S2E66 - MADiSON

Join me in The Dragon's Library for review of shows, movies, games, and books. This is my review of MADiSON, a psychological horror adventure game which was developed by Bloodious Studio. Luca wakes up in a locked room, covered in blood, and hears the distraught cries of his father. Having apparently killed his sister and mother, Luca flees to the attached former home of his grandfather. There, armed with a magic camera, Luca tries to survive as he is haunted by the ghost of a murderer named Madison Hale and the tragic history of his family.

You can find MADiSON at the links below.

MADiSON (Steam)
MADiSON (Official Site)


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New intro audio designed to be compatible with new youtube intro.

Transcript

[INTRO]

Hello Everyone and welcome back to The Dragon’s Library.

Today we have a newly released horror game, because the summer drought is horrible. Real talk for a moment. I usually stream on twitch for two weeks and then take a week off while I’m on call for work. So when I was about to get off call, I started looking for a game to play while I waited for Thymesia to come out. Eventually I settled on this horror game called Madison. We’ll get to the game in a moment but I need to talk about the studio for a second.

[Studio and Background]

See- The only reason I know about this game is because I was searching for any new release I could find online and vaguely remembered a trailer at last E3. After I finished playing Madison, while working on my script, I tried researching the studio that developed it, Bloodious Games. But I could find nothing on them. Their website redirects to the Madison page and the only info I could find out was that they Developed Madison and used to be called Nosebleed games, according to Gematsu. That same website says they're based out of Argentina, but that’s all. I tried searching wikipedia, but neither Madison, Bloodiouis, or Nosebleed Games have a wiki page. The closest I found was another developer called Nosebleed Interactive.

And it’s just weird. The game has decent graphics and looks like it took a lot of work and money to make, but there is just so little out there about it aside from the Madison twitter account and steam store page. Now this is true as of August 16th, so maybe there will be some more info in the future, but until then it will continue to be weird.

So moving on from the phantom developer. What is Madison?

[Premise]

Madison is described as a first person physiological horror game according to its steam page. The main influences seem to be PT, which gave us the creepy haunted house, and Fatal Frame, which gave us the haunted camera. The designers did an excellent job recreating the supernatural house from PT and the camera acts as your central item, allowing you to progress. I guess now is a good time to explain the story.

You play as Luca, a teenage boy who wakes up alone in his room on a stormy night. Your head is ringing and the sound of someone pounding on the door doesn’t help your headache. However as you get up you realize your hands are covered in blood and your dad is the one pounding on the door, demanding answers. As you get your bearings, the player finds a bloody tin with pictures of severed limbs and your Dad implies you’ve killed your sister and mother. Already off to a great start. The static of the TV barely lights your small corner of the room and despite the main character having no idea what is going on and begging for help, your Dad decides he’s going to put you down. With no other options, Luca finds a hammer and makes his way through the boarded off connection to the adjoined home, which is where your recently deceased grandfather lived.

Going through to the new house, where the rest of the game will take place, you find it a mess. Strange occult symbols and newspaper clippings of some old tragedy are everywhere.The kitchen is a disaster, creepy photos gleam from the walls. It’s really well done. Anyway, after finding a few items you open a present address to Luca. The creepy box is sitting on a chair surrounded by a circle of candles. Inside you find a polaroid camera and after you take a picture the chair spins around, making it very clear that this place is haunted.

Desperate to escape, Luca progresses further into the house. All the while, it becomes clear your grandpa and more recently your father had something to do with this or at least knew about whatever is haunting you. But I’ll get into that later. After some more key hunting and turning on the generator you find a tape from some priest who reveals you are suffering from a form of demonic possession.

[Play Audio Sample of First Tape]

This whole thing is linked to a serial killer named Madison Hale, who was killed by police upon discovery of a ritual she was performing with her dismembered victims. Proceeding down into the basement you find an impossible space below, a giant cavern with a sealed well.

