The Indie Informer

My mind is split in two — which thematically works pretty well for The Stone of Madness, the new game from the creators behind the Blasphemous franchise. Its animated cutscenes manifest movement and personality, harkening back to works like Dragon’s Liar or The Sword in the Stone. However, the irresistible style is, unsurprisingly from The Game Kitchen, shaded quite a bit darker here.

The gameplay loop also looks back in time for its genre: Strategic stealth, which I’ve long been a fan of and have seen increasingly fewer examples. I’m perfectly content to lurk in the shadows clocking patrol routines and plotting out possible infiltration routes. It is intensely hard to put down even before weighing in the pull of the historical setting and clandestine plot.

So why am I of two minds if the gameplay is absorbing and the worldbuilding is captivating? It’s almost like two unrelated teams worked on each part and at no point communicated with the other. The bizarre stitching of two aspects has left me baffled, though I still find the game hard to put down.

I’ve put eight hours into The Stone of Madness so far. Honestly, I suspect I’ll finish it, partly because it’s an excellent Steam Deck experience and podcast game. It does have a day/night cycle, but time isn’t an enemy. Rather it’s a currency I spend to gather knowledge before enacting — what I hope is — my perfectly laid plans.

For those who may not be familiar with the game, I wrote a preview you can check out. As a quick summary, players control a group of deeply flawed inmates in an eighteenth-century monastery’s insanity ward. Indeed, each individual has their struggles, including an unmanageable fear of fire or the dark, which makes my tasks even more difficult. However, they also boast essential skills, like lockpicking or spellweaving.

This merry band comes together after the mysterious death of a fellow inmate, revealing a conspiracy surrounding a supernatural stone. I played out finding this woman and discovering the stone over a three-hour prologue. During that time I had tutorials, like you’d expect, and built up my team’s synergies and resources. In the end, I was given a choice that promised to drastically change the game’s narrative path.

What it also drastically changed was my opinion. After picking my path, the game seemed to have started all over again in a way. The tutorials came back as if I’d never seen them, all of my hard-earned loot was inexplicably gone, and the narrative became unignorably disjointed.

The opening cutscene made it seem as though I had, in the past, collected a crew and brought them all into my base. Even after the prologue, though, it still seemed like my teammates hadn’t officially joined in my cause and I still had to get everyone together. It was like the narrative and gameplay were there, it was just no one had a vision for melding the two coherently.

Confused, I moved on seeking to unravel the mystery at The Stone of Madness‘ heart. The inconsistencies have yet to resolve themselves, but the gameplay and world maintain their iron grip on me even hours later. Maybe the game’s dazzling disparate pieces will blend as I reach its conclusion. At least I hope, lest I join the characters in their disoriented prison.