Is this game a masterpiece? No, not a masterpiece but a rather interesting take on the real-time stealth genre. You run around in real time while avoiding the cones of sight of guards or supernatural creatures. If that reminds you of Commandos or Desperados III - you're right. However, there is much more story and more puzzles. You have to achieve your goals, but killing enemies is mostly not required. Sneaking past is usually enough.

The game takes place in a godforsaken place. A forgotten and dilapidated monastery in 1799, hidden in the Spanish Pyrenees. In addition to pious monks, it is also home to mentally ill people who are guarded by brutal wardens with batons. But the monastery also harbors other secrets... and political prisoners of the Inquisition.

You play a team of five very different prisoners (and can switch between them) whose main goal is to escape from the monastery. You can move freely in certain rooms, but most parts of the monastery are off-limits to the prisoners. Also, while you are allowed to stand around and watch the grass grow, you can't search lockers, pull levers or do much else except walk around, read posters or stand still. When the guard looks away, you press a lever that opens a door, sneak into a courtyard and hide behind a bush. Then look for a key to open a door. You can sneak into the guards' outer cone of vision unnoticed. Your enemies have two areas of vision - they will always notice you at close range, but they will not see you further away or behind small obstacles as long as you are sneaking. You can sneak, walk or run. Your first character's special ability is to pray. After all, he is a monk. Prayer is so powerful that it paralyzes the evil spirits (yes, there are supernatural beings in the game) that roam the halls and suck out your mind. You can only see the spirits by light, which means you have to light lamps and torches. You will need lamp oil for this. Then paralyze the ghosts with a prayer and walk past them. Your first challenges mainly consist of getting from one place to the next without being seen or going mad.

Soon you will find other characters with the same motivation: escape from this prison! They bring further abilities (each character has several special abilities), but they also have their own weaknesses. The Monk, for example, is such a nice guy that he goes insane if he's around corpses for too long. The assassin doesn't like fire - I wonder why. Or the strong man doesn't like the dark, he's just been locked up in solitary confinement for too long. The story progresses during the day, while the characters can sleep at night - or go on special missions. When they rest, they are healed. You don't want to start the next day with a group of mentally unstable characters. Since each of your characters can do unique things, you have to choose the right character for certain tasks. You manage a (combined) inventory, you can craft things and learn new skills or improve them.

If the guards see you, they will chase you. However, if they catch you, the game is not over, but you are reset to a point a few seconds before they saw you. This means that the level of difficulty is not as extremely high as in Commandos, for example.

Conclusion:
Tactical real-time stealth game set in a Spanish monastery/prison in the 18th century. You play five prisoners who want to escape from this hell together and have to face their phobias and find a way to escape. You sneak past enemies, solve puzzles, craft items and manage your team in a day/night cycle - on your way to freedom. Stealth predominates, but the other game mechanics are not to be neglected either, which makes the gameplay quite varied.

TLDR: Sadly unplayable. The game unexplainably doesn't allow saving except at the end of in-game days that can last up to 20 minutes (this is by design). Several game breaking bugs, crashes, general inconsistency and lack of information make it a complete chore to make it through these time units, leading to very high frustration and waste of time. Apart from that the game is generally poorly designed and unfinished.

Long version:
Stone of madness is a tactical stealth game like commandos or shadow tactics. The first big difference vs those games is that you cannot issue orders simultaneously to different characters, since you are always controlling just one of them. This creates friction and dumb situations (e.g. one of the characters can taunt enemies to start a chase, but your other units cannot move or act during the chase). Control scheme is completely horrid especially on controller, requiring several random button presses for actions. This shouldn't be the case when every character has something like 3 actions. The upcoming keybind update (yes, no rebind at release) will not fix this because it's not a matter of which button does what, but the whole control scheme.

As mentioned at the headline the biggest problem is the lack of saving. There are a lot of ways things can go wrong, without counting the numerous bugs, and you will lose progress often due to things that are out of your control, such as enemies that spot you while being obscured by the foreground, or my favorite, which is that when a cutscene pops up, your character will lose his disguise, often in the midst of enemies. Mistakes are punished with high resource costs, and also there is a price for every day that passes. This makes for a tremedously infuriating experience, and heavily punishes the player for exploring and trying stuff, which is where the fun is.

On the technical side, bugs are very common, from crashes to broken quest progression, to graphical glitches. Quality of life is extremely low and the different UIs are just not well thought out.

On the artistic side, graphics are simple but quite nice, but the story is lackluster. The beginning has some mystery but it quickly devolves into doing chores in the same areas. Characters are interesting but their stories and relationships are never explored.

As a long-time RTS fan, I'd say this a great game when it runs properly. Too bad bugs happen way too often.

Characters climb places they're not supposed to then get stuck, cutscenes play when my character is running, when it's finished, they are stuck between walls, and so on.

Every time I click on the Exit button, I have to wait 1-5 min, the more you reload the worse it gets. The game doesn't rely on quick save/load like other games of the same genre, which is a creative take. However, bugs prevent me from executing my plan smoothly, therefore I have to reload often, and the loading time drives me insane.

To sum up, is this a good game? Yes. Is it playable at this point? Barely. Wait a few patches later before you buy the game.