Magic Rune Stone

Genre: Action-RPG / Roguelike

Players: 1

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Review:

Magic Rune Stone is an Action-RPG with Roguelike elements released in 2025 on PC and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2026. And I’ll be honest: my first impressions of this game were not great. Its extremely generic name seemed like a bad sign, its poor localization did not instill confidence (words like “equitment” and “physic” in place of “equipment” and “physical”, as an example), and it seems far more shallow and limited in scope than other games in the Roguelike Action-RPG genre, like Children of Morta.

However, judging this game based on what it is and not on what it isn’t… I had a really good time with this one.

The presentation here is generally good, making use of 2D pixel art visuals with a good amount of personality to them. This is backed by a soundtrack that doesn’t have much in the way of songs, and you’ll mostly just be hearing one tune playing while you battle… but it’s a really good thing that one song is fantastic. And it’s heartbreaking that I have to tell you that I can’t even tell you the name of the song.

You can hear the song in question playing in the back of this video, but the song doesn’t seem to be mentioned in the game’s credits, which individually credits only the composers for four songs (all from fair use website OpenGameArt.org), but this song isn’t listed among them. It took me quite a bit of research to even find this much, and I wanted to find it because this song may well have featured on my yearly eShopperReviews Game Awards “Best Song” award. But without an actual composer to credit… nope. Publishers, credit your workers, even those you’ve commissioned or outsourced – they deserve that much.

When we get to the gameplay, it takes a bit to parse through the bad localization (apparently “treasure” actually means “passive upgrades” and “equitment” is stat upgrades, for example), but once you get a feel for things this is a fairly simple and straightforward game – fight through waves of enemies, get an upgrade for your character (often selected from a trio of random upgrades), and aim to find synergies in those upgrades that makes you an effective fighting machine.

It’s nothing super-ambitious or original, but it’s well-done, and there are some really enjoyable synergies to be found here, and some good combat. Plus, you have different characters to unlock with different skill sets to add variety, as well as an endgame that requires you to complete runs with those multiple characters.

Beyond that, there’s not much to say here. Magic Rune Stone is a great Action-RPG Roguelike. It’s not going to revolutionize this style of game, but if you enjoy this sort of thing I’d wager you’ll likely enjoy this too. And it’s under $10, so it’s not a huge risk if you end up finding yourself going back to games like Children of Morta afterward. In any case, I do recommend this one.

tl;dr – Magic Rune Stone is an Action-RPG and Roguelike that has you fighting through waves of enemies and trying to select the best upgrades to make yourself a formidable fighter as you progress. This game has a poor localization among other issues, and nothing it does really revolutionizes the genre, but what it does do is present players with a solid, fairly inexpensive Action-RPG Roguelike that’s a lot of fun to play, and unless you’re looking for something that’s going to push the envelope, I’d definitely recommend this one.

Grade: B

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