So what do you do? Well the door’s blocked and Luca apparently can’t break a window or he’ll be in even more trouble, so we pop that sucker open. The lid is too heavy but luckily the camera is magic.

After falling down into an equally impossible basement, flooded with water we find a radio and walk straight into an area walled off with police tape. As the shadows begin going nuts and something darts around just out of sight, the police officer from the reports, officer Russel begins speaking over the radio and well, I’ll just let you listen.

[Play Russel Audio]

So yeah. After that, Luca has a round of camera tag with Madison, before eventually finding an exit and heading back up.

With the information given it appears as if Madison is using you conducting some kind of ritual and you have no say in the matter. Sucks to be Luca!

So with the story established, let’s get to the visuals.

[Visuals]

This might be one of the best looking horror games I’ve seen, or at least it’s pretty high up there. The graphics are crisp and fantastic, but I did play this on the PS5  so I’m not sure how it performs on PC, but from what I’ve read in Steam reviews, it seems on par with what I played.

The house is this highly detailed and decrepit place. Dim lighting and scuttling insects give it the feeling of being left to rot. The monsters are quick flashes that do a good job of never staying on screen too long, which creates a fear of the unknown. The player never quite knows what that flicker in the distance was.

[Sound Design]

The excellent visuals are complemented by the sound design. Tiny little scrapes and latches, echoing through the home.

The game uses its sounds to amplify the setting and oftentimes, sound queues can be used to prepare for jump scares or attacks, which give the player a bit more agency, even when there’s nothing you can do.

The whine of the camera flash, often punctuated by a supernatural crash when you snap a supernatural photo. 

[Camera Flash and then Crash]

This brings me to my favorite part of the game, the house itself.

[The House]

Grandpa’s abandoned home is probably the game’s most impressive feature. The whole thing is full of details and strange oddities. Why are half the pictures gone? What’s with the medication all over Grandpa’s bed? Why does that statue keep vanishing Weeping Angel style? When you first start playing the atmosphere is downright oppressive. The floorboards are creaking and doors shutting. Objects will shift and rearrange themselves. Bloodious really makes you feel the presence of demons and ghosts. As if they are right behind you the whole time.

[Show the Statue]

The whole system is semi-random too. New effects and modifications are added as you complete puzzles, and so the house almost starts to feel alive.

The whole thing is a masterclass in atmospheric design and horror effects, unfortunately this ends up conflicting with the gameplay, which is slow and methodical. So I guess I have to talk about that now.

[Sigh]

[Gameplay]

Despite calling itself a psychological horror game, that is not a genre. But Adventure games are. And Madison is the worst sort of adventure game, you find an obscure key and put it in an inscrutable lock. It starts out fine and relatively simple. You use the camera to uncover clues that lead you to the solution.

But after the well sequence you head into the arctic where you have to find the photos. Now after like twenty minutes of trying to use the two photos I found up there, I realized you needed to find the other photos. Once I got them all however, nothing happened. A bit more guesswork and I figured out how to use the camera to open the next area. The next few puzzles are fine and to be honest most of the time traveling church was great, but it is near the end of this section where the game goes off the rails.

See up until this point I had not been in real unscripted danger, but then I am suddenly murdered by a Nazi ghost who is immune to my camera while trying to finish a puzzle. Turns out that puzzle becomes a timed challenge in the last minute or so. The game is really bad at explaining this so I died a few times trying to flash the ghost like the game taught me to do and each time he killed me. What you need to do is run away and set the last candle down.

A little shaken, but still having enjoyed that section for the most part, Luca enters a nightmare hallway that keeps bricking up the doors. I’m in the mood when suddenly the ghost shows up again and instantly kills me. I tried again and again, but I couldn’t stop him and there was nowhere to run. With no other option I was forced to look up a guide and it was so dumb. Apparently once he appears you need to turn around and run away. Now Luca handle’s like a freight truck, and there is no way I could have realistically escaped him, but when you turn around it apparently lets the game know not to insta-kill you. Then you run and escape but it is all downhill from there.

