Modern tactical stealth games have big shoes to fill. A genre with very little, if anything, going on after the 2000s, when its staple series stopped releasing, saw a significant resurgence thanks to the efforts of Mimimi Games. Unfortunately, after several highly acclaimed titles, they shut down at the end of 2023. Is the cycle doomed to repeat now that another group of pioneers is moving on, or will new contenders enter the spotlight?
The Stone of Madness aims to bring the genre forward with some modern, popular mechanics. Survival elements, a day-night cycle as well as health, suspicion, and sanity meters define the experience, with a cast of five unique inmates of a corrupt Christian monastery asylum exploring its secrets to escape. The beautiful, hand-drawn character and environment art bring this colorful Spanish setting to life, as is now a standard for the developer The Game Kitchen, yet, the overall package feels comparatively lifeless.
I love weird things, and this is certainly a very unique, experimental take on the genre, but I just do not think this particular combination of tactical stealth and survival does it any favors. It instead ends up feeling like a conventionalization of the former, and an unsatisfying loop of the latter. Plenty of little changes were made to the typical stealth formula that seemed interesting at first, but never quite amounted to any satisfying or interesting conclusion.
What Stone of Madness ends up feeling like is a smaller-scale, more restrictive version of games that came before it. The two campaigns are played on their unique maps, which you will be exploring, observing, and uncovering more of with each new story mission. You get to choose a section of the map you start at (if you found and opened the entrance beforehand), but you will largely be traversing the same hallways and passages.
These locations tend to feel smaller than your standard stealth game, with the fixed camera and sectioned-off rooms, likely to facilitate easier traversal through the safe spots to get to the prohibited areas which you have to sneak through, faster. Each of them, however, is also filled with lootable containers, and sometimes other points of interest, interacting with which being an action that draws the attention of the different types of guards.
In theory, looting provides a form of distraction when waiting for a guard to pass or after completing your goal for the day, yet their sheer amount quickly makes gathering materials redundant. Aside from the first few days of a new campaign, I never felt like I was carefully managing resources. This missed opportunity likely comes from the decision to not have containers restock. Instead of a few, deliberate spots you would have to plan parts of your days around to get items, after your first sweep of a new area is finished there is precious little to do in the downtime.
Nighttime sections, though short, get particularly repetitive. I would always use the same few abilities to regain health and sanity I lost by basically forcing certain objectives knowing how small of a consequence I would face. Should something break or should I run out of certain materials, I also always had a few special keys lying around, allowing me to gain a massive amount of resources by opening rare chests during the most dangerous midnight curfew times.
This issue strikes particularly hard in moments where your selected team just cannot even begin to approach a story mission. Many story missions require skills that either only one or two people possess (three on occasion, though this might require unlocking an additional skill), meaning that it is highly likely your day can consist of entering the monastery, scouting out the issue for a minute, and then skipping to the end of the day to bring out the required party members, as they cannot be switched mid-day.
The most dangerous aspect of Stone of Madness comes in the form of additional afflictions gained when a character’s sanity meter reaches zero. These can get quite invasive, as an affliction can prohibit the use of certain actions, and healing them requires the use of a rare piece of loot only found on some of the corpses scattered around the darkest recesses of the monastery.
There are also the hilariously placed bear traps found on the monastery grounds, taking away three health when stepped on. With the typically calming music, I would often absent-mindedly walk over ones placed near entrances, which for some characters meant an instant knockout, missing an entire day. Why are there random bear traps on the ground of an asylum? And how do these spruce up the gameplay at all when most do not even block anything?
Another lacking genre staple is the quicksave—another change made to facilitate the survival playstyle. In such a case, failing may lead to a character who may just be your only way to progress becoming unavailable for the day. Back to the cell for you, come back tomorrow! In cases like this, I ended up wishing for an easier way to track enemy movements and cones of vision.
Some tactical stealth games have a tool for that: a marker you would place on the ground which would show if the point highlighted by it lies within anyone’s vision range. Its absence, and other tools that could make planning clearer, highlight a missing link between the two genres The Stone of Madness inhabits. If the punishments are greater than the majority of similar titles due to the survival focus, then perhaps preparing should be more approachable. Instead, allowing only one cone of vision to be visible at a time, having the fixed camera cover up rooms and an occasional hiccup with the controls leads to many hectic, yet unenjoyable situations.
Even when ignoring the somewhat mindless resource gathering, it becomes difficult to focus on even the best parts of the game’s stealth systems. Towards the end of a campaign, I started taking more risks and found myself in tense situations, unsure whether I would be able to slip by a tough spot or two. If you forget that you can just open one door a day and instead really push yourself to get things done in one segment, The Stone of Madness can have its moments.
When the mysteries of the monastery start coming together, there is a good amount of stuff to chew on. Approaching a statue or an NPC with one character may provide new insight into the story of another, and it quickly becomes easy to root for this band of misfits, to want to see them escape their increasingly disturbing circumstances. Though their dialogue is never particularly exciting, their presence and unique gameplay bring them to life, as is usual for tactical stealth.
For the first time playing a game, I wish a game as weird as The Stone of Madness was a bit more conventional. Or, rather, conventional in a different way. Instead of taking popular elements and structures from modern games, I would love to play a version of this that fits more into the standard tactical stealth mold, where each section of the monastery would constitute one level.
Perhaps best served as an entry-point to the genre, The Stone of Madness is a kind of curiosity that I find difficult to recommend. I want to champion it for its attempts at innovation following the departure of a celebrated pioneer, but instead, I ended up passionless towards its new formula. Though it holds plenty of promise, forcing myself to like it more would probably drive me to madness.
Mateusz reviewed The Stone of Madness on PC with a review code.
