Developed and published by BLOODIOUS GAMES, this locally produced terrifying offering blows the whistle on many a AAA game. An engaging story and demonic possessions await us in this first-person adventure.
MADiSON It is available for PC, Playstation and Xbox.
THE CRAZY SON
Although Madison is the name of a character within the story, the name of the game is a play on words that also means MAD SON, or crazy son. In this game we embody the role of Luca, precisely one of the last children of the leading family. Throughout the adventure we are going to unravel the family mysteries to reveal the plot, while everything seems to indicate that the closer we get to the truth, the closer we get to madness.
The game starts with our character waking up locked in a room with apparent amnesia, something quite common in games of the genre but that always works. This allows us to start without being given much explanation, and see the story little by little, tying up loose ends. Shortly after starting, we found out that we committed some murders and mutilations in a state of demonic possession, and we found evidence of this locked up in the family home.
This first room serves as a tutorial, the game cleverly shows us how to solve simple puzzles, use objects and light to our advantage. It’s a short sequence where we end up escaping down a hallway to the family grandfather’s house, where the game starts and we spend most of it.
Our main objective is going to be to escape from this house, but for this we are going to have to solve all kinds of puzzles and objectives. The house is huge and as we progress we are going to fit in new parts. The architecture is not that of any normal house and sometimes feels labyrinthine, but it works for a horror game.
The house is full of details in every corner, and although it more closely resembles the classic haunted house of these games, it also has some local details that reveal that the game was made by Argentines. For example, the kitchen has our most common and well-known marble countertops, along with cabinets that I’m sure I’ve seen in more than one house in this country. And there are also some medicine boxes that mimic some that I got to see in real life. Among other details that I am not going to spoil for you to look for, but it is appreciated that they are there. These details make the game, despite being localized for an international audience both in details, character names and story context, feel Argentine. I would have liked to see a matte or something more obvious anyway (if there is, I couldn’t find it). It also helps that the graphic level is impeccable, it happens in some titles that despite the fact that everything looks very realistic, there is always something that is out of place or looks half-done, it is not the case in MADiSON.
In case you were worried that we are only going to be confined to a dark house, I tell you that the game is full of surprises and other explorable locations, to give it more variety and flavor. The story is very good, and I liked the way it is told and how the narrative is built. If we are curious and inquisitive, we will be able to find details of things that will be important much later.
QUALITY HORROR
I’m not going to lie to you, horror games don’t usually scare me too much. It’s mostly in part because I’ve eaten so many jumpscares in my life, most of them barely startle me today. For this reason, and to understand more or less how a game of this type is put together at a technical level, it is difficult for me to reach a high degree of immersion as it happens to other people. Other people feel almost literally inside these games, and it gives them great anxiety and fear to play them. It’s hard for me not to see them as a ghost train, using a phrase from Max Payne 2: “a linear sequence of scares”.
None of this I said is to detract from the genre, much less this game. On the contrary, I really like and enjoy horror games, and MADiSON is one that could be used as an example to describe a title that does things extremely well. My appreciation for them goes more through the quality of the moments they put together, how they build suspense and scares. Also how they put together the narrative, if the story is good, and that nothing is in bad taste or farfetched.
In all these aspects, this title does things well. Maybe MADiSON It doesn’t have many “iconic” scares, but none of them are cheap or stupid. The game starts off quite calm, and gets increasingly cloudy as we get closer to the end. Every moment that wants to generate tension for us is well done and intelligent. Something that he does and I appreciate a lot, is that even though at times we are not in real danger, he is in charge of continuing to worry us. If we stay still for a long time we will begin to hear noises, knocks, footsteps, or doors opening and closing. These noises do not always indicate that something real is going on, but they do keep us alert and attentive.
There’s a section near the end that I don’t want to spoil, but it’s a horror masterclass. She won’t be as strong as PT either House Benevent but it’s the kind of thing we need in horror games, sections that leave you thinking for a while after completing them. They just have to know that Blue Knees is real, and it is now. It is clear that the developers have a great knowledge and love of the genre.
A slightly awkward detail of the game is that the camera moves a lot. Although the perspective is always in the first person and there is a reason in the story for that, Luca moves his head when he walks, and this can make us a little dizzy. Luckily we can disable it from options.
THE FLASH THAT REVEALS EVERYTHING
MADiSON It is one of those horror games where we use a camera as a tool. We find it shortly after starting the adventure and we are going to use it all the time. The main function it fulfills is to photograph specific points to solve puzzles and allow us to advance the story, if we take the photo in the right place, of course. These places, as well as the objects, are always well marked. This is a fairly common problem in other titles of the genre in which we waste time looking for objects that are not visible at all, or hidden in unintuitive ways. In the case of photos, the places where we can interact with them have polaroids around them.
Every photo we take we can develop it, and it will go to our polaroid collection so we can see it later. This is very useful and necessary to solve some puzzles if we don’t want to use a notebook in real life. It’s great that the game has a built-in tool like that. If we get the hang of it, we can also use the flash and these photos to illuminate dark areas. The game often plays with this in interesting ways, from a distance we can see something that looks like a threatening figure, but when we take a picture of it and illuminate it we see that it is just something casting a shadow. There is no limit to the photos that we can take, but we have to take into account that there is a delay between photo and photo. The flash can also protect us if something is chasing us, but only in emergencies, it is not usually something that happens often.
The biggest part of the gameplay is focused on the puzzles, I’m happy to tell you that none of them are too bad milk. They are not always easy, but they were able to find a fair point where, if we seriously think and see the clues, we should not get too stuck. This does not mean that some do not take time, in many places we have to go back to other areas to look for the objects we need, or go from one end of the map to another. The puzzles and clues are very well thought out, and solving them feels highly rewarding.
This brings me to perhaps the only criticism I can seriously make of the game, the inventory system. Luca can only carry 10 items on him, and some of those slots are already filled with items that we can’t leave in the storage box. I thought it was just a bit of a ball breaker, nothing serious, the game doesn’t always automatically discard objects that we won’t need anymore (it only discards the keys). There are some items like the hammer, which are useful from start to finish. But they take up space and we cannot know in advance exactly when we are going to need them, the game encourages us to save them in order to grab new objects that are useful in the short term for the puzzles of the moment. The problem is when many of these objects are universal and useful tools in a variety of situations, and we will always want to carry them with us.
For the more savvy players, there are various trophies/archievements to give you replay value. These range from collectibles, which I’m not going to lie to you, they’re hard to find, to speedrunning the game or passing it by taking as few photos as possible. We also have a hard mode where they won’t give us hints and the objects are harder to see, but if we already know exactly what to do it shouldn’t be a problem playing it a second time. The game has an adequate duration, our first time can take us from 6 to 8 hours, depending on how long it takes us to solve some puzzles or how much we want to look for collectibles and extra clues.
System Requirements
MINIMUM: OS: WINDOWS® 7, 8, 8.1, 10 – Processor: Intel® Core™ i3 or AMD Ryzen™ 3 – Memory: 6 GB RAM – Graphics: NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 950 or AMD Radeon™ R7 370 – DirectX : Version 10 – Storage: 10 GB of available space
RECOMMENDED: OS: Windows 10 – Processor: Intel® Core™ i5 or AMD Ryzen™ 5 – Memory: 8 GB RAM – Graphics: NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1060 or AMD Radeon™ RX 480 – Storage: 10 GB available space