See my problem with the second half of the game is that most of the puzzles give you barely any direction, sometimes actively misleading you, before revealing a nonsensical answer. These puzzles are almost unsolvable without a guide and many are randomized. Yeah, apparently the developers thought randomized solutions could add to replay value.

Sure that can work with door codes in an action game, but in a game focused puzzles and a central mystery in the narritive it obscures the answers. In addition, sometimes it leads to even greater player confusion. Don’t even get me started on the Blue Knees Section.

[Gramophone Eyes Sound Plays]

This leads to a pixel hunt for a small floorboard in the back corner of a bathroom you entered hours ago, and that you would never think to check.The puzzles become obsessed with becoming as obscure as possible and eventually result in the infamous red light puzzle. Now I have to explain one of the worst puzzles I have ever experienced.

So you need to gather pieces for a ritual and after getting the first digit of a code you need, the demon sends Luca the image of a red light in darkness, which he draws in the notebook.

Now earlier in the game you go to grandpa’s office and right before you get there is a hallway with the lights out and a red bulb dimly glowing at the very end against a clock, in such a way that it is designed to stand out. That red light bulb is a pretty rare sight in the game, and this is the only one still lit. So you take a picture and… Nothing happens. I spent so long trying to find a solution. Maybe I need to open the safe first. Or perhaps one of my other items interacts with the clock now. But nothing worked. After looking it up, I just felt insulted. See there is another light, now off, that you saw at the beginning of the game, near the generator. So what you were supposed to do is go inside, turn off the generator, which used an interaction point that had previously only resulted in Luca saying he wouldn’t turn off the power, so you can go through a new nightmare sequence.

There was almost no precedent and the only clue was that you  should’ve remembered an unusable interaction point and now turned off the red light from over six hours earlier, instead of the one you’ve been seeing for the last few hours. Screw that!

After the red light, I just started whipping out the guides, because the game had already shown me it didn’t give a damn about the puzzles anymore.

This uncertainty in what the game wants you to do is made worse by a limited inventory of eight items. That might sound like a lot, but your notebook, camera, and pictures eat up three slots and you have to store Audio recordings to prevent each one from using a slot as well. There is zero reason for this and most of the game agrees. In the early game, essential items would spawn a safe nearby, but as I said the second half of the game doesn’t give a shit and regularly makes you backtrack during puzzles. The most infamous being the elevator puzzle, that made me have to backtrack through nearly the entire house. The massive backtracking becomes a regular annoyance.

This problem destroys most of the game’s atmosphere, since after a while you just become numb to the repeating setpieces. I regularly found myself getting bored and frustrated during the sections between set pieces.

And I have to stress, that while these issues exist throughout the game, they were tolerable in the first half, but after the Nazi ghost the whole thing becomes a slough.

In conclusion, the main issue with the puzzle gameplay is not the idea of a horror themed adventure game, but rather that the pacing and comprehension of the puzzles which interrupt the story to the detriment of its horror.

[Before Spoilers]

Before I go over the rest of the story with spoilers, you probably want to know if I recommend Madison. See, while technically impressive, Madison does not hold up particularly well as a game. Several design elements like the limited inventory only exacerbate these problems. When the horror is moving at the proper pace, it is a very involved experience and quite frankly the first half of the game was excellent. So really this should come down to whether or not you can deal with the adventure game derailing the horror set pieces. I just couldn’t and as a result Madison gets a 6/10. Very detailed and horrific setting, broken up with lots of pointless nonsense. With that out of the way let’s move onto the rest of the story. Warning Spoilers are inbound from this point forward.

[Spoilers and Story]

Ok, so.

