MADiSON
by bloodious games.
the magnavox odyssey as it was released the early 1970's.
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".
a screencapture from odyssey now's Let's Play: Haunted House displaying the plastic overlay necessary to play.
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.
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 Infogrames' 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 a PC, or a phone. It's easier to make a huge splash, but I also struggle to think of 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.
promotional gif of the title screen, from the game's steam page.
Where is MADiSON on this spectrum? What does it take from or give us? It's inspirations seem less like modern or classi 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.
a hallway from the interior of the house main character luca is trying to escape from.
I have some problems with some of the sound, but it isn't things other people have been mentioning. Where others make note of Luca's voice acting, I find fault in the sound design as a whole. I'm tired of spooky noises for the sake of them, and I found volume levels to be a little weird, but these things thankfully don't 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 misses as far 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. Between the atmosphere and set up, feeling haunted in a house by a malicious entity is all that I wanted and expected from MADiSON. 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.
screencapture of Playable Teaser's never-ending hallway. the demo took place entirely in this one space.
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 never come to fruition. They just kind of hover and never land.
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?
a core mechanic makes use of the pictures you take with the polaroid camera in game.
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. Above all else, I wish we had more time with Luca and Madison herself. I pieced together what was going on but only once I completed 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 is 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.
an angel blocks you from going forward during a puzzle in game.
It's mediocre.