Play Demo
Play’n GO hit something genuinely different with Rich Wilde and the Tome of Madness. The intro sequence drops you straight into a Lovecraftian study with an H.P. Lovecraft quote — “That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die”, delivered over a thunderous, ominous score that keeps building throughout every spin. This is not background noise for a slot. It is a mood, sustained and deliberate, and it shifts the moment a cascade chain starts building.
The ominous becomes frenetic, the foreboding becomes intense, and when an 83x win arrived in our session from the Other World Free Round alone, the game felt like it had genuinely earned it. This is one of Play’n GO’s finest productions, and it shows in every frame. We rate it!
Tome of Madness runs on a 5×5 grid with a Cluster Pays system. Four or more matching symbols touching horizontally or vertically anywhere on the grid form a winning combination. All winning symbols are then removed, remaining symbols fall into the gaps, and new ones drop from above. Cascades continue until no new winning cluster forms. A single spin can produce multiple payouts in sequence, and each cascade charges the Portal Meter to the left of the grid.
Every symbol involved in a winning cluster is added to the Portal Meter. This is the engine of the game. As the meter fills, it releases additional effects at four specific thresholds:
The meter resets to zero on any non-winning spin during standard play. Building it to 42 takes genuine sustained momentum, which is why reaching the bonus round feels like an event when it happens.
At any point during a spin, one or more positions on the grid may be marked with a purple Eye Mark symbol. When you form a winning cluster that covers an Eye Mark location, that eye opens and 2 Special Wilds are added to the grid once the current cascade sequence ends. During the Other World Free Round, 11 or 12 Eye Marks are active simultaneously. Open all of them and the Mega Wild is summoned.
There are three distinct wilds in this game, each with a different function:
The bonus triggers when 42 winning symbols have been collected in the Portal Meter during a single spin chain. Players receive 1 free spin, plus a starting allocation of Portal Effects. The base award is 5 Portal Effects, but for every 3 additional symbols collected beyond the 42 threshold at the moment of triggering, one extra effect is added, up to a maximum of 7 Portal Effects total. The round ends when all Portal Effects have been played out.
Inside the free round, the grid is populated with 11 or 12 Eye Marks. Every time a cascade chain reaches a natural end with no wins remaining, one Portal Effect fires automatically, reshuffling the grid or removing symbols to create new winning opportunities. Open every Eye Mark during this process and the Mega Wild Cthulhu appears, moving down the grid with each cascade and generating additional wins before finally exiting at the bottom. The combination of Portal Effects keeping the action alive and the Mega Wild moving through an Eye Mark-cleared grid is where the game’s real numbers come from.
Both effects are triggered during the game when a Special Wild lands and forms part of a win at the relevant Portal stage. Abyss removes all symbols in the row or column occupied by the winning Special Wild, adding those removed symbols to the Portal Meter and potentially creating new cascades. Void removes every instance of one random symbol type from the entire grid, which can dramatically clear space for new drops and clusters. In the Other World Free Round, these same effects are triggered randomly via Portal Effects rather than via Special Wilds specifically.
Tome of Madness abandons traditional paylines entirely. Wins form when four or more identical symbols are connected in a cluster, touching horizontally or vertically. There are no payline patterns to track. If the symbols are adjacent and the cluster contains at least 4, you win. Larger clusters pay more, with values scaling from 4-symbol wins up to 10+ symbol wins, which represent the highest tier on the paytable. The grid starts fresh each spin, with symbols falling from above to fill all 25 positions. After each cascade, any empty spaces are filled by new drops from the top.
Stakes run from £0.10 to £100.00 per spin. The RTP default is 96.59%; worth checking in the info panel before playing, as Play’n GO makes this game available to operators at significantly lower alternative configurations. The volatility is classified as very high, meaning dry spells between wins are part of the expected experience. A sustained cascade chain building the Portal Meter to 42 is the goal, and it requires patience. The hit rate, as published by Play’n GO, is 3.24.
Figures below reflect a £1.00 total bet. Wins scale with your chosen stake.
