If you’ve played any of these games, you’ve essentially already experienced MADiSON. Outlast. Layers of Fear. Visage. Maid of Sker. Amnesia. PT. Bloodious Games follows in the footsteps of indie horror games released throughout the PS4 generation, with only a few differences.
When you wake up in a decrepit house with a demon following you, you are required to solve puzzles by analyzing environmental clues and matching up items with the unusual contraptions they correspond to. As you explore the house, you’ll unlock new rooms and face ever-escalating brain teasers. To eliminate backtracking, you must choose which items to carry on your person based on limited inventory space, with unwanted items being stored in a safe. Are you familiar with this?
MADiSON’s camera is what sets it apart. Luca holds the camera in his hands instead of the player-controlled one. By taking pictures during specific puzzles, the old-school device changes and modifies them, providing new clues or interaction points.
Although it is a neat mechanic, it can become frustrating when there’s no additional layer to any puzzle. The game occasionally succumbs to that all too familiar feeling in horror games where you’ve got a bunch of items to use and a bunch of puzzles to solve, but nothing seems to match up.
You don’t feel particularly on edge as you wander around the house either. During the game, you’ll hear noises in the distance and objects — such as the telephone — seem to turn on and off at random, but you’ll soon learn the game’s tricks. The demon stalks you and manipulates the environment in scripted sequences, which offer more effective jump scares.
Another fiend you’ll have to deal with — that’s more of the unexpected kind — is the frame rate, which constantly stutters. It’s relatively smooth most of the time, but evidently at random, it will freeze to a crawl for a second. There is an evident technical glitch that occurs rapidly one after another.
For anyone well-versed in the horror genre, MADiSON covers a lot of well-worn territory.
Pros:
- A good gameplay loop.
- It’s neat how cameras work.
- Jump scares that work.
Cons:
- There is very little originality.
- Doesn’t seem too scary to me.
- Violent frame rate fluctuations.
The rating would be 5 out of 10 for me.