As you progress in Islets, the boss fights take a step up in difficulty. Instead of exercises in button-mashing, you'll have to strategize and think about what the fight requires of you.
The Stone Witch fight is one of those fights. This encounter requires that you put more effort than usual into your positioning, and you'll need to brush up on your mid-air combat skills if you want to get the fight over before the cows come home. Here's our rundown - with our help, you'll have this witch conquered in no time.
The Stone Witch's Attacks
The Stone Witch has lots of attacks that, predictably, utilize stones. This fight is far more dodge-reliant than others and will reward good positioning and a deft knowledge of how fast and long your dodge roll is.
|
Attack |
Description |
How To Counter |
|---|---|---|
|
Stone Pillars |
The witch summons a single stone pillar that hangs in the air above you for a few moments, before smashing down on top of you very quickly. Immediately after, two lines of stone pillars appear either side and smash down in succession, with the only safe space being the center. |
The timing on this attack is tricky - you need to hit the dodge roll button the instant you see the first stone pillar moving downwards, and then immediately dodge roll back where you were to avoid the follow-up pillars. |
|
Stone Idol |
The witch disappears into the background and summons an idol. It smashes back and forth the arena incredibly quickly. |
When you see the idol, immediately head to one side of the stage. Here, perform floaty double jumps to stay in the air whenever the idol comes towards you. If you try to jump over the idol in the middle of the stage, you'll get hit on the rebound, so you need to be at a side. |
|
Smashing Dive |
This attack is used as a followup to Stone Idol and Enraged Stone Pillars. The witch will disappear from the background and a quick stream of exclamation marks will fall from the sky. The witch will crash down to the ground here, causing a shockwave that covers the entire floor. |
Move out of the stream of exclamation marks and immediately double jump to avoid the resulting shockwave. |
|
Stone Rain |
The witch conjures lots of stones of varying sizes. They will fall to the ground and bounce around for a while before disappearing. |
This move is very difficult to predict, especially in the second phase. One trick that sometimes works is to bait the witch to one side of the screen when this attack starts and then quickly dodge roll to the other side of the screen once she stops summoning stones. This might give you breathing room. |
|
Enraged Stone Pillars |
The witch heads to the background and starts summoning quickfire pillars in a random sequence to crash down on you. |
While the pillars fall extremely quickly, as long as you stay on the move, you shouldn't have too much trouble avoiding this attack. Just keep an eye on where the pillars are being summoned and react accordingly, dodge rolling only if you have to. |
|
Enraged Stone Swarm |
The witch conjures a rotating mass of stones that cover the entire screen. |
It can be tricky to avoid damage in this attack if you're not great at following the curved path of each stone. There are two possible ways to try and avoid damage - either move slowly from left to right, treating the stones as obstacles to jump over and through, or stand on the left side of the screen for the entire attack, dodging the stones as they fall around you. |
How To Beat The Stone Witch
This boss fight can be one of the trickier ones if you're not used to fighting in midair. Some of it will come down to luck - especially with the Stone Rain attack. Nevertheless, we have some tips to help you out.
- When staying at one side of the stage to avoid the Stone Idol attack, be sure you're not jumping into the spiked wall. That would hurt you.
- The witch loves to stay just out of reach of a simple double-jump-three-hit-combo. You'll have to extend your time in the air by putting your second jump in the middle of your attack combo if you want to benefit from the three-hit-combo damage bonus. Hit jump, then attack once, then jump again, and finish the combo with two more attacks. This will usually work, but sometimes the witch will simply be too far out of reach.
- This is a great fight to put the bow to use. Be careful, as the witch doesn't really give you much breathing room, but try to pelt her with arrows whenever she uses the Stone Pillars and Enraged Stone Swarm attacks. Refill your arrows by going on the offensive during the Stone Rain and the end of the Smashing Dive attacks.
Later in the game, you'll be able to get an upgrade that tells you that something has changed in the rainy plains. Head back to the Stone Witch's arena to see what this is! You'll get an achievement for it.