The Haunted Hoard: MADiSON (PS5)

MADiSON might be the most startling game I’ve played so far, and you’re likely wondering immediately why I’m using a word like “startling” over something like “scary” or “terrifying”. This first-person horror game does have some legitimate eerie atmospheric sections and gruesome sights, but what will quickly become apparent is the game leans heavily on frequent unexplained sounds and fake-outs that are more likely to make you jump than scream. While Broadband Choices’s media analysts declared it to be the scariest horror game of all time based on scientific “proof”, that conclusion was based on heart rate and the game definitely keeps you on edge through frequent substanceless sudden sounds and sights. While my body would jerk in surprise, my face was flat and unimpressed, and while this game could likely get nerve wracking for someone with a nervous disposition, its heavy use of unexpected noises and pop scares can also make you numb to them and the ones with some weight end up less impressive for it.

 

While I am usually one to defend a jump scare as a pay off to built-up tension, MADiSON does not let you rest to let the tension rise, and perhaps the odd thing about it is the game doesn’t feel like it needed to constantly fracture its atmosphere for cheap frights. MADiSON is the story of a young man named Luca who has begun seeing and doing terrible things as a demonic force tries to assert itself as the new owner of his body. Once Luca comes to grips with this horrifying scenario being authentic he tries to find some way to free himself from his fate, but his actions seem to put him ever closer to completing the ritual that will turn his body into the permanent host for this malevolent being. MADiSON does try to tie in the abundant flashes of something monstrous and quick and loud sounds to the idea of being possessed by a demon, it evoking hallucinations as it tries to drive its host mad and further push them into its control, and while a person playing a video game might hope for more creative scares to emerge from such a concept, it’s hard to say a demon shouldn’t go for such simple tricks to try and wind up and stress out someone when they are quite effective.

Once you start to become inured to the game’s attempts to startle you, you’ll find MADiSON does have a few decent ideas on how to lay out what actually feels more like a puzzler than a perilous bid for survival. MADiSON takes place across two households, Luca’s home and his grandfather’s connected and helping to show that this issue with demonic possession extends back further than just our unfortunate protagonist. Grimy and dark with an odd abundance of things like photographs and medication to really nail in how disturbed people became under the demon’s influence, it’s a setting that puts you on edge and knows how to construct some striking visuals that make you a bit hesitant to press forward. In the past, a woman named Madison had once performed gruesome sacrifices as she was wrapped up in a similar ritual, and Luca soon learns his family has closer ties to this demon and that woman than he first believes. At times you will find yourself transported to areas outside the home or a room like the basement will become impossibly strange to help better tie the spaces you explore to the growing mystery and it certainly helps increase the kind of unsettling sights and dangerous horrors you encounter. Trying to learn the truth behind this macabre situation is a good motivator and even some of the game’s puzzles find ways to tie into the lives of the family members you’re learning about, and with the puzzles feeling like the game’s best executed portion, it’s a treat to find them incorporating the narrative rather than just being roadblocks to add some interactivity.

Beyond moments you’re just witnessing events unfold or trying to escape from the few fiends that are more than brief visual flickers, MADiSON leans pretty deep into puzzle-solving as its main way of making progress. Luca has a camera that once belonged to Madison herself, it able to often expose new details or trigger reactions in the environment when you snap a picture, but it’s the puzzles with more steps to them that often shine the brightest. MADiSON will bring up puzzles where the important information will be things like who Madison’s murder victims were and usually has a good sense for how much it can spread out its information. A puzzle involving clocks is less afraid to have you traverse the whole house because you’ve been spotting clocks and knew they’d be useful eventually thanks to the fact you can interact with them, but at other times you’ll have most every relevant clue contained in the immediate area. Gradually uncovering the purpose of an inventory item or unraveling a riddle do make MADiSON’s puzzles satisfying to solve and there are enough that take some interesting logic that MADiSON could have rested on the idea of being an eerie puzzle game. It does get in its own way a bit, the player having a limited inventory so they can’t carry everything they find and have to rely on a red safe to store surplus. There doesn’t seem much point to the safe, the game can’t predict if you’ll ever need to come back to it so it’s not like it sets up ambushes in anticipation of such backtracking, but it does make getting work done a touch more tedious which doesn’t necessarily gel well with the game perhaps fraying your nerves with its false scares.

 

The moments you actually are in danger can come as a bit of a surprise though. After acclimating you to the idea that few of the sights or sounds have much meaning, there will eventually be malevolent forces that will catch and kill you if they get their hands on you. Outmaneuvering them as you complete tasks tends to become the focus when they’re present, and there is definitely some tension when the face-off with the game’s marquee enemy requires nail-biting waiting periods where you have to be quick to act or you can lose your hard work. These are perhaps rarer and less dangerous than one might hope, the first one I encountered I threw myself into the arms of because I had come to expect every creature or person I saw to be some harmless cheap scare, but even knowing there was legitimate peril didn’t always spice up that section’s exploration.

THE VERDICT: Besides some environmental staging, the horror of MADiSON ends up a bit unimpressive, the atmosphere not paid off well because the game is constantly trying to make you leap out of your seat with abrupt sounds or sudden jerky hallucinations. The tough but well conceived puzzles can tie into the story well and learning more about the ties between your family, Madison, and the demon do work as good motivators to want to do some problem solving that goes deeper than just inventory uses. While the game will gradually introduce variables for a future puzzle and takes its time with its plot, it’s impatient in trying to terrify you while also getting in its own way a bit with a needless storage safe and the fact you’ll be too inured by shallow pop scares to appreciate the true threats properly.

 

And so,  I give MADiSON for PlayStation 5…

An OKAY rating. MadisonGame.com proudly puts the Science of Scare results as its top accolade so the designers probably feel a bit unrepentant about the all too common empty scares, but the issue isn’t that the game is going for pop scares, it’s that it detracts from a better experience by wearing the player down to such scares. There are times MADiSON does let the horror build a bit, a section where you’re waist deep in water and listening to the recordings of the police officer who confronted Madison able to breathe and build up some tension, but it’s hard to appreciate the successes when elsewhere the game is doing the equivalent of loudly clapping next to your ear sporadically. The annoyance isn’t so frequent that it makes the experience intolerable, but it can make you start rolling your eyes when you see what looks like a horrific monster since you’ve come to distrust it, and when the threat is real, it still might not be able to rewire your brain enough to really appreciate the direction it is now heading in. Conversely, MADiSON’s puzzles do really feel like a lot of thought was put into them and figuring them out is usually a satisfying process even if their difficulty can sometimes be a bit high.

 

A better balance between puzzle solving’s satisfying difficulty and threat avoidance’s simplicity would probably be the key to bumping MADiSON’s quality up so it’s not a game weighed down just by it weakening its own horror, but with some visual sensibilities and a good feel for how a narrative can be slowly unveiled while also tying into your own activities, MADiSON definitely had the potential to be a truly good game instead of merely the most startling one I’ve come across so far.