Review - The Stone of Madness

Developer: The Game Kitchen

Publisher: Tripwire Interactive

Available on: Steam, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X|S, Microsoft Windows

Review system: PC (Steam)

I absolutely love stealth games. And I love unique ideas for games. When I got the original press release for the bizarre The Stone of Madness, about a prison break and mystery around an 18th-century Spanish monastery turned insane asylum, I was intrigued. The hand-drawn artwork was gorgeous and the whole thing reminded me of a certain Game of the Year contender from a few years back, Pentiment, another hand-drawn game about a murder-mystery-solving traveling artist in 15th century Bavaria. I also used to play a series called Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines, where you had a six-man team of specialists that each had individual abilities you could use to complement one another and slip past Nazi guards and destroy objectives.

And so, when the review code came along for The Stone of Madness, I jumped on it. But it’s been a disappointing experience and one that came to a surprising ending for me.

Come to the Asylum

You play as Father Alfredo, a man who has been locked up in this monastery because he had the nerve to question the powers that be about corruption within the church. Not exactly one to sit back and let this injustice go, Alfredo finds that there is dark work afoot within this monastery, where the church appears to be allowing doctors to do experiments on the mental patients. As Alfredo is quietly working towards uncovering the truth of what is going on at the monastery, he befriends what becomes the rest of his ragtag group of escapists and the team that you will be using to conduct your investigation: Leonora, the hot-headed murderer, Amelia, a child who is being groomed for sisterhood within the monastery who is not interested, Agnes, an old witch with occult powers, and Eduardo, gentle giant and mute.

Each one of the five characters have their powers that help with your investigation: Eduardo can use his brute strength to open objects with crowbars and push giant objects around, but he’s bitterly afraid of the dark. Amelia can squeeze through crawl spaces and between bars in gates, but she’s afraid of the gargoyles that regularly line the map as a part of the church. With their abilities, each of the five have the ability to neutralize each other’s fears: Father Alfredo can use a cross to “sanctify” a gargoyle from an area and make it so Amelia isn’t scared by it. Agnes can use a dousing spell to put out most fires that Leonora is afraid of. Fortunately, the team isn’t crippled by the fear and can run through areas where something is traumatizing them, at the cost of their sanity meter. Each team member has one, and if it completely depletes before the day ends, your teammate is sent back to their cell and they develop a permanent negative attribute that is designed to make your life a little less pleasant at the asylum. The attributes can be healed by Agnes, but at a steep cost.

Each day, after you assemble your team, you select three of your team to go into the asylum and wander around to complete missions to help you uncover the truth of the experiments at the asylum, where most of the time is generally utilizing your team's ability to open up a safe path for the rest of your team to get to where they need to go. Guards can be knocked out for a short amount of time, but wake up. Leonora is the only team member who can kill actual guards, but that elevates the alert status of the area of the asylum, which makes future forays more difficult as they increase the guards and countermeasures. The day/night cycle is about five minutes long, and then there is an “overtime” nighttime where the entire convent is on lockdown and anyone seen out is immediately suspect. Most of the time, there are places in the asylum where your characters can wander around freely, but there are parts that are off-limits and if you’re caught there, the guards will happily escort you back to the open area with a beating (lowering your health).

Then, every evening, your team reconvenes back in your hideout within the cells to plan for the next day. There are a variety of things that your team can do to while away the midnight hours, such as have Leonora play a ditty on her violin to raise everyone’s sanity, or Father Alfredo can bandage up any wounds you receive or read any books you find in your exploration to level up your team’s abilities. You can only do so much every night, and you also have a limited amount of resources in the game as well.

Going Insane

So that’s the game, and I’m playing through it, but man, it is kicking my ass. And not exactly in a good way. I’m playing on normal difficulty, where there’s a moderate amount of sanity loss every night you go back to your cells, whether or not you go out or not, so you’re constantly fighting the decaying sanity of your team. One of the big problems I’ve had with the game is the isometric, top-down view of the game. Once upon a time, the original Grand Theft Auto (and I’m talking the very first one), was a top-down game with an extremely limited field of view; any time you’d try to take your car out and really put your foot on the floor, you’d almost instantly run into something the camera wasn’t able to show you, but your character would have easily seen if you could see in front of you. This is a very similar situation, and despite being able to set the camera to three different distances from your active team member, I felt like I was constantly getting spotted from off-camera. There are, of course, countermeasures in place if you get seen so as to not get caught, with running away and finding a place to hide being the most obvious ones. A major portion of the game is using one of your teammates to distract the guards while another teammate is breaking in somewhere and stealing something or pickpocketing an unsuspecting guard, and there were many times in the game where I would sacrifice one teammate to get another teammate where I needed them to go. But I’m also now 10 hours into the game and my resources are getting extremely limited. The guards are on permanent high alert and I don’t have the resources to bring the alert level back down, and the lack of a way to go to an earlier save makes experimenting and then going back impossible. Everything is on the fly, and with a game like The Stone of Madness, where every failure means losing more finite resources, I am literally to a point in the game where I was considering starting the whole thing over again.

