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Set somewhere in the Pyrenees mountains, The Game Kitchen’s latest Roman Catholic guilt simulator is set in a monastery-come-sanatorium in the best year for mental health, 1799. You play as Father Alfredo, a priest who visited the monastery and is now a prisoner there. He and a few of the less insane plan on making an escape, breaking from The Game Kitchen’s two previous titles of hitting big things really hard and instead just trying to hide from guards like you’re name was Iroquois Pliskin. With Father Pliskin you’ll assemble a ragtag band of beautifully designed characters to assemble a band, maybe they can call it Madness.

With a cutscene art style right out of a Saturday morning cartoon and a general art style somewhere adjacent to that, the first thing you’ll notice about The Game Kitchen’s The Stone of Madness is how beautiful it is. Which you could say about both Blasphemous titles too, before you got rammed up the backside by a guy in a pointy hat. Very simple in a stealth-based concept, you have vision cones you’re supposed to avoid and guards doing their usual patterns or standing in one place, bouncing their heads like they were watching a game of Wiff-Waff.

As the group comes together, they all have their own abilities. However, they also have unique disadvantages. This being one of the few entirely unique points of The Stone of Madness, Father Alfredo can bless spirits so they disappear and has an oil lamp. In a priestly twist, he is negatively affected when surrounded by violence, such as dead or unconscious bodies. Eduardo needs to be surrounded by light or his sanity is affected, while Leonora can’t stand large pyres (light sources) but she can attack guards as long as she has the health to sacrifice as she listens to My Chemical Romance.

There’s a bit more strategy than simple stealth. What The Stone of Madness does best is its mechanic-based gameplay focused on time, abilities, and (of course) disadvantages. Each character’s sanity meter is just a countdown to the latest disability or disadvantage each character will receive once you forget Eduardo is scared of the dark. Leaving him there to develop an inability to do basically anything.

There is also a time cycle to this Oceans 1799 release, with guards and such having a sense of schedule about their day. As a result, you need to get certain things done before they return. Basically, if you’re stuck somewhere when guards change shifts, areas of the monastery become more heavily restricted. You also have a nighttime set of schemes to complete, including black market dealings, volunteering to dissuade suspension on the group, crafting, bribing of guards, and of course, healing physically and mentally.

It’s the mechanical aspects such as Leonora’s desire to slit her wrists every time she kills or Eduardo’s spiral into madness that are the most thematically coherent. There is great balance between overpowered stealth and the overall difficulty of The Stone of Madness. Match this with a beautiful isometric world and art style and a perfectly fine story, there is something to The Game Kitchen’s take on Opera Soft’s La Abadia del Crimen, or The Abbey of Crime. Game director Maikel Ortega noted this was a major inspiration in an interview with Epic. The Abbey of Crime itself is an interactive interpretation of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.

Maladied by its focus on the story, however, this makes The Stone of Madness something of a chore to play in one, two, or five sittings. Though the mystery in principle is solid, the script itself doesn’t jump out of the alleyway and grab you shouting conspiracy theories about the government being lizards or aliens – or lizard-aliens. It is tiresome at times. Where Blasphemous is breezy and lets the world do the talking for it, The Stone of Madness is a much slower-paced tale. Telling you to sit around a fire, but not too close (or Leonora will get antsy), and have lengthy chats.

All done in the name of a mystery of why this monastery is under both religious rule and gunpoint, very rarely are you given exciting moments of new information. The plot feels as though it just happens while you do needless busywork, making the story not half as exciting as it seems it probably thinks it is. Getting past guards surreptitiously, putting together some of the character backgrounds, and playing with the mechanics certainly does something right, but not enough.

The dark and twisted tale can sometimes provide shock and just enough horror that it does something refreshing, but The Stone of Madness’ plot itself not only feels bloated but also boring. Gameplay is the highlight, but stealth gameplay in a linear story only works so long as you can enjoy or endure the plot. What hampers gameplay however is the cumbersome controls, particularly if you’re using a Dualsense controller or otherwise. Switching between characters to harness their abilities for different obstacles is somewhat the key to success.

Unlike other real-time tactical stealth such as Commandos, however, you are to do everything without a moment to pause and coordinate. Run into the occasional cock-up, (sometimes no fault of your own) and the desire to press on throughout the two campaigns is exhausting sometimes. When The Stone of Madness shines, it is as Rihanna sang, “Bright like a diamond.” Yet, when it gets messy, elongated, dull, and cumbersome, it leaves your hands covered in coal.

Ultimately, The Stone of Madness is a great stealth puzzle to unravel with a fantastic art style that just makes you want to play it, but like Father Alfredo and the gang, it is trapped in a mystery that takes a while to get where it is going. The story is fine if lacking in something to keep it exciting. Sadly, it also does so little to keep itself going for 15-20 hours that it quickly runs out of steam. The escape of Frank Morris and John/Clarence Anglin, The Stone of Madness is not.

A PC review copy of The Stone of Madness was provided by Tripwire Presents for this review.

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The Stone of Madness

$29.99

7

Score

7.0/10

Pros

• Such a stunning art direction.
• Great mechanics and systems at play.

Cons

• A story with little revelation or excitement.
• Clunky or cumbersome controls.