The stony halls and ancient walls of an old monastery are fertile ground for all kinds of horror and intrigue. The Stone of Madness is certainly filled with both, painting an eye-catching portrait of secrets and skullduggery as you sneak around, searching for an escape. As the days and nights drag on, though, the cracks in its facade show, and the initially intriguing tactical stealth falls prey to too many technical issues.
The Stone of Madness comes from developers Teku Studios and The Game Kitchen, the latter of which is best known for Blasphemous, a series of action games similarly laden with religious imagery. There are still overt religious themes and visuals here, but instead of striking down giant bosses, The Stone of Madness is all about quietly finding a way out of the 18th-century Spanish monastery that acts as your jail.
Five prisoners make up the core of your party, hoping to escape after a brutal encounter that binds them all together. The halls are patrolled by guards, priests, nuns, and soldiers, but the motley crew of would-be escapees have plenty of ways to get around them. It’s a really compelling mood to set, heightened by the interesting characters that make up this team.
The holy man Alfredo, for instance, can put on priest’s robes and blend in with the clergy. Old lady Agnes has witchcraft up her sleeves, casting curses on unsuspecting guards. Eduardo, the silent giant, moves boxes and breaks down walls, while the tiny Amelia can sneak through tunnels, lay down mousetraps, and pick pockets. Leonora was my go-to for most days; she can climb walls, pick locks, and drop ropes, opening up new routes for characters in the process. She can also knockout guards or even kill them, though she will harm herself out of remorse in the process.
Days in The Stone of Madness alternate between daytime excursions and night-time planning. Stealing resources, uncovering clues, and completing objectives all take place in real-time during the day as you explore different areas of the monastery. At night, you can use your time and crew’s skills to recuperate and scheme. Time also passes during the day, with patrol routes changing and malevolent spirits emerging as afternoon turns to evening and on to nighttime. Staying out late can mean new, rewarding opportunities, but also more dangers, which makes for some exciting thrills as you try to push your luck.
Your characters have health, suspicion ratings, and sanity to manage, so keeping them healthy and stocked with tools for their particular skill sets is crucial. Managing the tasks you need to complete each day against your deteriorating well-being and limited night-time activities makes it feel like every victory is won against the ticking clocks of doom and entropy. Overcoming those odds, gaining mastery over the resources available, and thriving inside the walls of the monastery feels incredibly rewarding.
Flipping between these characters can feel a bit cumbersome while playing with a controller, but tinkering around with different combinations of abilities and options is enjoyable. Having Amelia mock an enemy and lead them into a quiet room where Leonora can knock them out, for example, captures the feeling of helming the crew of a well-planned heist. Each excursion from the team’s shared cell only lets you pick three members, so you’re pushed to constantly think ahead, considering who can collaborate to open the pathways or accomplish the tasks for each day.
Characters also have their drawbacks, too. Each of the five prisoners has their own fears to cope with or cleverly work around, and forcing them into certain situations will drain their sanity. Eduardo fears the dark, for instance, while Leonora cannot bear the sight of a blazing pyre. Amelia’s fear of the gargoyle statues looming throughout the halls is a constant concern when you’re trying to navigate new areas or evade capture. Finding ways to avoid these problems, like lighting up darkened rooms or shooting down gargoyles with a pistol, adds more satisfying wrinkles to iron out on the way to your objective.
Lose enough sanity, and a character will develop a new affliction, like claustrophobia. It’s an interesting system, and I actually found it to add some compelling friction. These conditions would force me to be mindful of where I left characters standing or how I moved them through a space. If I need Eduardo to drag a big box around, I better make sure the area is well-lit, which then isn’t great for sneaking around. That combination of team skills and dangers smartly encourages a lot of risky decision-making. Who can work well in this area, and what skills do you need on-hand? And who can salvage the operation when it all falls apart?
Frustratingly, things can fall apart, and not always because of your own mistakes. Across the roughly 25 hours it took me to finish The Stone of Madness’ two separate campaigns, I ran into a ton of different issues, bugs, and glitches. A guard got stuck on a random piece of geometry; a character disappeared out-of-bounds while moving through a tunnel; a cutscene would pop Alfredo out of his priest robes in the middle of a populated area; and in one case, opening a chest with Eduardo caused him to “zip” through the ceiling and onto the roof… in front of a waiting patrolman.
These frequent issues are tedious enough in isolation, but in a tactical stealth game where health and resources are at a premium, it can mean a full reset of the current day (upwards of 10 minutes at a time) and any progress lost. I even started avoiding certain areas or routes because I knew I could potentially run into a day-ending issue there, stamping out plans I had laid in the process.
Repeating these encounters also makes the control issues stand out even worse. Getting a character to lock onto the right target, interact with the right object, or even sometimes maneuver around certain obstacles always feels too finicky and unresponsive. Little annoyances compound, and it’s certainly frustrating when, say, a ghost is chasing you down and you can’t exorcise it because your character keeps locking onto something else nearby. The isometric camera angle doesn’t always help here either, and navigating certain areas took some trial-and-error to understand just where certain hiding spots and shaded corners even were. Tack on some weird graphical issues, like characters popping up through the environment or objective markers appearing in the way of prompts, and it can all wear on you pretty fast.
That’s particularly a shame because the art and animations are simply fantastic overall, with absolutely gorgeous models and areas on display across each campaign. Running along the tall ramparts of the monastery for the first time looked amazing. An 18th-century monastery is already a great setting choice, and The Game Kitchen uses the subject material well to create a memorable art style.
Each task within the monastery is a bread-crumb trail leading the five prisoners closer to freedom, while also sending them teetering down into the darker secrets hidden within its walls. The Stone of Madness is a dark story, all about the corruption and rampant abuse within a supposed asylum. Through its two campaigns, the prisoners uncover many hidden horrors, with plenty of wrinkles to force stubborn players to change up their approaches; certain areas might be difficult for your preferred characters to navigate until you’ve unlocked alternate pathways, for example.
Opening these areas up and mastering them over the course of a campaign is the greatest sense of achievement The Stone of Madness has to offer. Daily objectives help guide you along, but each new zone is really a puzzle to solve on its own. Distracting a guard with one of Alfredo’s sermons can let Eduardo lay down a plank, creating a bridge for Leonora to cross so she can lockpick a chest and uncover new treasure. These moments of carefully coordinated sneaking, puzzle solving, and thieving are when The Stone of Madness stands out the most.
The actual stories told throughout both campaigns serve their purposes well enough. Several well-animated cutscenes make the high points resonate, but it’s mostly told through text-only dialogue windows otherwise. The named characters are certainly memorable, like Tía del Nido, the egg-collecting elderly woman who gathers gossip, or the merchant Panecillo, who wears a loaf of bread for a hat. I wish some objectives were a little more overt about where to go next, but the intrigue compelled me enough to keep checking and rechecking old haunts to track it all down, and the tips and hints are extremely generous if you want them.
Though there are two branching campaigns, each with their own areas to explore and stories to tell, they play out pretty similarly in terms of what you’re actually doing. Additional characters to meet, stories to uncover, and areas to sneak around can add quite a bit to the total runtime, but the twin campaigns mostly offer two distinct flavors of the same idea. Still, I enjoyed the new challenges a second route offered, especially since each campaign’s final objective is a tense, thrilling challenge that lets every character shine in their own way.
