Developers The Game Kitchen have swapped brutal boss fights for brutal stealth tactics in The Stone of Madness as they take us into the bowels of an 18th century monastery. Full of secrecy, horror and depravity.
I’m Putting Together a Team
Published by Tripwire Interactive, The Stone of Madness is set during the Spanish Inquisition. It sets a grim tale of misery for our team, who for different reasons have found themselves imprisoned in the asylum.
Each member of the group has vastly different skills that will be needed if there is any chance of escaping. The prologue does a fantastic job of setting the pace and understanding the skills our prisoners have at their disposal. Take Eduardo for instance. Standing at least a foot taller than everyone else he uses his strength to break down doors and push heavy objects. However, spending years in solitary Eduardo has become mute and cannot read. So he is unable to collect clues or talk to anyone. He also has a clipping fear of the dark. These phobias are a minor inconvenience at the start, but left unchecked they can mutate into uncontrollable fears that will harm your chances of escape.
Plan Your Adventure
Our time spent in the monastery is split up into a day/night cycle. The days are spent searching for clues, solving puzzles and stealing resources while nighttime is spent planning your sorties. Your characters have health, sanity and suspicion bars to keep an eye on as well. Use your planning stage wisely. Make sure you have enough lockpicks, crowbars and anything else you might need as once you start your day you cannot return to your cell until nightfall. If you forget something important or you bring the wrong prisoner for the job, you will have to wait in real time until you can return to your cell.
This wasn’t a problem at the start. However, things started to fall apart for my team towards the end of the first campaign. One of my people kept getting random headaches and would take sanity damage throughout the day. Another was terrified of fire, coupled with a hatred for nuns, let’s say things got spicey.
Don’t Get Caught
With no manual saving everything plays out in real time, when things go wrong, they go monumentally wrong. More frustratingly when it’s not your fault. I ran into a few different bugs and glitches; the most common one was having a guard searching for you but them getting stuck on something and searching forever. Or the opposite just freezing so there is no way of getting past them. You can’t end the day when you are under suspicion either, so I had to restart days a lot. Losing 10 minutes at a time doesn’t seem like much but when you do it half a dozen times in a row, it becomes tedious.
Everything looks so pretty
The Game Kitchen has done a spectacular job of telling a grim and disturbing story through the setting and the well-placed cut scenes. The game is spilt up between 10 different areas of the monastery. Each one has a unique feeling to it, and secrets to reveal. The further into the campaigns (that right campaigns as in two) I got, the more out of my comfort zone I became. Each campaign is a separate story, using the same characters. Rather than increasing each day and tasks difficulties, The Stone of Madness has you play through two different scenarios, that quite frankly are grim.
Being forced to use characters I didn’t use much to open up areas for other characters to explore is very rewarding and when chemistry works it’s an amazing feeling. It’s also the same when things fall off the rails and the door you need to get through is locked. You are out of lockpicks and it’s a little too dark for our friend Eduardo. Do you think Amelia is small enough to squeeze through that gap?
Verdict
The Stone of Madness looks gorgeous, planning around the prisoners’ strengths and phobias makes for an intense stealth adventure that is ruined by bugs. I would rather smash my face against brutal enemies than succumb to glitches, which is how I felt my time with The Stone of Madness has been spent.
The Stones of Madness was reviewed on The Xbox Series X. It is also available on PC (via Steam) PlayStation 5, Xbox Sereis X/S and Nintendo Switch.
I would like to express my thanks to Trip Wire for sending us a review copy of Stones of Madness.
Stones of Madness has a playable demo, link below:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1309710/The_Stone_of_Madness
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