The new title from Spanish developer The Game Kitchen, previously known for their ‘Blasphemous’ series, is simultaneously new and familiar terrain for the studio. The religious iconography of their previous titles is alive and well, but gone is their Metroidvania action to be replaced by the tactical stealth of trying to escape an 18th-century monastery. Besides some frustrations with its resource management and a few lacking stealth mechanics, The Stone of Madness does a compelling job recreating the rhythm of classic prison break fiction.

The player takes control of five characters with their own backstories, abilities and phobias who must navigate the monastery grounds to find a way to escape. Each character is impressively distinct and well-realised, even if the lack of voice acting does hurt their memorability. They range from rogue Leonora, who comes from a privileged background and suffers bouts of violence, to the wizened witch Agnes, who feels ripped straight from a Brothers Grimm’s fairy tale (the original gothic kind), to silent giant Eduardo who can capably break down barriers but alludes to a deeply traumatised past.

The games place across a relatively effective tutorial level and then two separate campaigns, depending on an initial choice the player makes, that follow entirely different plots. The game wears its influences on its sleeve – you have the tactical stealth gameplay of ducking guards and planning routes of classics of the subgenre like ‘Desperados’ and the work of Mimimi studios (rest in peace), like the recent Shadow Gambits: The Cursed Crew, alongside the settings and aesthetics of classic religious and gothic literature. The vistas intermittently reminded me of the classic film ‘Black Narcissus’, but the game also directly calls out the work of 18th-century artist Francisco De Goya as a central inspiration.

The game plays in real-time via a day/night cycle. During the day, the characters can roam the monastery grounds collecting resources, talking to other characters and trying to sneak into prohibited areas to progress the game’s series of objectives to escape. At night, the characters are locked in their cells and can use the time to prepare for the next day by recovering their health and sanity, and crafting items. While the player can stay in the monastery grounds after dark, it poses additional challenges, with guards being more alert and ghosts awakening that are invisible in the dark, chasing the player when spotted. The monastery itself also changes and responds as both the story progresses and if the player is caught by guards too many times, with security ramping up, routines changing and more traps appearing.

This core gameplay loop is arguably the strongest part of The Stone of Madness, and regularly reminded me of the cadence of prison break fiction. For anyone who has seen the first season of ‘Prison Break’ or indulged in any of the classic Hollywood prison films, the routine will likely feel both familiar and compelling: day by day, piece by piece, you gather more information, collect supplies, plan out future actions and slowly progress towards your key goals under the watchful panoptic eye of the prison. It’s a cadence of cautious increments; each day you learn a little more, get a few more items and become more familiar with an area. It creates a rhythm that makes the game both great in short bursts, like trying to crack a certain guard routine just before bed, and longer sessions where you feel like you’re always just a day or two away from the next big plot point.

This is not to say that the tactical stealth side of Stone of Madness works perfectly. Setbacks, stumbles and frustrating stealth moments where a guard feels a bit too alert or a problem feels frustratingly insurmountable are common. Progress is never fully stunted; if a character becomes too injured or gets caught too many times, they simply become unavailable until the next day, meaning all the player loses is time. It does however disrupt the common reload/try again routine of other stealth games. Additionally, if you don’t bring the right character for the job, or someone accidentally steps on a trap at the very beginning of the day, that entire day cycle is wasted. As far as I could tell, there was no option to speed up time or end the day voluntarily, either, meaning that whenever I came across a particularly difficult section (of which there are a lot), the cadence of incremental progress would quickly grind to a halt and instead be replaced by a bit too much tedium.

This frustration with losing time is also exacerbated by Stone of Madness’ resource management, an illustrative component of this being your character’s sanity. Every character has a sanity bar that depletes whenever they encounter a phobia of theirs – Leonora, for example, has trauma that is triggered by large flames, the child Amelia gets spooked by the gargoyles that dot the monastery and strongman Eduardo is scared of the dark (particularly unfortunate for a time period that relies entirely on fickle candlelight). If you’re not cautious, a character’s sanity can decay rapidly, especially when it comes to completing objectives in the vicinity of triggering elements.

All characters also lose a set amount of sanity at the end of every day, though this can be turned off if players prefer. If a character’s sanity reaches zero – an easy occurrence if you’re not careful – then they unlock a further inhibition that makes the game even harder, such as headaches, bursts of murderous rage and rheumatism. You can restore sanity through nightly actions, but many of these consume resources that are inevitably finite, and juggling five steadily dwindling sanity meters isn’t an easy task. This adds a minor time pressure to game progression; if you get stuck on an objective, you can rapidly find yourself running low on both supplies and mental health spoons.

This time pressure ends up exacerbating the difficulty of the stealth. Fearing running too low on supplies, I started throwing bodies at a problem, like rushing characters into prohibited areas to quickly loot something while everyone spots them at once. This would often feel at odds with the rest of the game and created the sensation that I was actively playing around its stealth systems rather than with them. It also takes away from the otherwise great rhythm of its prison break-esque cycle, shifting the game away from incremental progression towards a sense of urgency I found more frustrating than fulfilling.

I wonder if some more robust supporting mechanics like a quick save system or better tactical pause options to help juggle multiple characters at once, like those seen in stealth tactic games like Shadow Gambit, would help take the edge off the frustration and time pressure a little, and ensured less of my days feeling wasted after some bad luck or small mistake. Even just minor mechanics, like being able to fast-forward time or swap characters during the day would have helped the challenging stealth and sanity feel a bit less punishing. On Easy difficulty then this sanity management becomes far less involved, but on Normal it felt like it was hamstringing The Stone of Madness’ best asset.

Besides the gameplay challenges, its presentation can feel a little tonally disjointed, but is otherwise strong. The art direction especially makes a great first impression. Exploring the monastery looks like a cross between a Hanna-Barbera cartoon and a Goya painting; incredibly ornate, lived-in environments overlayed with mildly cartoonish characters going about their business looking slightly detached from their surroundings. The character animations are oddly stilted, with many looking like they’re drawn on twos in a way that often makes them look like they’re walking in place. However, rather than detracting, this adds to the charm of its presentation and makes it feel like a Saturday morning cartoon with a bit of an edge.

The problem is these environments don’t always tonally match with the rest of the presentation. The characters all have expressive, semi-realistic portraits that feel at odds with their models and the plot of the game also tends to oscillate between indulging its more cartoonish aesthetic and adult themes. This leads to strange tonal moments where the story will go from a terrified woman accidentally falling to her death, brain splatter and all, to an inmate who dresses up as a chicken and exchanges eggs for gossip. Unlike say Darkest Dungeon, with which the game shares a similar sanity system and passing setting resemblance, The Stone of Madness feels less assured in its direction, which is disappointing and detracts from what is often otherwise beautiful isometric artistry.

This meant there were certain enemies and abilities I had to instead trial-and-error through to relearn how they worked, which wasted further time. Some items will also have descriptions that suggest they can be used in a certain way, for example in a recipe during the night, but I never discovered an option to do anything with them. This led to me, among other things, hoarding piles and piles of apples with the presumption that I would eventually be able to do something with them besides sell them, but that option never came. Quest objectives could also be quite vague sometimes, leading to me feeling a little directionless in my exploration. Those moments are however typically short-lived and there is an option to turn on objective tips if needed.