Today is the day of the release of The Game Kitchen’s the Stone of Madness, an isometric tactical game sneaking in the eighteenth -century monastery – “isometric tactical game” is quite a clinical way to describe the arduous situation of lost souls discovering the souls discovering the maze of Hellish Catholic art inhabited by guards and ghosts.
As in Commandos, you control a group of characters with different skills, strengths and weaknesses. Unlike Commandos, your characters have mental bars and a series of narratively grounded weaknesses and phobia-alas present from the very beginning, or exhaled in response to the difficulties you experienced. Lewis Gordon reviewed for Eurogamer And it makes it sound extremely attractive, semi -cooked plot and insidious controls.
I am interested in the stone of madness partly because it comes from the Spanish studio after blasphemy, a great study of religious horror, and partly because I recently thought about the role of religious orders in developing the “modern” European understanding of time. For the philosopher Michel Foucault, the hour and daily rituals of forgotten generations of monks paved the way for 9 to 5. Writing Discipline and punishmentHe describes the monasteries as “time specialists, great technicians of the rhythm and regular actions”, and examines how they influenced the secular world through attached schools and needy, and eventually industrial work, which “retained religious air for a long time.”
This historic schedule discipline, as Foucault describes, can also be traced on variable worlds of video games. Being a game set in the monastery, the stone of madness, of course, clearly expresses the relationship. His challenges and possibilities occur after a intricate daily cycle, which requires matching the right character to the right time if you succeed. Inspirations with this number from another, much older Spanish production, Abbey of crimeThe very loose adaptation of the gigantic mysterious monastic novel Umberto Eco name Rose.
All this makes me wonder if “monastic time” is a concept that is worth implementing with other, non-nourishing games, both alternative and the precursor of the more renowned idea of ”Game as work”, closed by live graphics simulators . I hope that in the next few weeks I will have something bigger about all this. At the moment, the stone of madness seems worth stabbing. It still is Steam demo Live at the time of writing.
