When five unique characters are locked behind the walls of a makeshift monastery “madhouse” in the late 18th century, it’s down to you to try your hand at managing the chaos somehow. That’s the premise of The Stone of Madness, which has just been announced by Merge Games.
Get ready to play as multiple characters from an isometric perspective as you devise a treacherous escape plan from a place shrouded in mystery. The Stone of Madness is a real-time tactics and stealth game featuring a progression system that can both improve and debilitate the individual characters. Each one starts with various traumas and phobias to be aware of and, depending on how you play, their sanity could seriously deteriorate. This will see them receive a “Stone of Madness”, triggering new disabilities and negative effects such as paranoia, dementia or bouts of violence. Obviously, that then increases the game’s overall difficulty.
Characters can also unlock positive skills or reverse the negative effects on their sanity by finding “Stones of Clarity”, which are scattered throughout the monastery. Some actions may exacerbate phobias and other mental conditions or even trigger new conditions to develop. There’s an awful lot going on here, isn’t it there?
At the start of each game you’ll be given the chance to select an escape plan and, subsequently, will discover areas, tools, and new character abilities. Each escape plan differs in requirements and difficulty though; thanks to different escape plans and the randomly assembled monastery, each playthrough of The Stone of Madness is truly unique for you.
With several different escape plans to execute, each with unique stories, objectives, special characters, and other surprises, The Stone of Madness offers a rich, dynamic real-time tactics experience for everyone to embrace. Factoring in the management of characters’ psyche through what’s essentially negative character progression, and The Stone of Madness really should add flexible degrees of difficulty to this dynamic stealth and strategy game.
If you can handle it, The Stone of Madness launches in Spring of 2021 for Xbox Series X, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and PC (Steam).
