With recently announced RTS stealth title The Stone of Madness, we're set for a surprising change of pace if our recent Gamescom preview is anything to go by. Blasphemous' high-stakes 2D combat is replaced by methodical exploration of a hand-painted monastery asylum that affords as much experimentation as its watchful guards will allow over the days, or even weeks, leading up to your freedom.
Five inmates, wrongly imprisoned in the murky confines of an 18th-century madhouse, collaborate to hatch an escape plan. In such dire straits, you'd think the inmates were all out of options. In fact, they have plenty. You have a variety of immersive-sim-inspired approaches at your disposal, as you navigate missions progressing through real-time days in the life of the monastery's resident guards, monks, and nuns and give the nasty inquisitors their overdue comeuppance.
Choosing a party of three, you can exploit each inmate's distinct capabilities. A guard can be evaded by good old-fashioned stealth, hiding in the shadows and slinking past their patrols. But other, more characterful methods are available too. They can be overpowered by Leonora's brawn, bewitched by Agnes' spells, or merely stupefied to distraction by Alfredo's tedious preaching.
As well as preserving their mental and, of course, physical health, each player has a suspicion meter - raised whenever forbidden actions are taken. These three meters add a delicate resource management element, akin to the hard tests we faced from Citizen Sleeper's difficult choices. Here, it's the reason you're forced into rotating actions between party members on the day - and switching characters day to day to let them recover if you overextend.
There's no death or permanent failure. Prison is punishment enough, leaving you all the time in the world to test the monastery's security, its guards' patience, and of course The Stone of Madness's RPG-lite systems to their utmost limits.
We had the chance to talk to two members of the Blasphemous team who are now working on The Stone of Madness -- Maikel Ortega (director and Enrique Colinet (lead level designer) — who told us all about how they went from their fast-paced Metroidvania series to cautious infiltration in a Pyrenean monastery.
GameParadise: It comes as a big surprise to many of us that The Game Kitchen is working on an RTS stealth game after the Blasphemous titles. How did this end up being the next step for the studio?
Maikel Ortega (Director): This game started under development of another studio in Spain called Teku Studios. We really liked the idea, so we ended up acquiring it and working with Teku to finish it. It's culturally influenced by Spain. The art has a lot of influence from Francisco de Goya as we also have in Blasphemous. And the overall mood of the game was really appealing to us. Of course in Spain, most of the players that had a PC grew up with Commandos. So this game was really, really close to us.
Enrique Colinet (Lead Level Designer): It was also inspired by [Amstrad game] The Abbey of Crime, which was also based on Umbero Eco's novel The Name of the Rose [also an inspiration for Pentiment]. It was released in Spain in the '80s; but they didn't get the rights for the movie. It's basically the same plot. It's a super well-known game in Spain, but it wasn't that successful outside the country.
EC: I would say from the gameplay point of view, having no game over or fail state makes it different to the others. Because usually when you're spotted then you reload the last checkpoint and you try again. In this one, you have to face the consequences. So if you're spotted, they chase you and they hit you and they send you to the cell. You have to try to accomplish the current objective with the rest of the characters trying a different strategy than you had planned beforehand. So it's cool that it's all about improvising and facing consequences. We love the idea that failing is part of what makes this game fun.
MO: When you're playing Dark Souls and you make a run for an item: you die, but you get the item and it was worth it. That happens in this game too, because you don't have quick loading all the time. We realized in the stealth genre that's something that happens a lot. You're just saving and loading all the time because you want to pass the level without being spotted. We wanted to do a game that was about sneaking around with five characters, using that as a tool. So it doesn't matter if one gets spotted; you are a group, you can use that in your favor.
Did anything you learned from Blasphemous carry over to this title?
MO: I'd say at the beginning when we were designing the obstacles that you face in a Metroidvania, you have keys and lock abilities that will give you access to a certain area. Those are soft locks. But in this game we wanted the opposite. We wanted an open space with a lot of different characters, different combinations. Having a hard lock that only one character can access is kind of bad for this game. So we had to think really differently.
The stealth RTS genre has faced major struggles in recent years. Pyro Studios, who started the genre with the Commandos series, closed several years ago, and Shadow Tactics devs Mimimi Games followed last year. What are your thoughts on the future of the genre? Can it ever be more than a niche?
MO: It's kind of a niche, it's true, but one of the reasons is that they're mostly tailored to PC gamers. And that's why The Stone of Madness is designed with a controller in mind at the very beginning. Of course there are mouse controls for PC, but the game was designed for a controller so it's easy to control in a console, and I think that can help bring people to a game like this. It's not something you used to see, but more and more people are getting into the stealth genre these days. Their mechanics are everywhere, even in triple-A games. People are used to them.
The camera is stuck to the character. There is no camera movement, there's only camera movement if you pause. That also simplifies the game because it feels kind of like an actual RPG. It's easier to control with a controller with that. We took a lot of inspiration from Supergiant games - Hades, for example. They're so good. There's a lot to learn from the 'giants.
Catholicism was a huge part of Blasphemous, and it's clearly back here with the monastery setting, Inquisitor villain, and even the loading icon is a crown of thorns. Can you tell us about Catholicism's inclusion in this game?
MO: This is a question we have a lot, and with Blasphemous, too. For us in Spain it's really difficult to differentiate religion from culture because it was all part of the same thing. So the game is not really focused on the 'religions' parts of it, it's just part of the culture. In this case one of the characters was an inquisitor and was framed because he was trying to investigate, but the one that framed him is another inquisitor. There were people of power in this era - they were from their religion, yes, but they were mostly people that had power and were using this monastery for their own means. So that's why you can see there are a lot of religious influences: because they were everywhere! They were in control of a lot of things in the society.
EC: I was at a round table yesterday talking about the influence of how we use Spanish culture in video games. In recent years it has been a progressive trend in Spanish developers, losing fear about using our culture in video games. We concluded that religious themes are used as an aesthetic because it's really hard to separate Catholic stuff from our culture. It just happens naturally.
MC: And also we really like to use interesting tidbits of Spanish culture. The Stone of Madness is based on the belief that the insane had a real stone in their brains that made them mad. The game takes that and pushes that a little forward.
MO: It's just to see what ways they come up with interesting plans. I want to see those heists because we really wanted to focus on experimentation, and that meant leaving a lot of things at the door. Challenge is maybe less important than you being able to find different solutions. Even if the game is challenging, stealth is not the main thing in the game (even if there is still stealth there). I want to see the interesting tactics that come out.
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