| Symbol | 4x | 5x | 6x | 7x | 8x | 9x | 10+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cthulhu Medallion | 2.00 | 4.00 | 8.00 | 16.00 | 32.00 | 50.00 | 100.00 |
| Dagger | 1.50 | 3.00 | 6.00 | 12.00 | 24.00 | 30.00 | 60.00 |
| Ring | 1.00 | 2.00 | 4.00 | 8.00 | 16.00 | 20.00 | 40.00 |
| Skull Mask | 0.70 | 1.50 | 3.00 | 6.00 | 12.00 | 15.00 | 30.00 |
| Purple Gem | 0.40 | 0.60 | 1.00 | 2.00 | 4.00 | 4.50 | 6.00 |
| Red Gem | 0.30 | 0.50 | 0.80 | 1.60 | 3.20 | 4.00 | 5.00 |
| Blue Gem | 0.20 | 0.40 | 0.60 | 1.20 | 2.40 | 3.00 | 4.00 |
| Green Gem | 0.10 | 0.20 | 0.30 | 0.60 | 1.20 | 1.50 | 2.00 |
The Cthulhu Medallion pays 100x for a cluster of 10 or more, which against a 2,000x max win means that a single cluster of the top symbol doesn’t come close on its own. The multiplier wild, Abyss/Void effects, and the Mega Wild are what close that gap. Standard base game wins without Portal involvement are modest, which is consistent with the extreme volatility rating. A free play session in the Tome of Madness demo will illustrate quickly how the gap between a quiet spin and a Portal-charged cascade sequence feels.
Rich Wilde and the Tome of Madness earns a rating of 4.8/5. Play'n GO produced something genuinely distinctive here. The game has structural depth, a coherent thematic identity, and production values that hold up years after release. It is not the easiest game in the series, and the max win of 2,000x is modest for its volatility class, but nothing else in the Rich Wilde catalogue feels quite like this.
The soundtrack is the first thing that distinguishes this game from the moment it loads. Most slots treat music as background; Tome of Madness treats it as atmosphere, and the difference is immediate. It opens with a thunderous, ominous score that shifts register when cascade chains start building — ominous becoming frenetic is exactly the right description, and the game even uses the word “frenetic” in its own interface. The environmental detail holds up under scrutiny too: mist drifts across the floor behind Rich Wilde, lightning occasionally illuminates the windows, and the UI elements have the look of carved stone rather than interface buttons. It is a consistently realised world.
Standard play delivered moderate wins in chains, with cascades regularly reaching 5 or 6 drops before settling. The Portal Meter built steadily across those sequences, and the Abyss and Void effects fired several times from Special Wild wins, each time clearing space that immediately created new clusters. Getting to 42 symbols in a single spin chain requires a run of sustained cascading, but the game gives you enough momentum, enough visual and sensory feedback, that the climb feels purposeful rather than arbitrary.
The Other World Free Round arrived after collecting 48 symbols across a cascade sequence (more than the base 42, which awarded a 5-effect session). Inside the bonus, the Eye Marks are everywhere and the Portal Effects fire reliably each time the cascades settle. The Mega Wild did not appear in this session. Opening all 11 or 12 Eye Marks is a genuine challenge, but the 83x total win from portal effects and cascades alone is a fair representation of what a solid free round delivers without hitting the jackpot scenario. The game is honest about what it is, a very high-volatility cluster slot where sustained momentum is the product, not a single symbol landing in the right place.
The thematic coherence deserves its own note. Most Lovecraft-adjacent games use the aesthetic as a skin (the name, the tentacles, the colour palette) without actually capturing the feeling of the fiction. Tome of Madness gets closer than most, partly through the audio design and partly because the cascading, unpredictable nature of the Portal system genuinely mirrors the sense of building, cumulative dread that H.P. Lovecraft’s best work produces. Whether that’s intentional or incidental, the effect is there.
Two limitations are worth being direct about. The 2,000x maximum win is a ceiling that players will find restrictive given how volatile the game is. If you are sitting through 30-spin dry spells, a 2,000x cap does not adequately reward the swings. The Portal Meter reset on non-winning spins is also punishing; building to 35 or 38 symbols and then watching a blank spin take the meter back to zero is a specific kind of frustration that this game will produce regularly. Neither limitation undermines the game overall, but they are meaningful trade-offs for players who choose it.
This is nonetheless the most fully realised slot in the Rich Wilde series and one of Play’n GO’s strongest productions. The free play demo captures all of the above exactly as described. It runs identically to the real money version and is genuinely worth a long session before committing a stake.
For a 2019 title, the production quality was insanely good, and the slot still looks fantastic today.
We scooped an Other World Free Spins Round pretty quickly.
An 83x win in regular play, putting us well ahead on the demo session. Not bad!
Tome of Madness is the fourth mainline Rich Wilde title, and the one where Play’n GO departed most radically from the template. Here is how it sits against the key entries in the series:
Tome of Madness stands apart from the standard Rich Wilde releases by abandoning traditional paylines and reels entirely. Every other entry in the main series is built on the same 5×3/scatter-expansion template in some form. Tome of Madness and Tome of Insanity are the outliers, the games where Play’n GO pushed the character into genuinely different mechanical territory. Between the two Lovecraftian entries, Tome of Madness is the more volatile and more demanding, Tome of Insanity the more accessible and player-friendly sequel. Which suits you depends entirely on what you want from the session.
