Today is release day for The Game Kitchen’s The Stone Of Madness, an isometric tactical stealth game set in an 18th century monastery – “isometric tactical stealth game” being a pretty clinical way to describe the plight of sundry lost souls exploring a maze of hellish Catholic art populated by guards and ghouls.
As in Commandos, you control a group of characters with different skills, strengths and weaknesses. Unlike in Commandos, your characters have sanity bars and a range of narratively-grounded foibles and phobias – either present from the get-go, or sprouted in response to the hardships you put them through. Lewis Gordon done a review for Eurogamer and he makes it sound extremely appealing, half-cooked plot and tricksy controls notwithstanding.
I’m interested in The Stone Of Madness partly because it’s from the Spanish studio behind Blasphemous, a terrific study in religious horror, and partly because I’ve been thinking lately about the role of monastic orders in developing “modern” European understandings of time. For the philosopher Michel Foucault, the hourly and daily rites of forgotten generations of monks paved the way for the 9-to-5. Writing in Discipline And Punish, he describes the monasteries as “the specialists of time, the great technicians of rhythm and regular activities”, and explores how they influenced the secular world by way of attached schools and poorhouses and eventually, industrial workplaces that “long retained a religious air”.
This ancient discipline of timekeeping, as Foucault describes it, can also be traced to the variably time-locked worlds of video games. Being a game set in a monastery, The Stone Of Madness naturally makes the connection explicit. Its challenges and opportunities follow an elaborate day-night cycle, requiring you to match the right character to the right hour if you’re to succeed. It takes inspiration on this count from another, much older Spanish production, The Abbey Of Crime, itself a loose adaptation of Umberto Eco’s gargantuan monastic mystery novel The Name Of The Rose.
All this makes me wonder whether “monastic time” is a concept worth pursuing to other, non-monastic games, as both alternative and precursor to the better-known idea of the “game as a job”, encapsulated by live service looting simulators. I’ll hopefully have something lengthier to say about all that in the next few weeks. For the moment, The Stone Of Madness seems worth a stab. There’s still a Steam demo live at the time of writing.