Interesting plot, freeform challenges, and a deeply user-hostile autosave system. Worth it if you've mastered games like Shadow Tactics and don't mind banging your head against a brick wall until it collapses.

This review contains no story spoilers

The Stone of Madness is a stealth game from the creators of Blasphemous. Set in the 18th century, you guide a group of inmates in a monastery in the Pyrenees through an investigation into the dark and macabre goings on. Led by Father Alfredo, you must uncover the mystery behind a series of disappearances and escape.

No review of The Stone of Madness could start anywhere else but with the visuals. Taking from the Goya painting "The Bewitched Man", the hand-drawn artwork gives the game a classic animation look. The character animations run smooth and the models are nicely detailed. Much like Blasphemous, the art drips with religious overtones that colour every aspect of the game.

The levels are richly detailed too. The monastery is a labyrinth with a network of corridors, tunnels and stairways that run through it like a warren. Each section is dreary and lush in equal measure and while the stone rooms started blurring together in my mind making it harder to remember locations and routes (the game has no map), each area has enough to distinguish itself from the rest.

If it's not Artwork that The Game Kitchen get right, then it's the music. The music is perfect. Neat period tracks plays in the background, helping to immerse the player into the setting. From nice piano pieces to lovely string arrangements, the whole soundtrack is expertly tied to the setting on screen.

The sound design is a bit more basic but it does just as good a job as the music, the soundscape is quite muted which gives each major action an impact due to the sound ramping up; the slamming of a cell door, the whack of a baton, the sound of a gunshot, each carries a real impact due to how the sound makes the action stand out as something exceptional.

So the Art, Music and Sound teams did their jobs well, how'd the writers do? Well…not good it has to be said. The premise is basic: you are all imprisoned unjustly, now complete the tasks and get everyone out. There are two scenarios to play which offer two contrasting ways the story can go. The story is delivered through admittedly excellent animated cutscenes or dialogue that's incredibly stilted because the characters are speaking for the benefit of the player, not to each other.

Speaking of the characters, there should be some sort of crime to waste potential this plentiful. Each of them has such a compelling description that isn't fleshed out in the slightest. I'm not asking for hours of flashbacks on each of them but if you're going to create characters this quirky and likeable then you've got to give some backstory. The longer scenario has you seek out a series of engravings which detail the building of the monastery and the mental decay of its engineers but there's no meat to the story to get invested in.

The main gameplay loop is days split into day and night sections, each altering how you progress through the levels. General exploration and interactions are easier during the day, whereas accessing the forbidden areas is usually easier at night when there are fewer people around but then you've got the ghostly animas to contend with too. At the end of every day cycle, you can either do some recon or return to your cell to rest up, recharge, craft and prepare for the next day.

Each of your characters has a different set of skills and figuring out which you need at any given time is essential to progressing. Alfredo can use his background as a priest to deliver guard-distracting sermons, conduct exorcisms, heal and even impersonate a priest allowing him to walk through restricted areas without worry. Leonora serves as the character who can directly knock out or kill guards and carry their bodies. She's also the lockpick and can be upgraded with the ability to throw ropes and even use guns. Eduardo is the muscle who also can knock people out with huge chain swings. He's the resident giant who can move huge boxes and planks to create new paths. Agnes is the witch who can cast spells putting out and starting fires, foreseeing the contents of containers, up to casting hexes on guards and summoning swarms of flies that can eat dead bodies. The group is rounded out by Amelia who functions as the scout. She can crawl through small tunnels, and plant traps to distract or incapacitate guards.

But it's not only your characters' strengths you'll have to manage, you'll also have to manage their fears and maintain their sanity levels. Alfredo can't be near a body, Eduardo is afraid of the dark, Agnes has a thing about mirrors, Leonora is afraid of fire and Amelia is terrified of the stone gargoyles. Their sanity also takes a hit at the end of each day as the stress of incarceration takes its toll. Ensuring they are all recovered before each day is a never-ending task you'll have to stay on top of. Should any of your characters' sanity bottom out, they'll be bedridden until the next day when they'll awake with a new issue for you to contend with such as arthritis meaning no running, or a complex where they'll harm themselves.

It's through these barriers and others that the game adds variety to the gameplay, some of the characters can't read so they're useless for any task involving reading and Eduardo is mute so he can't complete any tasks that need talking. While these seem restrictive, they force the player to think creatively and come up with novel ideas for completing objectives. The game gives you little to no guidance on how to do this and is wide open to allowing the player to come up with any solution to solve them.

Sometimes the barriers can seem contrived though, Eduardo will lose his mind standing in the shade, outside on a sunny day but can be left in a cupboard for hours on end without breaking a sweat, Alfredo is afraid of bodies but only ones that are not plot-specific. Then there are the Soldiers, mother superior and Inquisitor NPC's that serve as the games elite mooks. They're somehow immune to a wide variety of your abilities, including getting shot.

However, the main issue is that the game seems unfinished with a large amount of bugs present. These ranged from minor ones like screen transitions leaving all the previous scenes' characters onscreen to game-breaking ones like objectives not triggering or the particularly annoying one where Alfredo will remove his disguise at the start of every cutscene meaning triggering a cutscene in a room surrounded by guards meant getting caught the instant it ended.

The gameplay also suffers from a lack of Quality-of-life features that are common to the genre. The devs borrowed the stealth mechanics from Commandos and Shadow Tactics but ignored their innovations such as a tactical pause or AI commands. The lack of an ability to queue up actions is an inane one, as so many of the game puzzles depend on multiple actions being performed one after another by different characters, you have to switch to each character manually, reset the screen and hope you can complete the next action in time.

Featuring a Goya-inspired art style, The Stone of Madness will both enthrall and drive you mad. It has as many bugs as it does ideas and playing the game is like walking a tightrope. When it works, it's brilliant, when it doesn't, it's an unplayable mess. Once again the Game Kitchen has managed to perfect the elements surrounding the core of their game but are let down by faults in that core. The controls are jerky and often don't respond in time, the storyline is non-existent, the characters aren't memorable and the gameplay loop gets old FAST. I still really liked what worked though, enough to recommend people keep their eyes on the patch list for this.

Not recommended at this time.
This game by no mean doesn't hold your hand when it comes to game play and exploration which is fine.

But..having such a limit field of vision by having no camera pan, there just too cheap ways for you to get caught by the guards in the game. This game is 100% stealth there is no combat (even though there are "some" elements) BUT it absolutely does punish you on their stealth mechanics. To the point it leads to more frustration than fun.

Much of the "jank" involves the alert of the guards. Their alert meter sometimes gradually fills like its suppose or sometimes its just immediate attack mode. no consistency.
There's story, normal and hard mode. These game play difficulties clearly do not reflect these at this time.

Please allow some camera pan at least. otherwise this is more frustrating than fun.

lastly there are some animation twitches of the guards that occur in game. Hope to see some rebalancing tweak and QoL updates