ranzware
Do you have any of those games it feels like only you remember? For me, it’s Prisoner of War, a third-person stealth/adventure thing on the original Xbox that saw you play a captured WW2 pilot trying to break out of prisons like Stalag Luft and Colditz. It had some neat ideas for 2002: the prison camps were relatively open and they ran on a schedule. That meant once you had your objective—steal a document, get a disguise—you had all sorts of different routes to complete it, but you’d need to be back in bed by morning roll call.
Kind of neat, although it did look like a Morrowind mod. Anyway, the reason I bring it up is I’ve been playing the demo for The Stone of Madness, the new game from the devs behind Blasphemous that sees you and a cohort of comrades try to bust out of an asylum in an 18th-century Spanish monastery. Which, yep, is exactly the kind of thing I’d expect the devs behind Blasphemous to make.
Imagine Commandos with a light smattering of Darkest Dungeon and you’re not far off. This is squad-based stealth: you’re in charge of a gaggle of inmates as they wake up each day and try to inch along a little further in their quest to break free. Each of your characters has unique abilities—the priest can paralyse ghosts, the strongman can shove heavy objects around, the very angry lady can stab guards to death or beat them unconscious with planks—and you’ll make ample use of them as you navigate around vision cones and what-have-you.
So far, so familiar, but it’s in the broader, strategic layer of the game that things get interesting. Just like Prisoner of War back in 2002, the monastery runs on a schedule, and the routes you can take to achieve your goals are all pretty open-ended. A day begins, you select which of your three inmates you’re going to send out, and then you select a particular trapdoor you’ve unlocked in the asylum to pop out of like all three ghosts of Christmas at once.
It’s a dash of metroidvania—you’re gradually unlocking more and more of the monastery to return to and explore as you gather more materials and more abilities. It makes the whole thing feel open and rambling in a way I’m just not used to but greatly appreciate, even if the moment-to-moment of the whole thing feels familiar.
Plus, it’s not identical to those games. All your heroes are, ah, a tad unwell. The priest’s intense faith means he can’t stand corpses, the strongman is mute and afraid of the dark, and angry lady? She can’t stand fire. Bringing any of them near their fears means they start steadily losing sanity. Lose enough and they’re out of action. The same applies to health, but you don’t just lose it by getting whacked. The angry lady—who’s actually called Leonora, by the by—might lose all hers from whacking others: if you run out of the wooden planks you use to knock people unconscious, you can always have her stab them to death instead, but then she’ll go and feel bad about it, like some kind of loser, which will entail a hit to her limited pool of HP.
My only qualm is that, sometimes, it all adds up to create a layer of micromanagement that feels too intense. The priest has a lantern, so keep the guy scared of the dark with him until you get to a brazier, but then you can’t have Leonora there because she’s scared of fire, so keep her hanging back, but then there’s a guard by the brazier you need to deal with, so send the strongman, but don’t send him on his own or he’ll have to go through the dark, and so on and so on. It can create scenarios that feel a bit like the process of getting a fox, a chicken, and a bag of grain across a river, again, and again, and again.
But despite that, I’ve enjoyed the hour or two I’ve spent in its demo. It all combines to create something that feels like something unique assembled from familiar parts, and well worth checking out if you’re into squad-stealth stuff and/or videogames dripping with the intense psychic weight of a strict Catholic upbringing. That’s two ticks for me, at least.
If you want to try it out, you can find The Stone of Madness’ demo on Steam.
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Kurt Indovina
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