Arrest of a Stone Buddha

Compared to The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa, Arrest of a Stone Buddha is clearly more straightforward. You won’t find as much text or decision-making here. Although the game offers two possible endings, there are very few narrative segments, which are made up for by action. It is essentially a bloody 2D shooter. Yeo’s constant effort to push players toward “anti-entertainment” will deter many, as this is a game that requires extreme patience. In terms of gameplay, however, it’s a great combination of open-world and shoot ’em up elements.

Yeo's new game gets frustrating to early, so it's quite difficult to enjoy it despite its great art house aesthetics.

Arrest of a stone Buddha was way too repetitive for me. I didn't get into the story, and the gameplay was overall frustrating. One thing I did enjoy was the retro graphics and the ambient soundtrack. If you want to checkout Arrest of a stone Buddha, I recommend waiting on a sale.

It’s an unrelentingly bitter game, one which has the power to incite a strong reaction in anyone who plays it. Just as much as I liked it, I’m sure there are others out there who will come to hate it with a passion.

The best way to describe Arrest of a stone Buddha is to think of it as a dream in video game form, and I mean the kind you wake up from and wonder: “What the hell was that?” The lack of control, direction, and agency that one experiences while dreaming are the closest approximation I can come up with. However, there is some wisdom to be gleaned from the hundreds of bodies this professional killer leaves lying in his wake.

Much like the previous title from this game's developer, Friends of Ringo Ishikawa, Arrest of a Stone Buddha may be better defined as a gaming experiment than a traditional game...

Arrest of a Stone Buddha requires patience from its players; without that, it loses all of its core concepts. Still, getting passed the lengthy in-game day cycles are merely rewarded with shootouts full of cheap deaths and confusing mechanics. It attempts to add a layer of immersion that doesn’t really work as a game since the fundamental interactions with the world aren’t all that interesting.

I think this is the perfect case of a game in which its themes and message were crafted with a higher degree of priority than its gameplay loop. Arrest of a Stone Buddha tries to provide players with moments of reflection in between bouts of ultraviolent gunplay, but its actual gameplay loop is so clunky and frustrating that the only thing you’ll want to think once a level is over is “who the hell designed that level”.