It appears you're a young girl, in a medieval village, who has appeared at church improperly attired and is facing imprisonment as a consequence--excessive, it seems, though the game never puts the excess in any sort of context. Beyond that, you understand very little at the outset: the game elects not to explain anything about the setting. This is actually an interesting way to immerse the player in the story, in that the action starts right away without explaining who or where you are, and leaves you to piece together the salient details. Realism suffers somewhat (i.e., when your character asks other people about her own basic biographical information), but not excessively so. And there are lots and lots of things to figure out--the game name-drops left and right, and you accumulate unexplained references much faster than you can ask people about them. The game fairly drips with information: virtually no scenery is left unimplemented, for one thing, and there are lots of doors that you simply cannot get through. The effect is that the game's world seems much larger than it is--you have the sense that you have seen only a small portion of it by the end of the game--which is certainly a nice touch. Unfortunately, the masses of detail available mean that it's easy to fail to discover something important, or to lose an important name in the shuffle--and even at the end of the game, I could not discern how I should have learned a few key bits of information. The author has taken care to make the world of the game complete, but it ends up being almost too detailed, with too many names to keep straight. Still, an excess of detail is arguably more interesting than an underdescribed game, and Stone Cell certainly does put together an interesting setting.

Sadly, the puzzle-solving spoils the fun of the setting, by and large, by requiring mental telepathy on a grand scale. Particularly egregious in that regard is the dungeon cell of the title, which the author splits into nine parts, each with a one-line description--and a certain key object is hidden entirely, without even an oblique reference in the description that might lead to it. This is the most peculiar design choice in a game filled with such peculiar choices--the author's powers of description appear to be up to the task of rendering each portion of the cell vividly enough that the scene wouldn't be boring or repetitious. Indeed, it becomes apparent that there are quite a few things worth noticing scattered around the cell, and why the author chose to shortchange the descriptions is unclear. That poses one artificial barrier to solving puzzles, but there are others--you are supposed to sense, somehow, that you can signal a certain person a certain way from a certain spot in the cell, and how you know this remains a mystery to me. There is a measure of logic to most of the puzzles, but usually it's the sort of logic that is apparent only in retrospect--a player is unlikely to hit on most of the solutions other than by blind guess. (Particularly so in the case of the guardians that are distracted by a certain object; it is not apparent why those guardians react the way they do--or in the case of the solution that requires an adversary to be almost unfathomably stupid.) The unfairness of the puzzles detracts considerably from the effectiveness of the story, since most players will wind up relying heavily on the walkthrough. (A few of the puzzles, particularly the one where you open the door of your cell, are rather ingenious, though.)

The writing occasionally works and more often is ridiculously overdone, as in the following passage when you emerge from your cell:

During your time underground, time has passed as if you were here to
witness it; the world has fallen into the drowse of deep night,
without the least concern for your whereabouts. At this moment, a
realization holds you captive: all shall continue as it always has,
long after you have expired and returned to the loam.

Or this, from the initial description of your cell:

This is a sepulcher for the living. You are ensconced in the tomb
where you shall surely perish, with no one to anoint your body, no
one to assuage your throes, no one to hear your final lament.

The grammar here is fine, and there aren't really all that many unneeded adjectives and adverbs, but the cliche and melodrama levels are painfully high--it really isn't necessary to hand-wring about the awfulness of your prison cell, or exclaim over your sudden discovery that the world goes on without you. The author here can put sentences together, clearly, but knowing when to stop is a problem. Some of the descriptions that aren't supposed to be fraught with melodrama are acceptable:

>examine beams
Hewn from trees felled on the surrounding hillsides. You used to run
wild through those trees, on those rare days you'd complete your
chores before nightfall.

Nothing special, but it sets a scene and doesn't call attention to the writer unnecessarily. Stone Cell is a little too quick to ascribe emotions to the PC, and to maunder on about those emotions; the more restrained scene that leave the player to make inferences about the PC's feelings work much better. The other problem with the writing is that, in many cases, there's simply too much of it--some descriptions go on for more than 200 words, much more than necessary. Conciseness is a virtue in IF writing, and there's not a lot of it here.

The story itself is uneven, in the end--the story ends up being about the feudal lord's family as much as yours, though the introduction made it seem like the focus would be injustice, as visited upon those in small communities who transgress in minor but symbolic ways. It isn't apparent at the outset that you should care about the details of the lord's family, in other words, and the game never really signals that the PC does care about said family. The author seems to have been so eager to develop the various narrative threads that he never got around to making any of them work as a story--why do you care about the internal politics of the castle (as you seem to), when you're a twelve- year-old? Depending on how you approach it, the failure here is either an incoherently written PC (who's a lot more worldly than she appears), or a backstory that didn't fill out the necessary details as it should have.

Stone Cell is an interesting mess, in short--there's a whole lot of story running around with very little to tie it together, and the shape of the game is unfortunately provided by several badly done puzzles. There are clearly good intentions at work, though, and the setting was intriguing enough that I ended up giving the game a 7 in this year's competition.