The Stone of Madness Review – Fantastic concept, frustrating execution

The Stone of Madness is one of the most infuriating games I’ve played in recent memory. I know that’s not exactly the most pleasant thing to say at the beginning of a review, especially for a game I had such high hopes for, but it is how I feel. Developed by The Game Kitchen, the minds behind the excellent Blasphemous, The Stone of Madness seemed like a brilliant idea on paper – a tactical, stealth-focused experience in the vein of Commandos and Desperados where you explore a monastery/madhouse in the role of five different inmates, each with a unique repertoire of skills. Make use of one character’s advantages to compensate for the shortcomings of another in order to cleverly outmaneuver guards? Sounds good to me. The formula can indeed work quite beautifully, even when it’s held back by issues – after all, I’ve enjoyed flawed but otherwise fun games like War Mongrels in recent years, so I figured I’d have a similar experience here. I was wrong.

A rocky start

Okay, so I did sort of half-expect this. When I originally tried The Stone of Madness’ demo, back before the game came out, I experienced issues similar to what I’m about to describe. What I did not realize, however, is that this wasn’t an isolated problem, but something that would relentlessly snowball out of control as I continued to progress in the story, turning every minute spent with the game into an exercise in frustration. I realize that might be a little too vague, though, so let’s talk specifics. The Stone of Madness is an isometric stealth game where you control multiple different characters from a bird’s eye perspective – you’re dropped into a large monastery with multiple floors, rooms and winding corridors, and given a specific task to accomplish. There are, of course, guards everywhere, who will swiftly take you out if they see you do anything suspicious – which is precisely why you must do your work without being seen. Simple, right? Well, no. And I’m not talking about the game having a reasonable level of difficulty: I’m talking about the game doing everything in its power to be a thorn in the player’s side, constantly throwing up reminders of its frustrating, self-imposed mechanical limitations and baffling, player-unfriendly design choices. There is a fine line between being annoying and providing a satisfying challenge, and The Stone of Madness leans more towards the former.

It could’ve been great...

Which is a shame, because the basic concept is otherwise great. Your characters all have a handful of things they’re very good at. To give a few examples: one of them can assassinate guards, another can cast hexes to disarm enemies, while yet another can carry planks to create makeshift bridges or even barricade doors with chains. They all have their phobias, too: the young woman who’s able to get stabby-stabby with the guards is afraid of fire, the big guy who carries planks for you is terrified of the dark, while your witch is unable to perform her spells around mirrors. The priest? Uncomfortable around dead or unconscious bodies. The small child in your team? Afraid of the big, scary gargoyle statues found in the monastery. Everyone has a personal boogeyman – something that drains their sanity meter and makes them unable to use their skills, so you always have to find loopholes and clever ways to work around each obstacle. What’s more, if a character’s sanity drops too low, they will develop traumas that end up complicating things even further.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg – the abilities at your disposal are quite varied and can be further expanded upon with optional upgrades, should you choose to invest in each character’s skill tree or craft new items with the materials you scavenge from the monastery. You can use ropes to let others reach elevated places, craft crowbars to break open doors if you’re out of lockpicks, or place down mousetraps to momentarily distract guards if they step into them. I could go on. Like I said, this all sounds pretty fantastic on paper. In my past coverage, I’ve likened this game to an interesting take on rock-paper-scissors, where you have to micromanage your team’s pros and cons to make the best of each situation with only the meager tools available to you.

Enemy #1: the save system

Sadly, the problems become evident fairly quickly, and probably my biggest gripe with the game is the way it handles saving. Basically, it only uses autosaves, and you’re only given a single save slot per playthrough. This means that everything you do, good or bad, is automatically saved at the end of each day, regardless of how many mistakes you’ve made, how many items you’ve wasted or how deeply you’ve drained your sanity. There is no turning back – time passes in real time while you explore, and the very act of ending a day also comes with an automatic loss of sanity for every single character. In other words, the more you play, the worse off you’ll get, and since autosaves happen at the end of a given day, if you choose to reload in order to retry a certain segment (because, I don’t know, you messed up in a truly spectacular way), you have to redo everything. Let’s say you’ve spent 15-20 minutes scouting out an area, looting every container, gathering items, learning enemy patrol patterns and setting up a plan. Then, when it comes to executing said plan, you mess up, get caught, and one of your characters gets sent back to their cell, rendering them unusable for the rest of that day. Because yes, that can happen, too. Now you’re left with only two characters, unsure if you can still carry out your plan as intended. You either reload and try everything again, or accept your losses and keep moving, knowing that you achieved absolutely nothing – other than wasting your time and resources. Now imagine doing this 5-6 times in a row, and you’re starting to understand just how frustrating and demoralizing it is to play this game. You could be wasting an entire hour just trying to get through a specific part through trial and error, which is pretty much what happened to me.

