exactly fifty years ago, in 1972, the magnavox odyssey was released one September morning. the hardware was capable of displaying three blinking structures of polygons, and no more than that. to make use of the console, it came with two controllers, a stack of game cards, and a handful of overlays that you placed over your television screen, each of them correlating to a specific genre of game that was playable on the magnavox odyssey. as the very first video game console, it is an interesting point of history and something i consider necessary to know if you like games. unsurprising to anyone reading this: one of the plastic overlays was a "haunted house". in other words, magnavox odyssey's haunted house overlay was, arguably, the very first horror video game. a playthrough of it can be seen here, if you're interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ltYIXh4BQI

there is a number of "benchmarks" in horror gaming history. the haunted house overlay for the magnavox odyssey is one, but there's a heavy sprinkling of scares through out the history of gaming. once we hit the 80's, an explosion of horror booms across home consoles. immediately, castlevania, released for the famicom in 1986 comes to mind. then, there's sweet home released in 1989 for the NES, notable because the brain behind it was tokuro fujiwara, who did ghosts n goblins before it and would do resident evil after it. but before RE was alone in the dark which dropped in 1992 and is in the DNA of every single psychological horror game whether they know it or not. clock tower came out in 1995 and then we see silent hill, fatal frame, parasite eve, and even later we would see amnesia: the dark descent. after amnesia is outlast and then we have the absolute titan that is p.t. (silent hills)...

it is 2022. the gaming landscape has changed. it has been held up by steam, and youtube, with the let's play being an absolute necessary part of modern video game culture. video games are more accessible than ever, with nearly everyone having at least one console of their own, or at least a PC, or a phone. it's easier to make a huge splash, but i struggle to think horror games that left an actual mark on gaming. layers of fear would probably be it, which speaks to the quality of what we're getting these days. we have highs, often marked by things like Happy's Humble Burger Farm, or lows, marked by Poppy Playtime.

where is MADiSON on this spectrum? what does it take from or give us? it's inspirations seem less like modern video games and more aligned with modern horror movies. insidious is a clear inspiration, but so is the babadook. this isn't a bad thing; there's a late game enemy that is clearly inspired by both of these things that i genuinely really like. i enjoyed the execution and found it spooky enough, but more so than anything, it felt different from what other games have been trying to do. the camera mechanic felt like a lifeline, and while i don't know if i'd call it scary, i don't need a horror game to really scare me these days. i like the tropes, the media, the style, and i think MADiSON does a good job of understanding what makes a big modern day horror summer blockbuster.

the problem i have with the game is that it's story is largely puzzled out haphazardly. it reminds me of throwing spaghetti at a wall until something sticks. the opening is strong, and the first segment that deals only with the house Luca is stuck in is beautifully atmospheric and well pulled off. i have some problems with some of the sound, but it isn't things other people have been mentioning. i'm tired of spooky noises for the sake of them, and i found volume levels to be a little weird, but it's not like these are things that break a game's immersion for me. i really liked the puzzle work at this point, i liked how the camera felt like a mechanic and not a gimmick. i thought i would hate the basement segment, but the way the camera is used to trigger progression there actually kept me from feeling like this was another attempt at P.T. that undermined what it did.

P.T. is probably the biggest inspiration for the game, a sequence in MADiSON's dna that is simple to see. for better or worse, there are attempts to understand why P.T. hit like it did. i don't think the game is entirely inspired by silent hill alone but i don't think it misses the mark on why silent hill mechanically works. it's the story that flops as hard it does, and it's because the story is an unfinished quilt. you're introduced to Luca, the player character, when he's drenched in blood and being kicked out of the house by his father. from there, you find yourself rummaging through the remains of Luca's grandfather's home while he tries to find a way out. he believes his father is going to harm him but something is in his late grandfather's home, hunting him and wearing him down, picking at his brain and slowly attaching itself to him like a parasite. this, alone, is all i needed. the game decides to have a bigger scope, but the foundation that it has isn't made for bigger buildings, and when all you need is an apartment, a mansion seems egregious.

MADiSON is a warped ghost story, stretched to fill the pants of a horror that spans across time and space. it doesn't need to do this, but eventually the game involves not just ghosts, but demons, and nazis, and the manifestation of a childhood fear. even the puzzles at the midpoint where all this starts to show is weak: i don't like mazes in games, and throwing a puzzle in plus an aggressive chasing enemy is less fun or even frustrating and more of a headscratcher. i was just confused. the whole segment feels like a wholly different game and not one i would personally seek out. there are attempts to connect them but they don't really land. they just kind of hover and never finish.

the nazi plotline is not really explained in particular. there's no real connection to the story, and the use of a real life historical figure is a sour decision that honestly makes me wonder what the point was. we know nazis were scary, but when you implement them shakily, it feels like a clumsy attempt to capitalize on the horrors real families went through and still struggle with the after-effects of today. nazi scary, ooga booga. are you frightened?

the game is beautiful and it handles itself with as much grace as it can, all things considered. the adventure game mechanic of inventory management was not always my favorite, but it made me feel a little more calculated about my playthrough, i'll give it that. i wish we had more time with Luca and Madison herself. i pieced together what was going on but only once i finished the game. it wasn't because it was trying to be artsy or vague, but because the game just doesn't seem to give a damn about it's own story in parts.

i guess they're looking to do a sequel of some kind, but i honestly just wish this had been half the length and half the price. it would have been worth that twice over. the shifting setting was unnecessary, and the art direction was never quite as good as silent hill's or layer of fear's. i've got issues with the latter but it set a stage and it knew how to do it.

so what is MADiSON, exactly? a haunting of some kind, on a metatextual level, i suppose. it an exercise for an up and coming developer who won't feel the need to do anything bigger and better than what they set out for in the future, i hope. it's a video game that starts out strong and chokes at the end.

it's mediocre.

