Review:
A Review of Dragon Age: Origin Add-On "The Stone Prisoner"

 In case you took your “Dragon Age: Origins” (DAO) out of its box and tossed aside everything else, I would like to encourage you to pick through the box and get your hands on the code that you can use to download “The Stone Prisoner” to augment your experience when playing DAO. “The Stone Prison” is an add-on for DAO and can be downloaded using the code at Bio-Ware’s DAO website.

In this add-on, you will find a traveling merchant who will give you a magical rod for free that controls a golem; not looking a gift dragon in the mouth with questions like “What is the catch” or "Is it safe," you take the rod to the village of Honnleath to seek out your new pet. Once there, you find out that the village is being attacked by darkspawn and the golem does not respond to the rod; so much for a simple “go here and activate this” quest for your hero. After some fighting, a puzzle that uses flames (that will burn you to death, I’ve learned), and a chance to let a little girl be possessed by a demon that looks like it belongs in the Playboy center-fold (which originally possessed a cat), you are able to add to your party Shale. Shale is an interesting golem with a sharp tongue, a deep hatred with anything that has feathers, and can act as your tank, another melee/range fighter, or a party’s attribute buffer.

If you have traveled about with your companions in DAO, you know that they add interesting twists to dialogue options and entertain you with their banter as you travel about. Shale, along with your other companions, will enter into humorous conversations and regularly comments that birds are the evilest things in the realm (Shale’s battle cry is “Death to all Pigeons!”). I remember hearing a dialogue between Wynne and Shale where Wynne asked why Shale called Wynne an “elder mage” and Shale asks if it would be better to call her “mage well past her prime, don't mind the sagging bits.” While these conversations are nothing new for those who have played through the game, it is nice to have a new character that brings a new set of conversations and dialogue options that make replaying the game just as fun as the first time. In addition, if Shale is in your party as you travel through the dwarven areas, you will be given the chance to participate in deeper conversations about dwarven culture since golems are as much as a part of their history as drinking and digging about in mountains.