THE STONE OF MADNESS

The makers of Blasphemous return to religion and insanity

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After Blasphemous and its sequel, we didn’t expect The Game Kitchen’s next title to remind us of Commandos. For many Spanish developers, though, the Madrid-made stealth tactics series was a formative experience. “We grew up with those games,” Maikel Ortega, director of The Stone of Madness, tells us. “Almost everyone [in Spain] who had a PC at that time played Commandos. So it’s been on our minds since we were kids.” It was, however, a more recent entry in the genre, Shadow Tactics, that inspired the direction of Ortega’s game. Its sniper character, Takuma, has a wooden leg which makes noise when he moves. That got the team thinking, creative director José Antonio Gutiérrez explains: “What about, instead of a group of characters with super skills and special abilities, [we focus on] their fears and disorders? That was the foundation.”

As for the setting, it’s once again historical. While