Speaking of high alert, the more times you get caught, the higher your alert status goes, which means they add more guards. But another thing that they add are freakin’ bear traps. That’s right, bear traps. Usually in hallways where you can’t get around them, and there’s no way to trigger them, so you just have to use poor Eduardo’s big dumb ass to walk into it and take three pips of damage so the rest of your team can get past it. It’s one thing to put them in open areas, but as far as I can tell you can’t trigger the traps with anything, as I’ve tried by throwing Amelia’s mousetraps and Eduardo’s rocks at them. It’s a BIG problem in the game as things get more complicated, and to have an unpassable trap that resets itself over time…I literally feel like I must be doing something wrong here. I’m surprised one of the characters doesn’t have a “disarm trap” ability.

Bugs Under My Skin

The save system is broken right now, as I’m guessing that it’s a glitch that needs a day-one patch. There is no manual save in the game, while the game autosaves at the end of every day. However, the autosave isn’t tied into the clock properly, and there is nothing more sweaty than playing for hours and hours, deciding it’s time to take a break, and then the game is nice enough to tell you that you haven’t saved in six hours, are you sure you want to quit? Closing the game down that first time was a real “Russian Roulette” style feeling, but it did come back. Easy enough fix, but the game is out in a week.

One of the problems I had with The Stone of Madness is that I was a little more under the impression that each area was its own contained mission: i.e. chapter one is laid out in the first area, chapter two in the second, etc. But that is not the case. You start to really get the layout of the entire monastery. However, during an early quest, it involves you hunting for love letters of a certain friar to a certain nun there in a convent. The problem is that they introduce that mission next to one of the hardest areas of the map, the Inquisitor’s office, which requires your entire team to have a backpack full of tricks to disable the guards around them…only to find that the letters are nowhere near his office. Come to find out the letters are literally scattered across the entirety of the map, forcing you to double back and use new abilities you’ve since learned to uncover them. But I didn’t know that, and the game doesn’t exactly tell you that. So I wasted countless hours and resources banging my head trying to figure out how to get into this Inquisitor's office (because where else would some damning love letters be hiding but in the Inquisitor’s desk, come on gang), only to find out that they were in an area back at the beginning of the game.

The game has multiple glitches. Threw a switch to create a bridge across a gap, only to have the game not recognize that the one side of the bridge wasn’t touching the far side, and I couldn’t cross. Obviously, the save glitch isn’t great, but it’s a minor nuisance. I was running from a guard doing a suicide run with one of my guys, so as they were getting caught, I switched characters to take advantage of the guard being away and the overlay broke to where I had to shut the game down and I lost the entire day’s worth of progress.

And here’s a fun little “the hell do I do here?” moment: The girl, Amelia, or whatever, gets a hand scythe for plants, and there’s a plant that she and the rest of the team can reach that you need. However, the only one of the fellows who actually has the “herbalism” skill is Agnes, the old woman. You need to climb up on a box to reach it, and she tells you she’s too old to do it. So despite having everything, both characters can’t do anything. There is no secret passage to get there. I am literally stuck and I legitimately am curious to see how you get past this point. As a matter of fact, at the time of this writing, I wrote to the PR team to see if they could get me an answer because this is insane. I’m going to write to the devs and see if they have a Discord chat of reviewers or something to see if anyone has a solution to this one, because, I’m not sure what the answer is here.

Verdict

Look, I really wanted to see The Stone of Madness to its rightful conclusion, but I ran into a brick wall (the mandrake problem) and have decided to call it. But apart from that, The Stone of Madness is a stealth game that only the hardest of hardcore stealth action fans are going to be able to appreciate. The story is compelling and blessedly different, and the artwork is fantastic, but the most important part, the gameplay, is tricky here. Stealth action games are about trial and error, and having the cost of failure get more and more expensive with each in-game night that passes adds a level of grief. Adding the inability to go back to an earlier save with your single auto-saving save slot means you’re stuck with your mistakes. For a game coming out next week, the handful of bugs that I ran into, while minor, were still obnoxious and causing me problems in the game.

Bottom line, when I got to this mandrake problem and got absolutely stuck, I was somewhat relieved that I could put the game away and call it a day. I was not enjoying turning on my computer to play the game, and that usually is a sign that I should stop playing.

I am looking forward to seeing a walkthrough for this puzzle so I can slap my forehead and say, “Oh, of course, that’s it”, but using the mechanics the game has laid out for me, I am wildly stuck.

(I did end up reaching out to PR, who reached out to the team and the team told me how to reach that mandrake. Spoiler alert: I never would have figured it out on my own.)

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