Immortal Love: Stone Beauty – Review

Friendly Fox Studios, formerly 4 Friends Games, is back with a new sequel for their best-selling fantasy romance HOPA series. Immortal Love: Stone Beauty takes you to Italy, where you return to your hometown after many years at sea. As soon as you arrive, you discover that your lover has gone missing along with other women from the town. Can you track down the famous sculptor who is likely the culprit of this string of disappearances?

The Immortal Love series and Domini Games’ Dark Romance series are similar both in their concept and their two-perspectives gameplay. However, over the years, both series have managed to carve out space in the HOPA landscape for themselves – Dark Romance succeeds with its dark fantasy theme while Immortal Love excels through its fairytale-esque storyline and magical quality. On the surface, Immortal Love: Stone Beauty tells another cookie-cutter story about a missing lover and an artist with ill intentions. Luckily, it offers much more than that. With a fascinating backstory, memorable characters and smart storytelling – the game is able to craft and deliver an engaging tale that is as suspenseful as it is romantic.

Immortal Love: Stone Beauty is elevated by its breathtaking production. There is never a doubt that Friendly Fox Studios is capable of creating fantastic visuals, but that does not make the achievement less impressive. Each scene is wonderfully drawn and painted with such precision and detail and the gorgeous animations make it shine even brighter. On the audio side, the background music is immersive and enchanting, while the voice-overs portray the characters well.

But no game is perfect and neither is this one because Immortal Love: Stone Beauty’s gameplay leaves a lot to be desired. Although the hidden object scenes and the puzzles are occasionally creative and almost always entertaining, the adventure gameplay is quite dull. If not for the two-perspectives storytelling, every other move in the game is pretty straightforward. The special gadget named Eve that requires you to feed her crystal tears in exchange for juicy backstory is rather haunting and particularly redundant, especially since an extremely similar gimmick was just introduced by this very same studio in another recent game just a week ago.

All that being said, the overall experience of Immortal Love: Stone Beauty is still enjoyable. The main game took me around three and a half hours to complete and the bonus chapter took an extra 40 minutes and I was engaged all the way through. The Collector’s Edition also comes with all the perks; a strategy guide, wallpapers, screensavers, concept art, soundtracks, videos, replayable hidden object scenes, replayable mini-games, achievements, collectibles, and morphing objects.

Immortal Love: Stone Beauty is definitely an enjoyable spectacle, even if its gameplay is a little uninspiring.

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