rule is what stops a dark fantasy world turning into the same grey ruins everyone else ships. Angels made of stone are also a convenient answer to a hard animation problem: a thing that moves like a statue is allowed to move strangely.

If the appeal is a soulslike that plays with what your position in the world means, Stray Dog is the other one on this list. It comes at the same idea from the opposite end — Stonemachia starts you as the weakest piece on the board and lets you become the rest of them, while Stray Dog makes you a nameless hound and refuses to promote you at all.