Stone Prophet is the third game by SSI using the original Ravenloft engine. The two ealier games are Ravenloft - Stradt's Possession, Menzoberranzan. With each game since Raven 1 the graphics and game handling has had improvements and is now polished and workable.
A very brief outline of the story in Stone Prophet sees your party of two created characters being transported to the desert land of Har'kir. The only means of escape is to bring two mummies, the Hierophant and Anhktepot together for a showdown. There are however numerous dungeons and temples to explore and quests to be completed before that is possible.
The game is quite unlinear when compared to Menzo and Raven 1. In fact reading the comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg newsgroup seems to indicate many players had problems with this, they expected a linear progression as with the other two titles.Stone Prophet has a very egyptian feel to it, from the deserts, the characters you meet and even the types sites you explore. The graphics are by far the best in the series. You control a party of up to four characters, the view is a 3D type perspective. The combat is real time, although I did not find it hard to win battles, you will however have to get used to some quick mouse moving from character to character. Another plus for the game is that I did not strike a single bug, not bad for a SSI title. Sound is good, even very good in parts, the song that the ghost sings is great. Most of the non-player characters voices are an improvement over Ravenloft 1, Raven 1 had some rather thick US accents which did not particularly match the gothic setting of the game.
Overall I enjoyed Stone Prophet very much, the game is quite a bit longer than Raven 1 and much, much longer and harder then Menzo.
SOME TIPS
Of all the characters that offer to join your party, none is a mage. I did however get through the game without ever needing one. A cleric is always a good character to have and Stone Prophet is no exception. A thief is not needed and a good one will offer to join later anyway.
Explore everything !! become good friends with your automap. When entering a new level explore everything first, map all switches and pits, only after you explored all the boundaries start pushing switches, etc, always after pushing a switch consult the map to see what action has been performed.