A stealth puzzle game with an intense sense of intrigue, The Stone of Madness takes place in the grim setting of a 17th century Spanish monastery. The game tells the story of five playable prisoners trapped within the monastery under the watch of brutal guards and harsh nuns, with only unfortunate asylum patients for company.

The game begins with an engaging and well-crafted tutorial. You start off as Alfredo, a sharp-witted priest whose personal investment in the wellbeing of his fellow patients drives him to follow guards escorting a traumatised young woman through the building. Clear instructions show you how to sneak through the forbidden areas of the monastery and make use of Alfredo’s particular skills to avoid detection and reveal clues to the mystery. You are introduced to other core characters, learn their backstories, as well as how to switch between the different characters to make best use of their different abilities.

Each character has weaknesses as well as skills, and you have to keep an eye on their mental health throughout the day. As well as being an interesting gameplay mechanic, this cleverly gives each character’s story a function within the gameplay and makes each of them feel more grounded and human. Their fears are not uncommon; the little girl, Amelia, is afraid of scary gargoyles, while the ethically-driven priest, Alfredo, is traumatised by seeing evidence of violence and suffering. This focus on their mental wellbeing as much as their physical health ties neatly into the torturous aspects of the historical setting and ramps up the tension at the heart of the game.

Once the tutorial ends, The Stone of Madness enters a day-night cycle. Each morning, you can select up to three of your five playable characters to tackle the tasks of the day. Half the day you are free to roam the accessible areas of the monastery largely unimpeded, so long as no guards see you committing forbidden actions like unlocking doors or looting boxes. After a set amount of time, the monastery is haunted by animas, an element that makes great use of the game’s spiritual setting, which deal much harsher punishments than the human guards. You can stay out beyond curfew, but you’re much more likely to be caught and punished.

In the evening, your characters have additional skills, including healing their mental and physical resources, crafting useful items, and bartering with the guards for either items or a blind eye the next day. Strategising to keep your team alive overnight is as necessary as the thought required to survive the day.

Navigating the monastery is in itself a puzzle. There are multiple ways you can take advantage of your characters’ skills to distract the guards and access various blocked areas of the building to hunt down the information you need. The tasks you have to complete are clearly recorded in your logs, but you have to figure out how to do that yourself. Deciding where in the monastery to look, to whom to speak, and which characters will be best suited to those investigations is left largely down to you. 

Not long into the game, you get the choice of giving the titular stone to one of two characters. This choice determines which of two narratives your game will follow. Each offers an equally rich mystery that requires your skill in sleuthing and strategy to unravel. The game indicates roughly how long each storyline will take, with a percentage tracker in your save slot showing your process.

The puzzles are often challenging, which is only compounded by the necessary stealth. It can get frustrating knowing what you need to do, but being scuppered by the fierceness of the guards. At times, however, that works in the game’s favour by heightening the sense of desperation integral to the setting. Ultimately, finding solutions is massively rewarding, and the sense of chipping away at a seemingly overwhelming force certainly feels like a core element of the game.

The Stone of Madness is a stunningly designed game. As well as the story being a deep mystery and the characters rich with personality, the visual art is gorgeous throughout. The monastery you explore is beautiful, with a design that showcases the glory of the era’s religious architecture. It’s impossible to miss the cruelty etched in the face of the Mother Superior as she patrols the corridors or the anguish in the eyes of the tortured monastery inmates. The visuals are only enhanced by immensely impressive animated cutscenes that are nothing short of cinematic.

Overall, this makes for an absorbing and intriguing game with a fantastically ominous atmosphere. However, my copy of The Stone of Madness suffers from some kind of bug that causes it to crash. The trigger is unclear as, over the course of a few weeks, it has crashed at the end of the in-game day or when trying to switch between characters and, most recently, when using one particular move. I hope the devs are aware of this and are working on a fix because right now it crashes consistently in the same place preventing me from continuing with the story, which I would very much like to do. Once this is patched out, I’m confident this is going to be a uniquely interesting and well-crafted game. For the time being, it feels tragically incomplete.