If you ever thought monasteries were just devoted to worship, feasting abbots, and choral chants of Ave Maria, The Stone of Madness is set on proving you dead wrong.

This is The Game Kitchen’s first foray into the stealth-tactics genre (a distinctly Spanish obsession we discussed with the devs last year) after the team's stellar work with the Blasphemous Metroidvanias. Two separate campaigns take place in an imposing 1800s Pyrenees monastery, which doubles as an insane asylum. This mountaintop prison offers no redemption, nor escape from earthly woes, for five luckless inmates aiming to escape, or destroy, their captors.

The hospitality of these cruel nuns and friars may feel as cold and stony as the slabs making up the monastery’s walls, but we still marvelled at this sordid Jesuit asylum that drips with the Spanish Inquisition’s cruelty and sorrow. A magnificent stealth sandbox, hand painted in rich gothic atmosphere and Catholic pageantry, creates a reactive simulation of its daily operations: Fretful inmates roam common areas. Nuns and friars tend herb gardens, wash laundry, or attend to holy study under fearsome inquisitors and mother superiors. When the clock chimes three o’clock, monks march from their Angelus prayers from the chapel into the dining hall. Upon nightfall dreadful anima spirits stalk the halls.