As a big fan of stealth games, I take no pleasure in pointing out that we are a deeply underserved market. Aside from a few modern titles like Hitman or Shadow Gambit, many games now replace a stealth focus with stealth options, teasing players like myself with the idea of sneaking around, but refusing to create compelling consequences for getting caught. Which, if you’re a stealth purist, feels about as satisfying as shoveling a snowy driveway with a soup ladle – just a lot of effort for no real payoff. Accordingly, new entries into the genre that make keeping a low profile more of a necessity than just a cute little blurb for the Steam page will always have my respect.
On the surface, The Stone of Madness, a new real-time tactical stealth title from the creators of Blasphemous, looks similar to games like Shadow Gambit or Desperados III. But the more I played it, the more its variety of gameplay approaches, open-ended level design, and emphasis on character-specific skills made it feel like its own original thing, with some bits and bobs naturally inspired by other titles in the genre. But does The Stone of Madness succeed in paving an original path and giving stealth fans something meaty to chew on, or does it collapse under the weight of its own ambitions? Well, let’s talk about it.
The Stone of Madness sets itself in an 18th-century Spanish Monastery hidden away in the Pyrenees mountains. Within this monastery is a prison and madhouse, where we find our five protagonists struggling to exist under the weight of both their cruel treatment and psychological struggles. As inmates start to disappear, our protagonists begin their journey to find out what secrets the monastery holds and ultimately plan their escape.
I love the backdrop of The Stone of Madness for setting itself somewhere few games have tread before and creating a world both ripe for exploration and filled with numerous dangers. With that said, it’s helpful to go into this story with a hefty suspension of disbelief, because the second you try to break down the logic of any given moment, the whole thing dissolves faster than a paper straw in a margarita.
The plot wastes no time at all in being completely propped up by regular conveniences. For example, the game’s prologue, which also serves as an extensive and very competent tutorial, stars three of our prisoners as they free each other from captivity and proceed to knock out or kill guards while accessing a variety of very prohibited areas. The result? Well, the guards decide to lock them all up together in the cell of the priest character, Father Alfredo, who just happens to have been digging through his wall and discovered an entire room where they can conveniently plan their escape. Needless to say, the believability of this game’s plot is less of a stretch and more of a complete joke, but it can be fun if you let it be. I won’t pretend the writing fares much better, as it’s mostly pretty robotic and did little to keep me engaged in the details of the plot. But what’s here is inoffensive and does well enough as an excuse to traverse a variety of interesting levels.
And interesting they definitely are, because The Stone of Madness consistently impressed me with just how many different gameplay systems it manages to balance. You’ll start each new day picking which characters you’ll bring along with you, as well as which trapdoor in the monastery you want to emerge from to explore and accomplish objectives. Each day only lasts several real-time minutes though – as night falls, the challenge of getting around increases and you’ll be faced with ghostly Animas that wander the halls of the monastery. So, you’re often better off retreating to your cell and taking part in the nightly planning phase, where each character will have a limited pool of points to activate abilities like crafting from items collected during the day, using bandages to heal wounds, or playing the violin to regenerate some of each character’s sanity.
Sanity is arguably the most interesting mechanic in The Stone of Madness, as it has major repercussions for how each of its characters play. Every character has a different phobia that will drain their sanity meter if they’re subjected to it. Alfredo becomes stricken with fear every time he’s near enough to a corpse or incapacitated guard, while Leonara becomes terrified if she walks too close to a large fire. Failing to consider each character’s trauma as you make your way through the monastery could result in their sanity draining all the way, at which point a new phobia awakens inside of them and makes future traversal even harder. The nearer each character is to the source of their phobia, the less they can do and the slower they move, so keeping their psychological needs in mind is of the utmost importance. This results in situations where depending on which characters you’re using, you may or may not want them to travel together. You don’t want Alfredo and Leonara to be together when the priest uses his lamp to light a raging fire, but you do want Alfredo and the giant, Eduardo, to be together when traversing a dark corridor because Alfredo has a lamp and Eduardo is deathly afraid of the dark.
Each character has far more strengths than they do weaknesses, though, and understanding these strengths is both key to making it through each level and the reason the game’s learning curve can feel quite steep even though the tutorials are doing their best. For example, Leonara can kill or knock out guards, hide bodies, tie ropes to ledges for traversal, climb walls, pick locks, and read. Not all of these skills are exclusive to her character, as Alfredo can read as well. But his other skills are completely different, like being able to use his lamp to light the way or spot hidden clues other characters can’t see, use crosses to paralyze Animas, dress in priest robes to hide in plain sight, or give impromptu sermons that draw the attention of a nearby crowd, guards included, while other characters slip around unnoticed. This list of skills isn’t even comprehensive, as it doesn’t include the various unlockable ones that you’ll purchase over time. So, I think it goes without the full description of every character’s skill set to say that each one is both incredibly varied and hardly a one-trick pony. The result is that it takes a lot of time to get truly comfortable controlling each one and understanding their abilities, their foils, and how they synergize with other characters’ skill sets.
