Fashion
In a Monastery Turned Asylum, Outcasts Must Band Together
Each character in The Stone of Madness, including a mute man, an orphan and a woman proficient in witchcraft, has strengths that can help overcome tactical challenges.
The Stone of Madness, a new tactical-stealth video game, delivers two meaty campaigns inside a Spanish monastery that doubles as an asylum at the close of the 1700s. One concerns church corruption while the other delves into the secrets of the dwellers of the monastery. In both campaigns, your motley band of inmates conspire to outfox their guardians, including monks, soldiers, nuns and an inquisitor.
The narratives pick up a historical thread noted by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in “Madness and Civilization,” a study of the West’s long and varied history of identifying and treating people who fall afoul of society’s norms. One of the prevailing trends in 18th-century Europe, Foucault said, was to confine the “insane,” the poor and the religious and political outcasts to places where they might not be seen or heard.
Taking a cue from the Darkest Dungeon series, each of the five main characters in The Stone of Madness is burdened by phobias and has particular strengths and corresponding skill trees. At night, they can retire to a room to strategize and buff one another’s stats; a violin recital increases everyone’s sanity.
Players can wander about the monastery while controlling up to three characters at a time. The choices are quite distinct: Father Alfredo, a priest who goes from investigating the questionable goings on at the monastery to being a prisoner there; Leonora, a woman from a bourgeois background whose family packed her off because of her fiery temperament; Amelia, a young orphan; Agnes, an elderly woman proficient in witchcraft; and Eduardo (one of the asylum’s longest-serving inmates), a tall man with great strength who is also mute.
When the characters come into contact with the source of their fears — violence, darkness, mirrors, fire and, for Amelia, the asylum’s gargoyles — their individual sanity meters are depleted. If their meters reach zero, they are burdened with new ailments like migraines, back pains or claustrophobia.
