This is a difficult review, and not just because it’s uncomfortable to write in a damp, isolated bunker. MADiSON is without a doubt the scariest horror game I’ve ever played, but it’s also one of the most frustrating. If my nerves don’t let me down while typing, I try to proceed step by step.
In MADiSON you play as Luca, a slightly disturbed guy trying to figure out what’s going on in his life, both in his family tree and in the house he lives in. The game starts with you jumping right into the action and suddenly you’re locked in your room while your father brutally bangs his fists on the door. You must find a way to get out of the house, and fast. It turns out that’s easier said than done, though, and without giving too much away, it’s definitely not your angry dad you should be worrying about the most right now.
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The fact that MADiSON is the most terrifying experience I’ve ever had in a video game is not an easy statement to make. I’ve played everything in this genre from Dead Space and Outlast to Layers of Fear and Alien: Isolation just to name a few that come to mind. I’m absolutely fascinated by the horror genre, and on that front MADiSON took my breath away on numerous occasions (I literally took it upon myself to hold my breath a lot because I was terrified). This is thanks to the three points where the game absolutely excels.
The first is The soundtrack. The terrifying tones create an atmosphere that induces goosebumps, but the intense and dynamic music itself isn’t what creates that empathy unmatched in other titles of the style. The usual natur al sounds of a house, which one hears every day, are used here so impressively that a cold sweat runs down my spine with every creaking of the wood. Every time the wind howls through the halls and slams the door. Every time the thunder hits the outside of the house. As with the next point, these sounds come at a masterful tempo and you never get used to it.
number two is the where, how and when the moments of agony in the experience as a player are served. Titles like Resident Evil 7 can have lengthy stretches where you wander around looking for a puzzle solution with nothing special happening, while games like Outlast 2 feature stressful situations that haunt you relentlessly. MADiSON, on the other hand, constantly gives you little cues to remind you that you’re screwed, before regularly confirming it with a foretaste of well-placed “jump scares” in the narrative.
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Number three is the gameplay built around the core mechanics of MADiSON: the polaroid camera. This is one of the best designs I’ve come across for using a camera in a horror game and I take my hat off to it. Imagine this: You are in a narrow hallway with relatively poor lighting. The single bulb hanging from the ceiling will hold the last few watts before it dies for the night, leaving you in the dark and thinking about all the “what ifs” that have ever happened to you. You whip out the camera and with a bang the flash lights up the entire corridor for a split second before it goes dark again, but enough to map out the area and plan a route for the next five or six meters, but then you have to use the flash again. You turn it on, but this time you catch a glimpse of a figure down the hall, turning its head towards you, before darkness engulfs you again. We all know what’s next, right?
mistake. At the next flash, the figure is gone. Without noise. No sizzling bass, no screen full of hideous faces only a blind mother could love. Nothing at all. Just knowing that you’re not alone. That something is lurking there and you won’t see it coming.
MADiSON will make you pee your pants and I really have to applaud that. Too many horror games (and horror movies, for that matter) constantly string together shocking moments accompanied by chords several pitches above the bearable and think this is true horror. MADiSON knows how to do it better. It knows when to slowly torment you with fear of the unknown and when to smack you in the face with a sledgehammer out of sheer fear.
The Polaroid camera actually works like a Swiss army knife and is used, among other things, to solve puzzles, activate mechanisms and reveal secrets. You can shoot anything at any time and don’t have to worry about battery or storage capacity. I don’t know what kind of Polaroid it is, but it’s definitely not a Panasonic.
In other words, I’m a fan of the camera and how its use has been incorporated into the game mechanics, particularly to reinforce the horror element. Of what I’m not a big fan, it’s the design of many puzzles of the game. Some of them are incredibly creative and original, but we also have situations where you need to take a picture of a specific thing (without a shred of information or clues as to what you’re going to be photographing) because it happened to have been killed somewhere else appearing in the house (without a single beep or comment from the game’s protagonist to indicate that this actually happened). The result is that you often wander around confused about how you’re progressing in the game, and that’s disappointing. The puzzles should be challenging to crack and satisfying to solve, and not rely on randomness that frustrates the player.
In other words, like Luca’s camera, the game has some downsides. It’s always happened to me that I’ve wandered around in circles looking for something like a nail or a board to interact with and looking at anything that could be defined as such. After ten or fifteen minutes I realized that the first thing I was looking at was correct, however I had obviously been looking at the object from a slightly wrong angle and therefore couldn’t activate the icon.
It should also be noted that MADiSON has a completely useless mechanic where You can only carry up to eight items at a time. Is it annoying to be at one end of the house and finally find the key you need, but can’t pick it up and therefore have to go back to the other side of the house to check something before going all the way back? So that.
This feeling is compounded by the fact that items in a puzzle are often found too early and have to be lugged around for a long time. Therefore, you end up trying in vain to use them in different puzzles because they are not used for an hour or two. You may not recognize it immediately and therefore rack your brains with the uncertainty that you have not understood the solution to the riddle or that the item in your hands will not be used for several hours.
A good example is a room you find yourself in very early in the game. There you will find a padlock with a four-digit code. In the same room is a picture that you can turn over and on the back is a four-digit year. If you’ve ever played a video game you know what to do here, but no. It doesn’t work Turns out you have to do something else in the story before you have to enter the same code again. Absolutely ridiculous. This is just bad design and could easily have been avoided.
There are many glitches in the game and this is probably the worst because it just doesn’t work properly. Various bugs make the gaming experience suffer, such as a black screen lasting a few minutes before being thrown back to the main menu, where the disappointment is even greater when trying to reload the game to continue from the previous save location and back to the beginning of the game. Unacceptable.
Personally, I must have been incredibly lucky and didn’t see that black screen until I saw the end of the game, but I’ve seen first-hand instances of the game messing up. Then I thought it was part of the ending, but after two minutes of a black screen where the scrolling text never got through, I realized what was going on. I exited the game and reloaded and suddenly I was back in this room and the father was banging on the door again. I never got the Game Completion Trophy for that, and if I want it, I’ll have to go through the entire run all over again. If I try MADiSON again it will be after about ten patches or so.
Judging by the fear factor alone, MADiSON is a solid ten out of ten. It takes inspiration from various fantasy titles in the genre and charmingly translates this into its own original take on the “haunted house” trope. It also exudes an immersive atmosphere, taking ideas from films like The Conjuring, Insidious, Blair Witch and Babadook, which it then refines and takes to new heights.
Still, the extremely poor design, the inclusion of a completely unnecessary mechanic that feels like it’s only there to increase gameplay time, and a handful of fatal bugs can mess up your overall progression. This is pretty serious and should have been fixed prior to release.
Despite that, I can honestly say that I’ve never been more scared of sitting on the couch with a controller in my hands. MADiSON clings to you with claws and teeth and penetrates deep into your psyche. It’s a shocking, powerful and harrowing horror with a masterful soundtrack. If you can ignore the bugs mentioned in this review or play when they’re already patched, all I can say is remember to change your underwear after you’re done playing.
