Too much sanity may be Madness
Tactical stealth games were one of my favorite genres when I was growing up. Oh man, back then we had the Commando series, Desperado series, Jagged Alliance series. As the saying goes, what once was old is new again and almost all of these games have seen a new entry and better still, there is a resurgence in the genre which is awesome. But not every game is a hit and sadly while The Stone of Madness does some neat things, none of them raise it to the level of the classics.
MSRP: $29.99
Platforms: Xbox (reviewed), PlayStation, Switch, PC
Price I’d Pay: $29.99
The Stone of Madness is a weird game that takes place in a corrupt Christian monastery asylum. Developed by The Game Kitchen, Stone of Madness sports the studios stunning hand-drawn art, that brings the Spanish asylum to life in bright and vivid colors. Over the course of the story players will take control of a cast of five unique inmates, each with their own skills and quirks that players will need to use to escape. What makes this game unique is just how jam-packed it feels with features, there is a day-night cycle, survival elements, a suspicion meter and of course because we are in an asylum; a sanity meter.
As a fan of these tactical games and someone who loves when developers try something new, ‘dis tew much’. It’s just a lot of systems, some of which are neat but it doesn’t really add anything meaningful to the game and in fact for all these cool features the team added they omitted the simplest of items: the ability to quicksave. It’s not uncommon to play trial and error in these games with the quick save but players are not able to save whenever they would like in The Stone of Madness much to my chagrin.
Players are given quests to pursue each day and mysteries to investigate. As I said before each of the inmates that players can play as have unique abilities and as such players will have to use all of them to complete their tasks. What was all too common though; is starting a day, scouting out a mission only to realize that my chosen inmate can’t do anything with it. Players can’t switch out their inmate’s mid mission so are forced to complete a day with no progress and basically waste some time. These are really weird design choices, especially considering the developers added so many features to this game that are a first for the genre. How do we mess up the basics just to be fancy?
I wanted to enjoy The Stones of Madness because I really loved The Game Kitchen’s other game series; Blasphemous. Aside from the incredible hand-drawn art style in the Madness game, I wasn’t really a fan of this game. The omission of something as simple and important to tactical-strategy games as the quick save feels like a really big miss. While The Stones of Madness feels unique in its approach to story and indeed the overall mystery; this one just wasn’t for me at the end of the day.
Review copy of game provided by publisher.
