PC (Microsoft Windows)2023

Below the Stone

Below the Stone is a pixel-art roguelike about dwarves on the quest for the deepest depths. A place where each and every descent will lead to new adventures -- and where only the most determined dwarves with many lost lives will be rewarded by the hidden world lying below the stone.

Storyline

Discover the lore of dwarves, the treasures they die for, and the secrets they rarely speak of. Within the stone below lies the adventure everyone seeks, but there's always a price. Often death.

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Very Positive

1 Steam reviews

Review History

Reviews

1 total

≥h

Steam User 8794STEAMNot recommended

BTS is not Dynamite.
***
BTS has the DNA of a knee-capped rogue-like Core Keeper clone.

Extraction is one of the big mistakes of modern gaming. It takes gameplay and structure that would be fine and makes it worse.

It's a niche genre for multiplayer games for very specific players. There's an audience, but it's not a mass market idea; a terrible idea for a massive-budget reboot of a single player 1990's Mac FPS game let alone a mining roguelike.

The games owe a lot to action roguelikes, with poor choices applied. Imagine you were playing Hades, but if you didn't choose to exit before dying you lose all the meta upgrades you would have gained, plus also had to the meta upgrades you chose to bring in.

***

BTS plays fine, if not Butter smooth. It's twin stick via keyboard mouse, comparable to Duckov. It says it can gamepad, there's too much drag and drop management to make that good. It's kind of janky, but the jank if more player-friendly than clunky, like being able to melee attack through solid walls.

The loops is OK, but too dry. You generate a new Core Keeper-like world each run with biomes. You'll have to mine your way through the map like Core Keeper, but the floor doesn't have pits, just water you can walk on.

You're going to be seeing a lot of the same things over again. Exploration procedurally gen maps need interesting things to find. BTS has places hidden in the rock, but none of them are a real MIC Drop.

The actual extraction isn't good. Instead of having to get somewhere, you have to meet objectives. This part is easy enough. But you have to fight waves of enemies to get out. This encourages you to press your luck even less. You have to be able to take a few hits to leave, and you might just have to run back to easier areas to get healing so you can safely leave.

It takes too long to get shops open if you can't rescue NPCs. You must rescue them to move up in crafting and they're a ways out. They're also surrounded by mini-mazes of enemies, sometimes with enemy spawners and guys who can do cheap hits. It's cheese or be cheesed. And again you may have to buff up to kill them.

The crafting is standard get the ore then the better ore, but you don't base-build your way up. Here the game feels so much like Core Keeper with depth taken out, and maybe the exploration and combat could be enough if it was richer and if this is a roguelike.

That extraction structure (and inventory) forces you to stop having fun all the time. They could make exploration richer but you're still going to have to run away when there's a huge map to explore, and when you run you have to start over.

In Core Keeper, you can push because you can always get back, and try to pick up your stuff and pick up where you left off. In a Roguelike, you have to keep pushing and you keep the rewards you earned. Extraction games tell you that you do have to go home. The best Extraction, while maybe not maximizing the game, get around this with short runs. BTS requires huge runs and if you get punished you have to do so much boring stuff to have fun again.

Why punish fun?

In the end, BTS says you do not have Permission to Dance.

Feb 28, 2026·8h·1·Verified·Early Access