Stone World
Push the rune stones home. No timers, no lives.
Stone World is a Sokoban-style puzzle game in pixel art. In each chamber you push rune stones onto an ancient altar, take keys from chests and open the gates in the way, and when every rune is lit the portal to the next chamber opens. A stone only moves when you push it, so a stone pushed into a corner stays there, and restarting is always one tap away. There are 20 hand-made chambers, no timers and no lives, and everything works offline. The game is free, with a full-screen ad after every fifth chamber and one optional purchase that opens every chamber and removes the ads.
Screenshots
What it does
Simple premise. Real value.
20 hand-made chambers
From a first lesson to a finale with four keys and four gates. Each chamber adds one idea to the one before it and opens once you solve it.
Runes, keys and gates
Light the altar one rune stone at a time, take keys from chests and spend each one on a gate. A key used on the wrong gate is gone.
Courtyards and terraces
Later chambers join courtyards and terraces with stairs, where a stone can only go where you can follow it.
Controls made for exact moves
Tap an arrow to move exactly one cell, hold it to keep walking, or touch anywhere on the screen to bring the joystick under your thumb.
Calm and offline
No timers, no lives and no connection needed. Agate, a stone guide, gives a short hint as you enter, and the first chambers show the way with blue motes.
The story behind it
The Problem
I started Stone World in Unity in 2021: a main menu, a rune counter and stones that were plain physics bodies you could shove around freely. Then it sat untouched for years. In 2026 I wanted to finish it instead of starting something new.
What I Built
I moved it to Unity 6 with URP 2D and changed the stones so a push moves them exactly one cell on a grid, which made the puzzles possible to design at all. Each chamber is built by an editor script, and a breadth-first solver over pushes proves it solvable before it ships, then a Play Mode walkthrough replays that solution in the real scene. The art comes from licensed pixel art packs.
What I Learned
I tried generating chambers from seeds and scoring them, and deleted all ten: they were solvable but did not follow on from one another. The ones that shipped are placed by hand and checked by the solver, and proving the last chamber took 13 minutes and 1.7 million states. The first release was also a 45 MB download, and stripping unused code, turning off the splash and removing a post-processing stack the game no longer used brought it to 35.6 MB.
Push the rune stones home. No timers, no lives.
A push box puzzle in pixel art: push rune stones onto an ancient altar, take keys from chests and open gates across 20 hand-made chambers.
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