My SCARIEST GAME of 2022 (so far…) | MADiSON Review
i’ll be honest i played this game because i thought it was going to be and i thought it would make a funny video if it was i remember watching the trailer for madison a few weeks before it came out and actually being anxious as but since i’m a crybaby piss boy i knew it would be a waste of money on my end you know i’d buy it load it up and then be functionally frozen with fear until the heat death of the universe they weren’t handing out keys for psn streamers either so you know that
wasn’t an explorable avenue for me and i was one of the idiots that pre-ordered cyberpunk 2077 so i wouldn’t be making that mistake again seriously that game sat in its plastic wrap for almost two years at least the bugs were fixed by the time i tried it on release day i popped by a stream on twitch and gave the gameplay a bit of a glance i don’t know what i stumbled on but madison looked crap it looked really goofy i watched for a few minutes and i turned the stream off because i was unimpressed but
as the weeks went on i started to hear more about it a few people said it was an incredible game a few people said it was dog and one
it turns out that madison is one of the cheapest but highest quality vpns currently on the market oh no wait sorry i was confused that’s today’s sponsor atlas vpn with over 6 million users atlas vpn is a free unlimited vpn offering heavy duty protection against ddos attacks and snooping prevents isp throttling and allows you to swap your time zone for early access to time zone or region locked games right now atlas vpn is running a limited time offer so check out the link in the description to learn more although i work in software i mean
i’m a web designer i’m highly technical especially when it comes to vpns so i was happy to see how easy atlas vpn is to use you can connect anywhere from a wide variety of countries and any concerns are immediately addressed by the support center no technical jargon no walls of text just good help for users of any technical ability with over 6 million users worldwide atlas vpn is one of the most popular vpns available now and for good reason right now atlas vpn is running a massive discount you can get a three year subscription for
just under two dollars per month plus three months for free all with a 30 day money back guarantee this deal won’t be around forever so make the most of this limited time offer by clicking the link in the video description below or my pinned comment below the video thank you atlasvpn for sponsoring today’s video yeah no madison is no vpn it’s a game unsurprisingly a horror game and when i saw it i expected a stale walking simulator with minimal effort flipped assets cheap jump scares and a dead atmosphere but like dead in a crap way
not in a scary way probably with the wankiest story on the planet i was wrong this is one of the scariest games i’ve ever played and easily my scariest game of the year if not the last half decade now what really surprised me about madison is that the game is actually really really good hear me out so those of you who already watch my content will probably know already i like games with good stories good communicative control schemes and a lack of reliance on jump scares so on paper i would hate madison like all good
pieces of horror media madison is a fairly terrifying experience that sits squarely on a story so flimsy that you can see its nips poking through its t-shirt when it gets cold a lot of horror movies are like that a shaky foundation of bad writing serving the simple purpose of hoisting up some creepy visuals and nasty scares some of their stories are crap all the way through like the human centipede 2 or cabin fever squatting squarely on your face with the pure intention of making you very very uncomfortable with as little narrative effort as possible the
narrative is there loosely to justify what you’re seeing on screen some of them start really strong and then they kind of blow their beans at the end when they realize they’ve escalated to a conclusion they can’t quite pay off like sinister madison i feel kind of falls into the first camp of horror media as in the story is a very basic skeleton that justifies the gameplay with very little room for exploration and discovery and very little payoff farty vidya would starve in this game there’s no hidden secrets to be found no twists or turns it’s
very basic it’s rare for horror stories to be good and that’s fairly accepted i don’t mind that but we should try and be better i think madison controls like trying to pilot a tractor through a supermarket random interactions are assigned to the same buttons for some reason so you’ll try and sprint and end up taking a photo instead or you’ll try and take a photo and accidentally interact with something opening drawers and cupboards feels like peeling your own fingernails off your main character fumbles around like a toddler in a ball pit and the jump scares
christ i won’t show you any jump scares in the game in this video one for spoiler reasons but two for the mere fact that i hate them but this game absolutely layers them on and honestly it doesn’t really need to because the one thing i think this game does so well so brilliantly so pants-wettingly well is atmosphere enough for despite all those problems with the game all those issues i just mentioned the atmosphere is what makes it one of the best horror games i’ve ever played like it’s that good it can stand on its atmosphere