Ever since P.T. was shown and canceled it set a new standard for survival horror games. Silent Hill has always been the gold standard to live up to and many games have since. MADiSON is one of the first games I've played in the style of P.T. to actually be good and pull off the scares and atmospheres. While not inherently as frightening as P.T. or other horror games it definitely gets across a dark and haunting atmosphere with plenty of scares.

The game starts out really solid but also has foreshadowing of the game's main weakness. You start out in a dark room with just a TV on and your dad pounding on a door. You need to use the TV as a flashlight by spinning it around and finding a handle to a cupboard on the wall to get a hammer. You get to crawl your way into the rest of the house which acts as the main area you will be solving puzzles. Madison is all about puzzle solving as that's all you do. The first half of the game can be solved fairly easily. It's the same affair of examining everything you can and finding that one thing you can pick up and can use on something you remembered it would go to. A lot of finding and matching at the beginning. In between, there is the main gameplay mechanics which involved a Polaroid camera. A Camera Obscura isn't unusual in horror games. The entire Fatal Frame series is based around one, but here it's used to advance the story. There are Polaroids laying around objects you can photograph. When you do you can shake the photo to expose it. While most photos don't need this some need to be exposed to show a number for a combination lock.

I have to give the developers credit for the great layout of the house. This is a huge issue with a lot of horror games. Many require tons of backtracking through the same area and they grow as you unlock new areas. The house in Madison is well laid out with lots of landmarks to memorize where certain things are. I knew the main starting point with the "ritual area" was past the dining room. The basement was in the main hallway etc. The house is laid out like all horror games should be laid out. Make it memorable with easy landmarks because you trek through the house probably hundreds of times. Most of the rooms hold puzzle areas or transport you to new areas to solve puzzles. You also have an 8-item inventory limit and need to trek to your safe often to store and pick up items. Outside of occasional scripted events, not much happens in the house outside of sounds. There is one scene in a water-filled basement that was probably the scariest in the whole game. The developers really used audio to spook the crap out of you and draw out many fears people would have. Creepy static on radios with unclear voices is haunting.

When you're wandering around the house nothing happens in between puzzles. Just a lot of squeaking doors, wind blowing, slamming doors, etc. There's Luca's breathing that gets annoying as his deep sighs repeat often, but the house itself is just haunting. The sterile lighting, the ultra-realistic look to the house, and the head bobbing. If you played the P.T. demo you know what I'm talking about. This is the new-age horror style that needs to get perfected and Madison definitely sets a new bar. Here's where things take a bit of a dive. Halfway through when you get to the infamous candle puzzle area in the church many players may turn the game off. You must find four different candles in two different time periods and match those colors that are associated with religious imagery. You also have to navigate through four different mazes and if that candle's image isn't there you have to backtrack, go back to the other time period, navigate the same maze again, then repeat this three more times. The one thing the game doesn't tell you is that if you listen to the confessional too early a ghost stalks you and can kill you if you don't place the candle down before he shows up. Thankfully he only exists in one time period. I was able to place the first three candles before doing the last one, but many players won't know this.

Then there's the clock face puzzle. You must match clock faces that are shown on five different walls but the correct faces are spread out around the house. It's a lot of memorization and backtracking. And then there's the Blue Knees ghost puzzle that was incredibly frustrating at the very end. None of this spoils the story, but the last half of the game will really try players' patience. The game got so much right up until this point and it felt like filler to stretch a 2-hour game into 5. Horror game developers please listen. You don't need insanely mind-bending puzzles to be a good game. I know this is a trope, but please stop it. No one liked them 25 years ago and no one likes them now. We play horror games for the atmosphere, scares, and intense scenes, not puzzles.

In the end, the story itself is open to self-interpretation. It's not obvious or clear when the credits roll about what happens to Madison or Luca, but what is obvious are the possible reasons why the ending occurred the way it did. Props to the developers for making an open-ending without being cryptic or making no sense. The visuals are excellent and the production values are up there, but those later half puzzles really bring the game down quite a bit. If you can push past them you're in for a treat with this being one of the best horror games in recent years.

An excellent psychological horror game, in some ways Madison is even scarier than Visage.

I really liked the atmosphere and setting of the game, which is scary and very realistic, as well as the graphics.

The story is also good, but for me the best aspect of Madison is definitely the atmosphere.

I really enjoyed the game, it's worth playing.

Started off okay: Great atmosphere, nice game design, neat little puzzles.

Unfortunately, it fell flat rather quickly. Different story lines scrambled together with no real connection between them, tied to locations that also... have nothing to do with each other.

The game soon managed to destroy the carefully crafted (and honestly, pretty scary!) atmosphere by turning into a jump scare simulator half-way through.

And I guess we should also talk about the protagonist. The voice acting just isn't very good. In fact, he sounds close to tears at any given moment, his comments are annoying and often of little value. The devs seemed to know this, too, since they included an option to mute him. Which is pretty funny, ngl.

This could have been great but in the end, "Madison" is just another forgettable indie horror title.