THE STONE OF MADNESS

The makers of Blasphemous return to religion and insanity

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.”