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Low-Spoiler Guide to The Omega Stone

Welcome to my Omega Stone hints page. (-: If you're new to this series of low-spoiler computer game walkthroughs, the idea behind them is to point gamers towards things they might not have tried in each game rather than giving step-by-step instructions or divulging puzzle solutions. There's not much point in playing a puzzle game if you know the solutions in advance, after all.

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So these pages are as close to spoiler-free as possible while still providing some valuable Omega Stone hints and tips. If you are looking for the solution to a particular puzzle, I recommend the UHS site--due to the way their pages are set up you can only see one hint at a time, so you can get the answer to one pesky puzzle without ruining all the others for yourself. Here's the UHS page for Omega Stone, if that interests you. My site, meanwhile, focuses on exactly the things UHS and other traditional walkthroughs don't: the non-critical parts of the game, little detours you can take, extra details you might miss if you did only what was strictly necessary to complete the game. If you want even fewer spoilers--you're considering whether or not to buy the game, for example--please try my Omega Stone Review page to find all the pertinant information in one convenient spoiler-free package.

Now, on with the game!

The Omega Stone Hints and Tips
The Omega Stone Walkthrough
The Omega Stone Cheats and Links
The Backseat Game Designer: The Omega Stone Critique

The Omega Stone Hints and Tips



This is a fairly linear game. Other than becoming confused by red herrings and searching about fruitlessly for further information about them that doesn't exist, there's not much you're in danger of missing during the course of playing The Omega Stone--no side quests, no character interactions, few gameworld details you might skim by if you didn't realize they were there, none of the things my low-spoiler walkthroughs are usually good at helping you tease out of a game. On the other hand, it's easy to get frustrated by Omega Stone's gameplay--to have no idea whether an area is intentionally useless or you've just missed something to do there, or whether you just need to think about a puzzle harder or it's impossible to solve at this point in the game. Or to want to know how to just get to the next puzzle already without all the @%#!@!! navigating around looking for it. If that's you, I can help you, and without revealing the answers to any of the puzzles, either: check out my Non-Boring Guide to The Omega Stone.

Besides the walkthrough, here are my general gameplay suggestions for minimizing tedious and aggravating elements of the game to get the maximum amount of fun out of it:

Installation: If you haven't installed this game yet, and your hard drive can accomodate it, go for the full install. This is the slowest-loading game you've seen since the 80's, and having to swap disks and wait for the area to load from CD every single time you switch locations would be a real pain.

Time Management: Ignore Gil's ominous monologue about the time to save the world running out. Time does not pass in The Omega Stone, and you can take as long as you like exploring any part of it you choose in any order you want to. You can literally spend months sailing back and forth between Easter Island and Mexico, yet no game time will ever have passed. You never need to worry about time in this game.

Savegame Habits: Save frequently. This is always a good idea in adventure games, but Omega Stone feels so much like Myst in concept and execution that it can take you really offguard when you die suddenly in the course of normal exploration. (I've been gaming more than 15 years, and I still died an incredibly stupid death by touching something I would never have touched in a more action-oriented game.) There are no dead ends in The Omega Stone--nothing you can do that will doom you later in the game--so there's no reason not to keep reusing the same five savegames or so, to preserve screen space and save yourself a few extra clicks. But you really want to be saving every single time you complete a task you wouldn't want to have to complete again.

Movement: Though the help screen gives you a "warp" option, in reality, it doesn't exist. It's highly unfortunate, but you'll just have to trek back the way you came manually. Also, The Omega Stone has the peculiar idiosyncrasy that its areas fill your ENTIRE viewscreen, so there's no peripheral vision at all. This means that unlike in other Mystlike games, you will frequently fail to notice important things, like a door or a giant wall mural, that are located to your left or right. You will have to swing your view manually side to side to make sure there's nothing important there, like in Ultima I.

Dialogue: There isn't any; the gamewriters literally didn't bother making a dialogue interface. So in order to interact with Humph (the only NPC you're likely to want to interact with), you'll have to physically show him the card with the name of the location you want to go to next. (You can also click on Humph to hear him ask you where you want to go, if you want, but you'll never be able to answer him. Perhaps your character is mute.)

Interface: Your only method of interacting with the gameworld is by clicking on it. The cursor will light up when an object or exit is interactive, which makes it generally quite easy to move around; however, the cursor will not show you when an object on the screen can be acted on by means of an object in your inventory, so if, for example, you're looking for the one flagstone in a large area that can be pried up with a crowbar, you'll have to wave the crowbar itself over all of them to find it, not just the empty cursor. When the cursor changes to be a picture of the inventory object in question (with no hand holding it), you'll know you've found the correct spot.

Camera: As far as I know it is impossible to 'zoom' the camera view in or out, which means the camera feature is nearly useless (since it can only capture part of the screen, and most clues you will need to save for later are larger than will fit into the camera scope). Use your computer's screen capture function instead, or use a piece of scratch paper.

Viewing Documents: Many documents in this game were erroneously created larger than the game screen is capable of containing. Be sure to grab any document you've opened with the cursor and move it around to see if you've missed anything to one side of it or the other.

Problem Spots: The Omega Stone is not subtitled and there are some audio clues, so this is not a good game for the hard of hearing or people who can't play with the sound on. There are no dead ends and you can't paint yourself into any corners.

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