alone this game is scary it is extremely tense it is a perfectly crafted experience designed entirely with the intention of making you sleep with the lights on and it pulls it off so well if we were to grade madison on its story it would be low if we graded it on characters it would be average if we graded it on mechanics it’d be pretty good but if we grade it on horror it’s top of the class and today i’m gonna tell you why so since most of the weaknesses of this game fall within the story
beats expect full spoilers for madison i will be covering everything including the ending although don’t let that concern you too much the story in this game really is secondary and in my opinion you can fully appreciate the game while still knowing how it ends there’s a few different interpretations for how it ends and like the general story and how it all works and i’ll glance on them but i don’t really want to cover them here because you know i want to stick to the review but that said before we begin thanks for being here remember
to like the video and subscribe if you enjoyed it i post all sorts of gaming videos and there’s plenty more to watch comment your own thoughts on the game if you’ve played it your own likes and dislikes and check me out over on twitch.tv if you’d like to check games real time finally there’s a patreon down below in the description where you can earn access to some beautiful pledge rewards and when i figure this vimeo thing out see videos early thanks to my current patrons for all their support with that said let’s get on with
it in madison we start in a dark dank room the only illumination is a tv screen which flickers ominously casting this washed out light across all the walls there’s a man your character’s dad crying outside the door your own blood he says what were you thinking first things first but our character’s voice reminds me of somebody so familiar i gotta get out of here father when can i leave to be on my own i’ve got the whole world to see yeah i couldn’t get that little puppet out of my head the whole time i played
this luca our main character has a hilariously soft voice that sometimes he does these little moans when he’s scared or upset and they’re supposed to be like harrowing he’s like it just sounds like he’s creamed his pants and they make me laugh every time the own blood your father is referring to seems to be some dismembered body parts you see in some polaroids you collect off of the floor so we can assume luka killed somebody in his family shortly before this game began and then locked himself in that room fears fear luca i would probably
need some breathing space after something like that as well as we toddle around this tiny room grappling with the insanely stiff cupboard opening animation it will be the death of me i swear we grab a hammer and use it to pry our way through some boards in the wall heading into a new section of the house so cool and creepy definitely this new section of the house is as we learn luca’s grandfather’s house his furniture screams the cheapest starter set of sims furniture and among the page decor we learn that he’s installed a ton of
jump scares we can assume he’s dead the game never specifies i don’t think but i feel it’s a comfortable assumption to make and the house has been kept the same ever since exactly the same the place is littered with rubbish old unopened mail pill bottles not even a sweep god i hope my kids leave my house and belongings to rot away after i die that’d be great luca has a camera that i initially assumed would serve as a terrible torch full of canned jump scares but not so not so at all the camera in this
game is actually pretty cool not only can you get cute skins for it including a literal skin one if you want to roleplay as some flamboyant necromancer but the function the camera serves evolves across the course of the game frustratingly it’s assigned to the same button as sprint meaning you’ll often accidentally shoot a premature photo when something makes you jump like a squeaky masochist but one of the many purposes of the camera we’ll find it serves is that it can magically make stuff happen when you take photos of stuff you often progress the story by
finding what you need or assembling what you need to assemble and then photographing it there will be a loud bang the screen will shake and whatever happens happens usually in a manner that involves it running right at you screaming at the top of its voice lazy design maybe but i mean anything luca does seems to take 10 000 years and a ton of elbow grease to work so it’s nice to literally have a make the thing work button in my hands why is opening cabinets so clunky why do i feel like i’m peeling tarmac every
time i open a drawer me we enter a room with a chair sat in the center and we use the camera to make the thing work and we watch it turn into some kind of ritual setup with candles littered across the floor as we explore we find a hole in the wall with a blaring tv on the other side it’s a rude but effective move this game pulls often your character wants to see through the hole this game is played in first person and so your character will have to get right up close to the
hole in the wall and stare directly through it at a clue or something on the other side and god it’s arse crunching i would really quickly glance through and then back out straight away the medium burned me on this and it certainly won’t be happening again i don’t know if any scares ever happen in those situations i didn’t get one they could be randomly generated and for that i applaud the team for their self-restraint being that they could have ended my life in a second with one close-up screamer that being said if there are possible
