MADiSON - Review — Maxi-Geek

Blue Knees is behind and will find what he has been looking for… For so long, all alone, where he… belongs. Blue Knees is behind and will find, what he has been looking for…

MADiSON is an innovative, bizarre and unique take on the Psychological Horror genre. With an almost Visage like overtone, MADiSON takes you as Luca down a hellscape of psychological torment and torture. Armed with nothing but a camera that may or may not be the cause of the possession that is taking place, you must solve increasingly bizarre puzzles whilst escaping Madison Hale, Hans Goring and one of the most unsettling antagonists in horror gamedom, Blue Knees.

MADiSON is an indie project, five years in the making. Crafted with love and care by an incredibly small team the amount of polish on the game is incredible. We are living through an age of unity asset flipped horror walking simulators, so when something new and this well-crafted comes together it really stands out. There is a certain gritty slickness to the environment in MADiSON. The world is littered with objects that may seem inconsequential, but as you progress through the game getting further and further haunted, the world itself comes to life. The sounds of creaking doors, floors and falling objects stop just being sounds. You came face to face with physical parts of the environment being moved and shifted. Tables thrown across the floor, a couch flipped perfectly inverted and attached to the ceiling. One of the most unsettling visuals is simply that of a shadow being cast by a wall mounted cuckoo clock. Bathed in red light, standing at the end of a hallway the shadow looks more like a demon creature beckoning you in, than a wide spread shadow of the clock itself.

It cannot be understated how much the visual aspects of the game lend themselves to the fear factor. The atmosphere is further enhanced by flickering lights, reactive environment events and complete changes of reality and dimension through something as simple as walking through a door. Unfortunately, there was a design choice to give your character some of the worst head sway I’ve ever experienced in a game ever. Whilst the intent behind it is to symbolise the struggles Luca is facing within himself, slowly losing control over his own body and racked with pain. It is incredibly jarring and at times sickness inducing to have such wild swings of the camera when simply standing still. It makes walking feel like a drunken wobbly experience, and I found myself often in a battle of keeping the POV straight forward so I could see what I was doing. I would seriously ask the developers to consider an option to turn off the head sway, as there were definitely moments I felt almost nauseous from the movement.

I had a very love- hate relationship with the puzzles in MADiSON. Similarly to Visage, a lot of the puzzles required back and forth movement through the environment, searching for different items required for solutions. The one mechanic I really found myself not having much love for, was a max amount of items being held in the inventory and a storage system as a result of this. This would be fine if the storage safes were a little more prevalent, but most of the time there will be one for an entire area, which could mean a lot of wasted time running back to a safe to grab an item that you haven’t used in a few hours, that you assumed no longer had any use. A good idea is to never store the hammer, as it seems this item is required throughout the entirety of the game, but not always in the situations you would expect. Whilst I appreciate the homage to survival horror games of old the system needs a bit more fine tuning here. The collectible story tapes could benefit from their own storage system, rather than also taking up an inventory slot and then becoming a permanent item in the storage safe. One puzzle in particular can take up to four inventory slots, and as you lose a minimum of 3 of these, it only really gives you leeway of one to work with.

The puzzles themselves are pretty standard affairs, with some being a little bit more brain scratching than others. A portrait puzzle that requires you to take pictures of blank portrait spaces to get a number that you then add or subtract from the age of the portraits is enjoyable enough when it works as intended. My first attempt at the puzzle, taking pictures of the three non-marked empty spaces didn’t seem to trigger anything, and thus I felt incredibly stuck. This appears to just be a bug, but it made me a bit weary moving forward. Playing on normal, indicates areas where you should be looking to take a picture with blank polaroids laying around. This in of itself can be misleading at times. A wall hanging had polaroids around it for the entirety of the game but didn’t need to be taken a picture of until the lead up to the final section. It can make it confusing at times in this regard at remembering where you’ve already progressed a puzzle, or if you’re trying to cause a trigger that isn’t yet in the game for you to do so. Just some slight more guidance, or rather, a removal of unnecessary guidance would go a long way in helping improve the understandability of progress.

An interesting choice of feature is the silent mode feature, which essentially mutes the main character. Whilst I didn’t use this feature when playing through the game it is a strange one to add. Luca has a horrible habit of talking over the top of the very few other voices that you get to hear throughout the game. Most games will circumvent this by only having the character talk during gaps in monologues or expressing their thoughts after the fact. I’m unsure if the choice for Luca was to make him infuriatingly whiny to listen to, but the fact that Silent Mode is a feature you can activate at any point in time, leads me to believe somewhere in the development cycle there was conscious understanding of how frustrating this may be to have a whining protagonist who talks over the top of the key story elements being explained. The human reaction would be to internally think these thoughts, which can be hard to express in videogame medium, but there was definitely ways to get around the talking over aspect without hurting the integrity of the game.

The story itself is a little odd. Madison Hale appears to be a witch who was attempting to do a body transfer ritual, whether to put a demon in herself, or to ensure she could have a second chance at life is unclear. You are now being haunted and slowly possessed by Madison, and are trying to understand why this is happening, whilst being in complete denial for 90% of the game. There are stronger parts of the story, such as the seemingly far more interesting aspect with Blue Knees and the grandparents. Your own father seems to be an incredibly more complex and in-depth character, despite never being a voice outside of the initial minute of the game. Obsessively trying to stop the possession of his own child, he has a Its Always Sunny like room of wall scrawls, drawings, newspaper articles and information on Madison Hale, and even the employ of a priest.

Madison Hale will be the predominant antagonist across the game, often appearing to give you a cheap jumpscare or seemingly guide you to where you should be looking next. A small decision was to seemingly make her unhostile, or at least I never felt like she was going to kill me. Madison needs you to complete her ritual, so it makes no sense for her to kill you off. The problem with this, however, is with her being the main antagonist throughout the game the sense of dread disappears relatively quickly once you realise she cannot and will not hurt you. This may be leading you into a false sense of security, such that when Hans Goring enters into the game, and you inevitably are stabbed and killed by him it comes as a shock. Problematically, Hans only exists for a short section, and you never really find much attachment to him. It almost feels like he was added because there needed to be an intermediary danger between Madison and Blue Knees.

Blue Knees however made me incredibly uncomfortable. Almost looking like a real-life hyper-realistic and grossly oversized Mr Meeseeks, Blue Knees is introduced in a fashion that more games need to take note of. The entirety of the game builds to this unknown thing. Your grandmother lost her pupils and seemed to have gone insane feeling the house is moving and something is trying to get her. Blaming it on a bizarre book they bought for their son, Luca’s father, she seems completely unhinged. There are constant references that Blue Knees is real throughout the game, and whilst you never know what it actually is, Blue Knees feels far more developed and fleshed out than the Madison Hale storyline ever is. After activating the Blue Knees section, by finally reading the very odd book about a boy who lost his eyes and developed blue knees crawling around looking for them, you finally encounter him. All it takes is the change in environment and his gross balloon head peeking around the door frame, bloody holes where his eyes should be and its off. Blue Knees brought out an innate fear in me and is easily the absolute best antagonist in the game. You need to play MADiSON to experience the horror that is not only seeing him but having him crookedly chase you down.

MADiSON is an interesting game. There are so many good aspects to it, but there are also a lot of pitfalls that detract from what could be a horror of the year contender. Whilst easily the best indie horror game to come out since Visage, there are some things that still need to be ironed out to truly etch itself into the peak of horror. An incredible first game from BLOODIOUS, and I cannot wait to see what they come up with next.