Thankfully, all the information you could possibly need about each character, their skills, their upgrades, your objectives, and the game’s systems is readily available in beautifully organized menus that reasonably ensure you have a handy reference to avoid confusion. And you’ll need it, because while there exists a menu option to add more detail to objectives if necessary, and I did find it to be extremely necessary, much of the game will set you loose in a small open environment and task you with figuring out what to do, with more than one option always being feasible. In this sense, playing The Stone of Madness feels like it mixes real-time tactical stealth with aspects of immersive sims like Prey or, arguably, Hitman. And though that may not strike the stealth itch of players looking for a more linear, guided experience, those looking to be rewarded for patient exploration should feel right at home here.
Personally, though, I’m more of the former – a fan of more guided, more linear stealth experiences that encourage multiple approaches but are more straightforward in nature. The prologue of The Stone of Madness felt exactly like the sort of experience I was looking for, as combining character abilities to sneak past or take out enemies was cerebral and fun. But as soon as the game opened up and started giving more open-ended objectives like having to find a specific character or search the level for a particular set of items, cracks in the core mechanics did begin to show. I will say, it’s remarkable how well the experience holds together with dozens of character abilities, crafting, loot, traumas to consider, security levels, and more. You’d think the game would completely buckle under such an unusual combination of complex systems, but elegantly thought-out design makes sure that isn’t the case. It’s easy to see what each character is capable of and how they might help each other out.
Still though, comprehending the game’s mechanics and executing them occasionally felt like the difference between understanding chunks of a foreign language and being able to speak it yourself. For one, controlling multiple characters at the same time can have some hiccups. If they’re all making their way through a prohibited area, for example, and Alfredo is in trouble while you’re controlling Leonara, good luck switching back to him in time to do something about it. There are ways to address that, like having certain characters hide in a wardrobe while you’re not controlling them, but it’s not always a feasible option and can feel unfortunately clunky.
Even so, some objectives feel immensely satisfying to complete, like when I had to determine the identity of a particular friar at the monastery based only on what I could pick from his pockets, and then subject him to his own superstitions by forcing him to look at a broken mirror. Doing so required a combination of several character abilities that felt great to successfully execute.
On the flip side, some levels felt deliberately obtuse in a way that undermines the satisfaction of figuring things out, like a gate that can only be opened by lighting the candle of a random statue. Traversing each level on the normal difficulty setting, especially prohibited areas, is quite difficult in and of itself, something that I obviously don’t have a problem with given my love of stealth games with real consequences. But if I’m making my way through a prohibited area where I’m constantly moments from getting caught, it would be nice to feel more confident that I’m making actual progress. And the feeling of spending an in-game day meticulously studying guard patterns and making your way around them only to find out you were in the wrong place to begin with is utterly exhausting. Getting caught too much will also raise the security level at the monastery, which will result in more guards and some baffling obstacles like randomly placed bear traps. Again, this game can be really hard to take seriously when you’re free to walk among the guards and inmates yet have to be on the lookout for random bear traps that can end that character’s run for the day. If you needed that character to execute your plan, well, too bad! Wait for tomorrow.
Less helpful still is that The Stone of Madness has a number of bugs to iron out that range from relatively benign to frustratingly defeating. In one section, there was an optional approach that required all three of my characters at the time – Amelia, Leonara, and Alfredo, to work in tandem to infiltrate the cell of an inmate and find a hidden passageway that Amelia could crawl through to complete the objective. But even when I did everything right, that hidden passageway never appeared, though ironically did so in a later objective when I no longer needed it. A funnier bug, albeit one stressful enough to give heart palpitations, was that upon exiting the game it would frequently tell me that it hadn’t saved for over an hour, and knowing there was no way of manually doing so I was pretty scared to close out. Turns out that wasn’t the case and the game autosaves very frequently – it’s just the exit prompt, for whatever reason, hasn’t yet gotten the memo.
Visually, there is a lot to love about The Stone of Madness. Its hand-painted art style and meticulous attention to environmental detail make it a fascinating game to look at, with lots of color and scenic variety that still manages to strike a uniquely dreary tone. Performance is a mixed bag though, with the game easily hitting 60 fps in early areas on both the Steam Deck and my laptop running an RTX 4060, but the more open levels bafflingly dropping into the 40s and 50s in both cases, despite what would seem to be a relatively lightweight visual style. While the soundtrack wasn’t quite as memorable to me, it’s still perfectly fitting for the game’s mood and does a nice job of rounding out the presentation.
In the end, The Stone of Madness is a potentially fantastic game that for me, felt dragged down by numerous and often major frustrations. Its open level design and mechanical complexities are as much an asset to it as they are its downfall at times, and depending on who you are as a gamer, that might not sound so bad. Those looking for an open-ended experience that rewards exploration while remaining consistently demanding throughout might find one of their favorite games of 2025 here, especially given there are two separate campaigns to play through, each with a hefty helping of content. For others, the patience required may drive them to madness indeed.
GOOD
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