The Stone of Madness review – 18th century stealth ’em up with a devilish psychological twist

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. There is a monastery located high in the mountains of Europe. Grisly secrets lurk within its fortified walls: inhabitants afflicted by strange diseases; bodies dropped from towers, chickens pecking at the bits of splattered brain. Scariest of all? The sheer hypocrisy of those who profess love to God and their fellow humans yet never miss an opportunity to subjugate – with words, cane, or an object much sharper – those more vulnerable than themselves.

The Stone of Madness may be set in the 18th century, a full 350 years on from Umberto Eco’s masterful monastic mystery The Name of the Rose, yet the game is clearly indebted to the literary phenomenon. Actually, the game approaches the novel via an unusual source, a 1987 adventure video game adaptation called The Abbey of Crime, “one of the most important games made in Spain,” said The Stone of Madness director Maikel Ortega.

What we have is not so much a straightforward adaptation as an interpretation twice removed which attempts to translate the spirit and structure of Eco’s book into video game form. Naturally, there is a mystery to be solved, one involving nefarious clergymen. But you are not playing as a detective (or equivalent) parachuted into these sacred halls, but as a cast of inmates imprisoned within them. That’s the other big point of departure from Eco’s book: this monastery, rendered in ravishing, illustrated style, doubles as an asylum which, of course, is just another word for a prison in this historical setting. Here come lashings of agony, guilt, and heresy!

On the face of it, The Stone of Madness is a departure for Spanish studio, The Game Kitchen. Its previous games, 2019’s Blasphemous and its 2023 sequel, were robust, immaculately crafted works of homage to 16-bit action-platformers, elevated by genuinely depraved Catholic art. The Stone of Madness is an isometric stealth adventure with a dollop of immersive sim (and just a little less blood). It sees The Game Kitchen furrowing a more distinct mechanical path, and mostly executing on it.

This isometric monastery is large and ornately detailed, protected by a militia’s worth of club and gun-wielding guards. Playing as a band of plucky escapees, including devoted priest Alfredo and elderly witch Agnes, you’re free to move about some areas with relative freedom (like the dusty courtyard that sits next to a vegetable garden) while others are strictly off limits (like the plush living quarters of more distinguished patients). You’re aiming to avoid arousing suspicion while likely standing in a guard’s beady-eyed cone of vision. Fail to do so and you must scarper to the nearest hidey-hole, Alfredo’s white nightgown wafting as he runs.

If you know the Commandos or Desperados games, all this will sound very familiar. The rub comes in the form of the clock: as time advances, levels change (you don’t want to get stuck in the refectory while the monks are having lunch, for example). Choose to linger at night and areas will become further restricted; you must also reckon with both patrolling guards and the spirits that haunt the monastery. Then, having turned into a dank cell for the night, further opportunities arise: trade on the black market; heal party members; comfort one another to assuage the group’s darkest thoughts.

That’s another key difference between The Stone of Madness and its stealthy forebears: each of your characters has a sanity meter which you will want to keep topped up, lest they spiral into despair.

Pity poor Eduardo, a towering man with gangly limbs, hunched back, and a heart of gold. He provides the group’s muscle, capable of heaving massive planks of wood to make walkways to unreachable areas and throwing rubble to distract guards. He is also afraid of the dark – not exactly an ideal trait in this dimly lit monastery. At the outset of the game, you control only Alfredo and this gentle giant. Such was my incompetence, I quickly whittled away at Eduardo’s precious sanity (mainly by absent-mindingly leaving him in the dark).

With each chunk of sanity diminished, Eduardo developed a new malady: claustrophobia, meaning he could not hide in enclosed spaces; cowardice, meaning he could not commit illegal acts in prohibited areas. Quickly, my loyal mammoth became a husk of his former self, so weakened as to become useless. So I left him in the cell, only putting him to use at night to either craft objects, or worst of all, partaking in back-breaking manual labour in a bid to convince the prison that neither he nor his co-conspirators posed a threat. It felt like a sad and all too likely demise for a man who had already been through so much.

I relay the fate of Eduardo because it demonstrates how the game’s systems, even in moments of irrefutable failure, whirr to produce narratively and mechanically coherent outcomes. Another instance involves Leonarda, a feisty heroine capable of cold-blooded murder. Except after slaying an unwitting foe, she is riddled with shame, slashing at her arm in a fit of unsettlingly animated self-harm, thus cleaving a heart from her set of lives. The effect is temporary but this is nonetheless an ingenious act of video game balancing – wince-inducing and elegant in equal measure.

Alas, if only every aspect of the game was so effective. There is some clunkiness in controls, notably when directing characters about as a group and the path-finding leads following members into enemy lines of sight. Another niggle: having to manually move each character into a trap door (the game’s fast-travel system) one at a time rather than as a single unit.

The bigger issue is the mystery which, to put it bluntly, is not especially absorbing, and the actual script, which doesn’t exactly jump from the screen as Eco’s brilliant prose leaps from the page. This is a wordier and more straightforwardly plot-driven game than the Blasphemous games, which mostly eschewed specific plotting for arcane motivations and a dread-filled atmosphere. The indistinct, overarching narrative gets lost in the objectives that occur over the game’s ambitious day-and-night structure. More than once, I forgot why I was completing a particular task, such as the setpiece which involves talking down a monk from a violent paranoid episode. The completion of such objectives does not usually lead to narrative epiphanies – casting the mystery in a new light – but to further its busywork, like looking for a precious emblem in the great crack that carves down one of the monastery’s immaculate sandstone walls. The plot advances, but not in an especially tantalising, tension-filled way.

And yet, if The Stone of Madness’ mystery falls short of greatness, then the game nonetheless summons a great quality of mystery fiction. While skulking about cloisters and slipping past guards, when your team combines seamlessly and enemy AI goes your way, the game is an electric combination of coincidence, luck, skill and opportunity. It speaks to a subtle, but deviously entertaining shift in perspective between The Stone of Madness and The Name of Rose: the player isn’t just solving a riddle but perpetuating one, too. What fun Eco’s Franciscan monk William of Baskerville would have decoding this tangled web of actions!

Still, for all the game’s lighthearted sleuthing and slinking, it does not shy away from dreadful subject matter, concerning itself, to a large degree, with the Church’s often monstrous real-world legacy. The most affecting story is that which occurs through the bodies and minds of its uniformly endearing characters. As they are beaten and maimed by fearsome monks and brutish henchmen, a slow accretion of hardship takes place. It is not the enjoyably flexible stealth action, nor the undercooked mystery, or even the lavish monastery that lingers in the mind, but their human suffering. Foregrounding this emotion is reason enough to tell such a story again.

A copy of The Stone of Madness was provided for review by publisher Tripwire Interactive.