Phobias can condition your life. Above all, if the flight of the monastery in which they have been held depending on dealing with the irrational fears that dominate your being. Therefore, the five protagonists of the Spanish video game The Stone of Madness They will have very complicated to coordinate to solve the mysteries that the Pyrenees asylum in which they are locked up. With this premise inspired by historical events, Goya’s paintings as aesthetic reference and a dark approach to national folklore are the other two ingredients that make up the proposal.
“The project was going to be totally different, also historically set in Spain, but a century earlier, in the seventeenth,” explains José A. Gutiérrez, creative director and founding member of Turolense Teku Studios, in which the original concept of the work they have developed with veterans The Game Kitchen, Sevillano studio responsible for the popular Blasphemous. Here, although they drink less than the imagery of the Andalusian Holy Week, they maintain interest in the religious setting, only that, instead of making their way to swords, progress depends on the ingenuity of a group of pariahs that will have to overcome their own mental barriers.
“We ended up focusing on the Golden Age for the Houses of Crazy and how psychiatry began to be introduced gradually, although then it was not such,” he details. He considers that there was a “very interesting context, because the Jesuits had just been expelled from Spain and some monasteries had been empty, the sick being realized there.” This created an “amazing atmosphere” for a work of tactical stealth, in which it is necessary to calculate each step so as not to suffer the consequences of caught your team by committing an infraction.
The dream of reason produces phobias
The video game, which has been published for PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X | S and Nintendo Switch, points ways from the title itself, an allusion to “The stone of madness”, a term referred to the trepanations made in the Middle Ages to extract a cluster of stones that were believed to originate mental ailments. With the name of this dangerous and absurd practice, The Stone of Madness It follows five people with serious phobias who must join forces to survive in an oppressive place.
“Since childhood I have been attracted to the miserable characters, and here the context gave us a chance to play with them,” clarifies the developer, “I was clear that they were not going to be powerful, rather on the contrary, with a bit extravagant skills” . With that idea in the head, the protagonists appeared naturally. They were clear that one must be a priest, so that he could play a certain spy role in the monastery and because “it came very well to connect with the story, offer a narrator and as a hook that remembers famous works as The name of the rose ”.
In addition, the entire cast has particular skills and phobias, which must be combined to move forward. For the choice of these handicaps, they sought fears that “understood themselves instantly.” In this way, the priest Alfredo suffers in the presence of the bodies precisely for his faith and the little Amelia fears the gargoyles of the convent, the result of child fear. When they are exposed to these terrors, their sanity bar descends. And, if they lose it completely, they develop a new trauma that will further hinder the game.
Some phobias options are more obvious – for example, the silent artisan Eduardo fears the darkness and can develop claustrophobia if he does not go carefully – others more particular. This is the case of the old Agnes, a witch with regrets to which it enters when it runs and, if you do not play with it in a long time, you fall asleep on the cane. For Gutierrez, the fiera Leonora has been a difficult character to design for her “contrasts” because, although he has a good education he is the most violent in the group, and it was difficult to transmit that balance in his design: “The face had to have some beauty But being rude, and imposing is very complicated when you wear a red little girl in your head. ” Meanwhile, with Eduardo they had to rehearse a lot, because “the fear of darkness at the beginning was very tired to cope with.” Now, he is being one of the most beloved characters.
Controlling these five inmates, you have to sneak through the monastery without the guards detecting their presence to find clues. At night, the team must also prepare the play, and choose between healing their wounds, bribing presidiaries or introducing smuggling merchandise. Through trying different strategies, a mystery is revealed that speaks of social injustices, pain and a gloomy historical legacy.
CLAROSCUROS OF A RELIGIOUS TIME
“Our religion is a bit dark, right? When you get little in a church and it’s all so dark, with those statues … that has been something that has always attracted me to a cultural level, ”the creative continues about the setting of the video game. Compare it with the saga Blasphemouswhich takes “the most dramatic part of the Spanish Christian religion and transforms it into something very truculent.” Instead, in The Stone of Madness The approach is more historical, although they have not resisted supernatural elements.
He ensures that the objective “has never been to show the church as the bad, but as the context of an era that was not understood without religious beliefs.” That is why they have as its protagonist a priest locked up to defend their principles facing another corrupt, it is a story full of grays. In addition, it points out that everything in those centuries is very well documented, so that many cases that appear in the game are taken out of reality. “But only the softest,” he warns, because “many times those traumas mixed religious beliefs with sexual filias and gave rise to very strange things,” and they have decided to adapt it to all audiences. “I still think that it has been quite obscured,” he acknowledges.
Darkness is also present in the beautiful stages, inspired by the paintings of Francisco de Goya. As a student of Fine Arts, Gutiérrez quotes him as one of his reference artists: “Goya’s painting, with those thick strokes, is very characteristic, but it is something that does not work well in motion, so we had to find a style Differentiator, and in front of the unattended palette so fashionable now in video games, we chose to put more vivid colors. ” He says they opted for a path that reminds Disney’s classic films by combining very detailed hand -painted funds with characters from the characters, which stands out more. “We did the animations by broken, we recorded them first with real people and on top we have painted and altered by hand,” he says. The care result, of course, can be seen in each of the beautiful rooms of the monastery.
Difficulty not suitable for impatient
The complexity of The Stone of Madness It is remarkable from the first measures, and does not stop increasing. Your mechanics remember the real -time strategy classic Commandoswhich also has characters with special skills that must be combined to progress. It also takes the research structure developed throughout several day-night cycles of another national development icon, The Crime Abbeya 1987 title that adapts freely The name of the rose From Umberto Eco. For Gutierrez, it would be nice for new players to approach these classics thanks to their video games.
Of course, consider that “when you throw enough hours you end up realizing that it is really more Dishonoredbecause the key is to experiment with combinations, skills, and there are some very crazy. ” He states that the programming part “has been a tremendous challenge” because many small pieces had to be taken into account. “You can’t imagine the amount of Bugs [errores] that have come out, ”he reveals, hence he claims that work so many times invisible programmers. To get everything to work, they have had to “Test Very much with many players from all over the world “, instead of limiting themselves to” tests within the study or with family and friends, which is typical. ” Even now, seeing the Streamings From their audience, they continue to take stock of the difficulty in order to launch patches.
The reality is that it is a complicated video game, especially when night falls and the convent is filled with souls and restrictions that increase the difficulty. It can even become frustrating, especially for those who do not enjoy the trial-error. But the developer says that at the moment it is working well among the rookie people of the genre, which finds many “novel and refreshing stimuli.” “We knew that it was not going to be an explosive video game that gets hundreds of thousands of sales on day one, but we believe that it needs filming and that the mouth to ear is already working quite well,” summarizes José A. Gutiérrez on the expectations of the future that They have with this monastery marked by madness, of which it is both a pleasure and a torment escape.
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