scares in these situations and i just somehow avoided them then i don’t know lick my bum as i learned throughout the game some of the scares in this game are actually random not as in like pure rng but some places have scares spawned where they don’t normally spawn so it’s perfectly achievable to be on your sixth run-through of the game only to flounder into a scare you’ve never seen before and i think we can all agree that that is like the worst thing ever so the tv tells us that a woman named madison hale killed
her own family during a ritual just like us 20s except she was fatally shot in the stomach interrupting said ritual but what was the ritual ah i’m sure it won’t be relevant oh look at this a book full of drawings of burned polaroids the drawings are titled things like sister’s leg mum’s arm dad’s head but most importantly this book is found in a red save the red save is essentially your storage box think like resident evil 7 and then think it again because that font in the upper eye of your inventory is definitely like ripped
straight from it for some reason as we walk into the house proper we see what we have to work with and the real strengths of this game come to light remember how i said this game was really good well i haven’t been doing it much justice so far with my explanations have i but this is where the game really begins to shine see madison largely takes place in a modest sized family house with a few rooms i say that but i mean modest sized family house from like the 60s so it probably cost 800 pounds
with a zero interest mortgage qualified for because the buyer showed up in a suit and tie or because his parents promised the bank he’d probably be good for the cash but this is good because it means that we have a very small space to explore and do our puzzles in with some branching paths that take us elsewhere the house at first feels almost like a hub area like it seems a bit safe but occasionally something ultimately harmless will scare the out of us think henry’s apartment from silent hill 4 if you’re old enough to have
seen a playstation 2 in person and i know that some of you aren’t there are only a few rooms available to us at first and there are puzzles dotted around but we don’t have tools to access them yet most of the doors are locked this game does a thing where it gives you access to some late game puzzles or items early but with no way of using them i think this is easy to criticize but personally i really like him i hate when games oversimplify themselves by having you walk into a new section of the
game when you are given exactly the puzzles that you need to solve right now and the exact tools that you need to solve them with because then the game becomes a four piece jigsaw that you already have the pieces for so it’s just a matter of slotting them together i think it makes puzzles too easy when you’re given exactly what you need exactly when you need it in madison you can be given late game puzzles right at the start the toilet for example which needs bolt cutters to open and the game doesn’t tell you whether
or not you can solve them yet and horror games love pretending bolt cutters are far more relevant to daily life than they actually are so you spend a bit of time with the toilet get to know it try some stuff on it and while you explore you tend to find the puzzles you can actually solve and the items you can actually solve them with i prefer it it becomes a jigsaw you don’t have all the pieces for you you don’t actually know how big it’s supposed to be but the game drip feeds you a random
selection of pieces at a time and half of the challenge is figuring out what’s relevant and when it’s relevant at this point i wandered around a little bit and explored the items you can pick up like winding keys and shovels feel natural enough to be found in a home and aren’t out of place but they also feel useful enough that i can understand why my character picked them up you have a good balance between resident evil and song of horror here where resident evil has you picking up three dog head reliefs the song of horror
has you picking up bits of random scrap metal you would definitely never notice or think to find important if the game didn’t specifically have your character comment allowed on them and put an interact button right above them the puzzles in madison i feel are done really well what really works in this game and what i really find to be its strongest asset is the atmosphere what you’ll find around this point or maybe we’ll have found even earlier is that this game is tense it is really scary there is no other way to describe it madison
makes incredible use of the surround sound in your headphones to create a game so immersive that even the most seasoned horror players will utterly crawl through it i know whenever i talk about scary games there’s always somebody in the comments like yo i played it it wasn’t scary not even one bit and it’s like okay but i don’t believe you and i definitely don’t believe you with madison the audio design in this game is one in a million the house fundamentally is extremely quiet there’s no music or wind whistling or ambient sound the house is
