Blasphemous creator The Game Kitchen revealed a brand new title at last night's Future Game Show, and while it's a very different beast from the studio's challenging 2D soulslikes, it does carry over the team's fascination with Catholic imagery and doctrine. The Stone of Madness is a real-time tactics game in the vein of Shadow Tactics and Desperados 3, but set in a haunted 18th Century Jesuit monastery which you must escape from before your ragtag team of talented prisoners all go insane.
The Stone of Madness puts players in control of five different characters, all of whom are trapped in said monastery located deep in the Pyrenees. As with other real-time tactics games, each character has a different set of skills that, according to the game's Steam page, let them "cast spells, assassinate targets, distract enemies" among other things. You'll be able to swap between characters at will to evade the monastery's guards, and solve puzzles.
Yet while mechanically similar to games like Shadow Tactics, it sounds like the Stone of Madness will be structurally quite different from Mimimi's games. The monastery will be a single, open space that you'll gradually peel back the layers of. Conditions within the monastery also change depending on the time of day. During daytime, you'll be able to explore semi-freely, although there will be restricted areas where guards will punish you if you're caught snooping. At night, however, things take a supernatural turn, with ghosts as well as guards roaming the monastery's cloistered hallways. This makes sneaking around at night much more dangerous, although with that apparently comes the potential for greater rewards.
This paranormal element also plays a key role in The Stone of Madness' other differentiating feature. Your crew of prisoners may be skilled, but they're also psychologically traumatised, with each having a set of negative traits alongside their unique skills. These psychological traumas can be triggered by various events and circumstances, which will further impact that character's sanity.
Frankly, it sounds rad as heck. I had my issues with the Blasphemous games (some of the platforming could be pretty iffy) but I loved their worlds and art direction, so I'm extremely up for The Game Kitchen bringing those talents to a different genre. As you can already see in the above trailer, The Stone of Madness is no slouch in this department. The isometric art and character animations are really striking and distinctive. The developers say the game's visuals are inspired by the works of Goya, which, of course they are. I'm also keen to see how The Game Kitchen delves back into the wilder fringes of Catholicism, something the Blasphemous games likewise excelled at.
There's no hard release date for The Stone of Madness yet, but Steam lists it as coming out in 2025. Between this and the upcoming Commandos: Origins, I'm glad the real-time-tactics genre is continuing to sneak new titles onto my PC despite the sad closure of Mimimi Games last year.
