The Stone of Madness: Conduct a monastery heist in the heights of the Pyrenees
8.29.2024
By Francisco Dominguez, Contributor
The best heists assemble a crack team of the world’s best safecrackers, hackers, and con-artists. In this 18th-century monastic prison, you have to make do with the skills and flaws possessed by the inmates you’ll come to know very well. The game pairs unique abilities with intense phobias born from the trauma that led them here in the first place. Each day, you choose a party of three inmates and search for a way out of the penitentiary, hand-painted in the style of renowned painter Francisco de Goya.
TSoM’s Director Maikel Ortega explains they want players to feel like a mastermind. At night, you plan. You choose the next day’s party composition, select your tools, and decide between bribing guards or crafting lockpicks. You recover wounds and restore your sanity. When the first rays of sunlight glint over the mountaintops through your cell’s window, it’s time to execute.
The daytime RTS phase is the bulk of the game, following the monastery’s daily rhythms from morning vigils to evening vespers—and even beyond curfew if you dare to risk leaving your cell after dark.
Facing the consequences of your incompetence
The Game Kitchen is aiming for the deep flexibility often found in the "immersive sims" first pioneered in the '90s, such as the Thief series. Mirroring the expansive options offered by the likes of Dishonored, you won’t teleport through metal railings or summon hordes of rats to do your dirty work. Instead, you’ll navigate through the precisely defined skills and pronounced limitations of your characters, who present a range of options almost matching the variety of isometric RPGs like Black Isle Studio’s original Fallout games, paired with the stealth gameplay of Commandos or Shadow Tactics.
For instance, Leonara has no qualms over knocking out the monastery’s guards, friars, and nuns when they cross her path, but her deathly fear of flames makes fireplaces impassable. Eduardo is the asylum’s longest-serving resident: Unable to speak and afraid of the dark, he’s incapable of communicating with NPCs and struggles to pass unlit halls. Agnes the witch is blind and can’t read any notes she finds, but she can surveil by inhabiting the sight of the monastery’s looming gargoyle (Ortega jokes that she’s their "hacker"). Navigating through the inmate’s combinations of skills and limitations is an intriguing prospect—especially when failure to respect their phobias can add new ones to the mix.
Like any heist, you’ll need to improvise; different party compositions demand different solutions. Leonara may be happy to thump guards into submission, but gentle Alfredo won’t even consider violence. There’s a great variety of ways to approach missions: Level designer Enrique Colinet showed me how inmates can weave through bushes to evade guards or scandalize a fellow inmate by performing a forbidden action, luring guards out of position as they investigate the source of their panicked wailing.
The team doesn't want their game to be as punishing as its miserable setting. In a bid to avoid the frustration and reloading encouraged by stealth mechanics and unsalvageable im-sim fail states, TSoM has no game over screen, no checkpoints, and an outlook intended to deter save scumming. Ortega wants players to “face the consequences of your incompetence” and see the butterfly effect of their decisions unfold.
Even when events don’t go so smoothly, there’ll always be a way out. Guards don’t know you’re working together. Just because they suspect one of you for taking one too many forbidden actions—making one area impassable to that character—that route stays available to others, unless they make the same mistake. As well as the moment-to-moment changes, the team wants the game to reflect a sense of longer-term reactivity. Getting caught too many times in one arena will trigger larger numbers of patrolling guards persistently in that area, which may up the challenge or encourage another approach.
Switching genre and art style
Since Blasphemous and Blasphemous 2 are two of the most memorable Metroidvanias of recent years, you wouldn’t expect a stealth RTS to be The Game Kitchen’s next move. Ortega says TSoM’s surprising genre choice is a product of two important influences on Spain’s unique PC gaming culture.
The first is Commandos, the World War II stealth-RTS series (also found at Gamescom) by Madrid’s sadly defunct Pyro Studios, which invented the stealth-RTS genre and became a phenomenon across the country.
The second is lesser-known outside Spain, having never received an international release: The Abbey of Crime. The 1987 murder mystery—an unlicensed adaptation of 1980 novel The Name of the Rose—had an advanced simulation of monastic life which had a lasting influence on the director and many others. “We all love it, it's one of the most important games made in Spain," Ortega says. "It was a technical beast at the time.”
For this new project, The Game Kitchen has replaced Blasphemous series’ pixel art with hand-painted art and portraits evoking Francisco de Goya’s late delirious paintings of the supernatural. These works were inspired by his firsthand experience with a mystery illness, likely lead poisoning from the paints he used to create memorably twisted creations like Saturn Devouring His Son.
Ortega and Colinet wouldn’t say if Goya’s particularly disturbing artwork has an influence later in the game, but they were pleased to show off their inclusion of another artwork found in the Museo del Prado galleries in-game as a mural: Hieronymus Bosch’s The Extraction of the Stone of Madness. That painting depicts the surgical removal of the “stone of madness," which reflects the superstition that madness manifests as a physical stone within the brain, which inspired TSoM’s title.
For all the fun to be had with sci-fi immersive sims like Deus Ex and System Shock, I’ve always been partial to the cloak-and-dagger pre-modern era found in the Thief series. As a result, I’m looking forward to seeing more of The Game Kitchen’s im-sim-flavored stealth RTS.
You can wishlist The Stone of Madness on the Epic Games Store.