silent which means that any noise you hear just strikes through like a gunshot the house creaks around you footsteps echo in other rooms doors open and shut when you’re not looking the house is in no way lived in but you do not feel alone noises don’t escalate but the tension does the house finds a constant level of creepy occasional sounds and stays there but your anxiety will just grow and grow and grow until you’re sweating heart palpitating having to pause the game for a rest every few minutes it’s a difficult game to play in the
best possible way often you’ll find a note to read and when you pick it up you’ll hear something right behind you walking towards you but when you frantically put the note down and look behind you nothing’s there but you don’t even want to turn around maybe it would just be better not to know the utter silence of the house the dead ear meant i was crawling through this place on my belly the house has been carefully crafted in such a way that rooms are connected by long thin corridors and tiny doorways under tall ceilings so
you can see far ahead but only a pin prick you can’t see left right or above it makes walking down those corridors extremely tense your blind spots on either side are so significant that something could be right on the other side of a wall or corner and you would not know until you were right next to it and sometimes you are right next to it the game plays with this a bit having figures walking away right at the end of a corridor or having a very very rare jump scare that i think spawns if you
spend too long walking around the house where one particular corner becomes well it becomes a cause for concern if you catch my drift and drift i did right over to the power button when i put this game down for the night the lighting in madison is bleak adding to this dusty grey filter over everything you can see luca’s grandpappy’s house has some of the most washed out overhead lights on the market bathing everything in like a dull grey that gives the place a strange and otherworldly vibe the shadows leaping across the floor make me jump
bad the corners of the rooms are pitch black and creepily dark you can only illuminate them with the flash from your camera and doorways are short and narrow obscuring your viewers to what’s on the other side and as the game wears on and one particular entity begins to roam it really helps to know what’s on the other side of those doors the way this house has been put together to maximize atmosphere is utterly masterful in my opinion with every detail geared specifically towards giving you some of the tensest experiences of your life the way the
gameplay functions is similar too initially i was really skeptical of the use of an inventory system often they just feel like time wasters and the consequential blight of inventory management since you get what like eight measly slots for inventory and some of them are permanently occupied i was initially really irritated by the semi-constant need to be shuffling these bits and pieces back and forth from the red safe combined with the way the game gives you late game pieces early it means that you might need to trial a few different combination of items before you find
the ones you need for a puzzle adding to your reliance on walking back and forth from the red safe but as i played i started to realize that this is a really effective way of raising the tension see when you make progress in this house invisible variables will turn on and things will become active like new jump scares or just general spookiness having inventory management forces you to walk through the house to the red safe and then walk through the house back to where you were doing the puzzle it’s only a short walk but combined
with the noises and the tension and the crippling atmosphere of this horrible little game it becomes a walk you would genuinely rather do tomorrow i remember doing a puzzle in the attic which involved moving four portraits around on the walls only to realize my inventory was full a quick trip to the safe i reassured myself but looking down the ladder imagining myself taking that long walk back to the safe i put the game down and went to bed tomorrow problem because the map does do that change i mean not go to bed after a certain
point the ladder will fall down from the attic so that you now have access to the attic but this cuts off your quick access to the kitchen it takes the initial donut shape of the map and turns it into a horseshoe this means that instead of being able to scurry through the fairly open jump scare-free kitchen you now have to take a long long walk through those corridors round three tight corners multiple doors and the game will make you feel every extra second of that trip jesus christ this artificially elongates the gameplay but not to
the extent where it feels like they’re trying to drag out the play time the time is nominal here it’s only a few seconds but it feels like years i feel like madison forces you to turn away from what you’re doing and face that horrible network of corridors head-on it means that while you might be in one room doing one single puzzle having to pick up a new item means that the situation now extends across the house and you have to take a very nauseous heart palpati walk all the way back to that red safe to
drop off some more stuff i think it’s really effective normally i find these kinds of gameplay extension tactics to be really cheap but i think it worked so well in madison that i couldn’t fault it and in some of the later puzzles it adds a risk of death when you’re running back and forth across the house or wherever you find yourself but there’s something there with you too the way this functions forces you to immerse yourself in the atmosphere and it forces you to endure it and it is really unbearable on the flip side the
