The Stone of Madness, a new tactical-stealth video game, delivers two meaty campaigns inside a Spanish monastery that doubles as an asylum at the close of the 1700s. One concerns church corruption while the other delves into the secrets of the dwellers of the monastery. In both campaigns, your motley band of inmates conspire to outfox their guardians, including monks, soldiers, nuns and an inquisitor.
The narratives pick up a historical thread noted by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in “Madness and Civilization,” a study of the West’s long and varied history of identifying and treating people who fall afoul of society’s norms. One of the prevailing trends in 18th-century Europe, Foucault said, was to confine the “insane,” the poor and the religious and political outcasts to places where they might not be seen or heard.
Taking a cue from the Darkest Dungeon series, each of the five main characters in The Stone of Madness is burdened by phobias and has particular strengths and corresponding skill trees. At night, they can retire to a room to strategize and buff one another’s stats; a violin recital increases everyone’s sanity.
Players can wander about the monastery while controlling up to three characters at a time. The choices are quite distinct: Father Alfredo, a priest who goes from investigating the questionable goings on at the monastery to being a prisoner there; Leonora, a woman from a bourgeois background whose family packed her off because of her fiery temperament; Amelia, a young orphan; Agnes, an elderly woman proficient in witchcraft; and Eduardo (one of the asylum’s longest-serving inmates), a tall man with great strength who is also mute.
When the characters come into contact with the source of their fears — violence, darkness, mirrors, fire and, for Amelia, the asylum’s gargoyles — their individual sanity meters are depleted. If their meters reach zero, they are burdened with new ailments like migraines, back pains or claustrophobia.
Cycling through the characters and using their abilities — Eduardo can use a crowbar to remove obstacles, while Father Alfredo can don a priest’s robes to pass undetected by most guards — to overcome tactical challenges is invigorating.
At one point, I hit a wall trying to get Agnes to stand on a crate in a heavily patrolled area so that Eduardo could move her into a position that would have otherwise been impossible for her to reach. But then I felt like a master strategist after taking a step back and unlocking a skill upgrade for Leonora that allowed her to forge a letter at night to reduce the security in a particular area, as well as another for Eduardo that allowed him to pass along valuable items to the monastery’s staff at night so he could enter prohibited areas without trouble.
Returning to the section that had frustrated me numerous times, I breezed through and felt the rush of executing a well-conceived plan.
“When we were working on the final set of skills and disorders in the game, we wanted to reach two different sweet spots,” the game’s director, Maikel Ortega, said. “One thing was for each character to cover a role like the ones you see in heist movies — one of them can act as the specialist in sneaking around, the other as a hacker.”
Ortega, who works for the Game Kitchen, a Spanish studio that developed Blasphemous, added that the level design in The Stone of Madness took a lot of inspiration from immersive sims like Dishonored and Hitman.
“We want the player to experiment and choose their own solution for a certain problem,” he said.
Aside from its snazzy mechanics, The Stone of Madness also sports beautiful visuals. José Antonio Gutiérrez, the game’s creative director, said its art direction was heavily inspired by the paintings of Goya. The studio used actors to convey the physical movements of the characters and then painted over their performances to achieve the final aesthetic.
“The backgrounds of the game are very detailed and hand painted,” Gutiérrez said. “But the animation of the characters has more to do with Disney classical animation — cells of plain colors with only one shadow” beneath a character.
Ortega said he hoped that players would enjoy the game’s take on “people fighting against the odds and taking care of each other.” Given the real-life madness on display these days, that’s a cozy sentiment to sink into.
The post In a Monastery Turned Asylum, Outcasts Must Band Together appeared first on New York Times.
