Stonewall Penitentiary Review: Then There Were None Meets Saw

Stonewall Penitentiry is an excellent murder mystery game, that plays like your typical let's escape point and click puzzle game. It is developed by Storycentric Worlds and published by Unimatrix Productions.

We control a character called Will who wakes up in an abandoned prison for the criminally insane. He is locked in a cell with his hands tied. A female voice reaches out and Will must work together with this mysterious woman to escape from his cell. We soon find out that the two of us are definitely not alone and more victims were also kidnapped, put in the same prison and worked together just like us to escape from their own locked cells.

Shortly after meeting each other we learn why we are put in this prison, what we must to do survive and what would happen to us if we were to not carry out the instructions of our captor. There is only limited time to escape and every hour one of us has to die. The door will open when the clock hits a specific hour but who will make it out alive when that time comes? Our captor surely follows up on their word and bodies start dropping like flies shortly after. The killer is among us in the prison. Who is he or she among the 7 suspects including our character? Who can we trust? Can we even trust ourselves?

This whole theme is a constant and most welcome reminder of the many Saw movies I enjoyed watching as well as the awesome concept of Agatha Christie's masterpiece and my most favourite murder mystery novel of all time, Then There Were None.

Stonewall Penitentiary doesn't have moon logic puzzles. There are clues and hints for every one of them. There are also just enough hints to determine who the killer is at the end without making it too obvious. Guessing the killer correctly will also reward you with an achievement called "Elementary" which is a nice little nod at Sherlock.

While I truly appreciate the game not having pixel hunting or moon logic puzzles, there is ample amount of backtracking. When you do a certain puzzle or trigger a specific event, something will happen in some room. For example an item you need to progress will be strategically placed there by the killer. Therefore I found myself constantly checking every room far more frequently than I should in my opinion just to avoid getting stuck. There could have been vague hints for this but maybe there were and I missed them. I also would have truly appreciated having the option to "read" journals or notes instead of trying to directly read characters' handwriting. Certain journals were hard for me to decipher due to their fonts.

Speaking of missing hints or clues, the game has a point system. In order to get the perfect score which is 675, you need to have triggered every possible dialogue with every character, found every clue, discovered all secrets. My final score at the end was 634 so I missed 41 points worth of secrets. Who knows what I missed because sadly there is no guide for it either. I'm actually quite curious because the prison is filled with so many secrets giving the player a lot of insight about its background, management, guards, patients as well as the experiments and "treatments" that took place there. This horrifying prison becomes even grimmer than it was before with each of these revelations.

Unfortunately there is only one save slot and it gets deleted after finishing the game. After a certain decision I proceeded with finishing the game. I backed up my save prior to making that decision because I wanted to choose the other option only to realise that I can't use that save file again. I didn't want to replay the whole game just for that decision near the end. I'll try to find a video for it but sadly there aren't many videos of this game. Shame too because the game is absolutely brilliant so more people should discover and play this awesome game.

If you like murder mystery "whodunit" type of stories and/or enjoy point and click let's escape puzzle games do yourself a favour and make sure to try this little gem out.