I understand this is likely by design, and that the developers wanted you to live with the consequences of your actions, but man. I’ve played Commandos. I’ve played Desperados. I even enjoyed the previously mentioned War Mongrels, which, granted, also drove me up the wall a handful of times, but still felt far more manageable than The Stone of Madness. There’s a clear difference between giving the player a fun but doable challenge and turning the entire game into a constant battle against arbitrary mechanics and limitations that make you feel utterly shackled.

Further annoyances

The otherwise interesting “phobia” system is similarly intriguing on paper, but can be dreadful in practice, as the maps are absolutely littered with objects that trigger your characters’ various fears, meaning you can’t go two steps without running into some kind of an obstacle. There’s also the fact that you can only bring three of your five characters with you on a mission at any given time, and the game autosaves the moment you deploy your selected team, meaning you’re locked in. Your lineup can only be changed at the beginning of each day; mid-mission, you’re stuck with the three you’ve selected. This means that if you happen to need a different character for a specific situation, you have to either waste time trying to look for another solution, which is annoying, or end the day, eat a mandatory sanity loss, and switch in your desired character. Which is also annoying, and completely obliterates the pacing of the gameplay.

The graphics, while beautiful, also manage to sabotage your efforts. For starters, it’s all 2D, meaning you can’t rotate the camera in order to have a better look at things. Visual elements can blend into each other at times, as the game’s art style doesn’t lend itself very well to handling multiple floors and overlapping walls. You also can’t scroll too far ahead with the camera to see what potential threats you can expect on the map, so enjoy being detected by an off-screen soldier who will then proceed to shoot your shins off. Managing your characters is yet another source of frustration. There is a tactical pause in the game, but it’s fairly useless. If you were expecting the kind of pause menu where you can strategically queue up actions in advance to coordinate your characters, I have bad news for you. You have to do everything in real time, which just opens you up to making more mistakes as you hastily, and often clumsily, try to simultaneously control three different characters. I mean, I love a cool little distraction stunt as much as the next guy – make one character attract a guard’s attention while another sneaks by and does whatever it is you need to do. But the way it’s handled in The Stone of Madness just felt really unwieldly and tedious.

What if you get caught, though? Do you have any means of fighting back? Well, no. If a guard reaches you, the game locks up and plays a little animation of you getting knocked out. There’s nothing you can do. It’s an “instant fail” event. Should this happen enough times, that character will be made unavailable for the rest of that session, so if you needed them for something... well, tough luck, try again the next day. And enjoy your forced sanity loss, too. As always.

A painful conclusion

Honestly, I really wanted to love this game. It has all the ingredients for success, and it feels like a real passion project – the characters are all diverse, the levels are complex and multi-layered, and there was clearly some potential for juicy stealth gameplay here. Which is why I find it so immensely frustrating that a handful of issues, including a bizarre autosave system, could completely ruin an experience that held so much promise. Granted, there are ways to tone down the difficult by making it harder for guards to spot you, and you can outright eliminate the mandatory sanity loss after each day, but these solutions feel like band-aids for a severed limb. The Stone of Madness is an experience where everything feels like a chore, and challenges are met with eyerolls and tired sighs; rather than feeling like exciting obstacles to overcome, they instead come off as annoyingly arbitrary limitations you’re simply forced to accept. I’m sure there’s an audience for this game, and I respect the effort that was put into pretty much every aspect of the project. But unless you have the patience of a saint, I cannot in good conscience recommend it.