Luca is kinda screwed. As the game progresses, we get further insight into the tragedy of both Luca’s family and the surrounding area. Long story short, when Luca’s dad was a kid, the grandmother started being haunted by a demon called Blue Knees after Luca’s father was given a picture book from a garage sale. In 1972, the demon began to torment the grandmother, driving her to near insanity and slowly blinding her eyes. Eventually she died and it was only years later that the grandfather would come to believe her stories about the demon. As Luca’s dad moved out and the grandfather realized what had happened to his wife, he became obsessed with contacting her dead spirit. Unfortunately, it quickly became obvious that the various tarot card readers and spiritualists were all fake.

In 1987, Madison Hale, a occultist and witch, murdered seven people in an attempt to perform a demonic body swapping ritual. The ritual was stopped by police officer Russel and Madison Hale was shot dead. Her spirit would go on to bind itself to her beloved camera. Luca and his family would move to a house next door to  his grandfather in the early 2000s, and even as the grandfather became more desperate. The old man began developing into more obscure occultist practices and is implied to have acquired Madison Hales camera.

Then a few years before the game, the grandfather died from unknown causes. Though we can assume either Blue Knees, Madison, or some other monstrosity got to him. Shortly after Luca was given Madison’s camera and began to act strangely. Withdrawing from the rest of his loved ones. The father, shaped by his experience with the Supernatural, called a priest who began to investigate. From the voicemails and how the father seemed to be putting together newspaper clippings on Madison Hale, they seemed to be realizing she had been possessing Luca. However, before either of the men could act, Madison put her plan in motion. That plan is unclear, but seems to involve swapping bodies with people to keep living forever. So she kills several people, including the mother and sister, while possessing Luca. She then forces him to flee to the walled off home on a stormy night. This is where the intro to the game starts, which I already talked about.

After the basement, Luca is lured into the attic. He discovers a set of four picture hooks but only two frames. Finding the other two and using your camera on the wall, a door appears. Picking up the lighter you head into an impossibly vast tunnel sequence that seems to go on forever. The whole way you get jumpscared by Madison, but nothing important happens. Passing out, Luca awakens in an abandoned church and uses his camera to jump into the building at three different time periods: 1951, 1987, and 2022.

Basically there is a Nazi ghost haunting his ex-wife, who killed him when she learned that he was survivor of the Nazi regime which fled to america. The puzzle is pretty simple, involving placing colored candles in the appropriate spots. After the 3rd the Ghost attacks you and it becomes a timed puzzle. Once you finish with that you have the hallway I talked about in the gameplay.

As Madison's influence begins forcing Luca to keep going, it becomes increasingly hard to determine who is in control. Luca seems to forget about trying to escape at this point. He finds his father’s notes and listens to voicemails left by the priest, but is unable to stop himself. Madison directs Luca to collecting several ingredients necessary to complete the ritual.

As time passes, the supernatural visions grow stronger and stronger, becoming indistinguishable from reality. After facing down blue eyes in a really annoying section where the house is randomly remixed and retrieving grandmother’s ashes, Luca places the sacrificial objects on four statues that have been following us all game. At this point, he’s not even talking. He just softly sobs as his body lurches forward. It becomes clear that he has no control left. Luca props up the camera, steps onto the chair and hangs himself in front of the altars. As he dies, Madison is seen flashing the camera before his vision goes dark. Then suddenly his eyes shoot back open and the game ends. Though it is implied that Madison succeeded and has now stolen Luca’s body.

So that’s kinda a bummer, but it looks like that priest and the dad can deal with her.

Like I said earlier, the horror elements and story are well done, but they just don’t mesh well with the gameplay. The resulting experience almost had me wishing this had been a walking simulator instead.

[Pause in shock]

Wow. That might be the worst thing I’ve ever said about a game. I don’t want to say that. I really don’t-cause I hate walking simulators, but at least then I could enjoy the atmosphere.

[Extra Stuff]

Hope you enjoyed this review. I’m trying a new more comprehensive script style, so let me know what you think. Do you like this, or did you prefer my unscripted spoiler sections?

If you ever want to suggest something for review, be it video game, movie, show, book, or even something weird like a podcast, you can always email me or @ me on twitter. Links to both are in the description.

And I will see you all next time!