save frequency in this game can only be described as appalling the game auto saves as denoted by an icon that appears in the bottom right corner of the screen but it only auto saves when you make measurable progress through the story since initial playthroughs are puzzle heavy they can run you pretty long the time between measurable pieces of progress can be quite high sometimes i would spend like 30 45 minutes carefully walking around the house picking up items examining things reading notes reshuffling my inventory figuring out puzzles but then i would need to clock back
into work or go to bed and there’s no way to save the game without progressing the story so what do i do do i check a walkthrough and spoil the next step for myself just so that i can save the game or do i turn the game off and lose my thread 30 minutes in and return to the game not knowing what i’ve read picked up experienced or have in my inventory for me since i love puzzles i would just turn the game off and take the hit to my play time but it was really
annoying when i wanted to stop and take a break only to be forced to play for another 20 minutes just to wait for the save game icon to show up i know it sounds like a nothing problem and in most games it’s not really that important but on my first playthrough i was really annoyed by this i think with games like this that are so intensive and heavy that when you need a break you you need a break being able to quick save or have a point in the house you can interact with to save
the game potentially the phone and the kitchen would be really useful just so i could keep my inventory and not have to retrace my steps every time i pick up the game again after a short stint in the basement we find a recording left by a priest who visited the house where he talks about demonic possession the way this game does recordings is really funny rather than just putting the tape into a tape player luca just holds it in his hand and the thingies in the tape just spin while the tape plays hey what’s up
what you been up to the priest tells us that from the moment of first contact it is already too late demons attach themselves to humans like parasites and devour their soul the whole time luca is just repeating words or phrases from the recording in these like meek shocked little whispers aggressive head things but sometimes he just directly talks over the recording like shut up luca there’s actually an option in the menu to turn off lucas voice which gets really tempting at points luca sees visions of a red door and if you’re already on a second
playthrough you’ll probably already have walked down into the basement and been standing outside said red door by this point waiting for the dialogue to end it’s really funny actually if you check out some speed runs on this game half of the run is spent waiting for that priest to stop talking the priest warns us that demonic possession usually manipulates insects into gathering and the priest tells us to avoid places where we see insects particularly cockroaches but lo and behold this cockroach is on the door just as the priest said but this is a horror story
so naturally it is the only time in the game that cockroaches are used to my memory it’s a shame i think they could be a strong motif used throughout the game but they’re largely forgotten from this moment onward they’re just like a cool oh yeah moment when you’re listening to the audio and then you look up and see some insects there’s a lot like that in this story to be honest motifs that are picked up and dropped storylines that are undercooked connections between storylines that are half-assed and half-baked i won’t go into them for the
sake of spoilers and at one point i did flirt with the idea of explaining the story in this review since it has some interesting elements but i decided against it i think it’s worth playing it yourself so i won’t go into detail so while i said earlier that this game takes place in a small house with a few branching paths behind this door is one of those branching paths as we’re told by the priests recording subjects of possession tend to hallucinate big time which i think is what’s implied by these branches we’re not actually going
down a well into the sewers we’re not actually going through a subterranean maze we’re not actually in an old rundown church we’re probably just lying down on a dirty floor somewhere tripping demonic balls it might be what’s implied by the wall luca crawls through to get to his grandpa’s house these places might not even exist they could just be happening in luca’s mind honestly his grandpa’s house could be in his mind as well he might never have left the tv room at the start of the game and a lot about the game implies that especially
the priest’s dialogue when he tells us that the fastest way to get rid of a demon is to do exactly what it wants you to do like isn’t that exactly what a demon would tell you if they wanted you to do what they wanted you to do like yeah dude definitely this priest this holy man this vessel of christ he definitely thinks you should do what i say you should do so go and do it i think the whole hallucination idea is a pretty cool concept that gets a little bit more explored in the game
more than the cockroaches anyway i mean the title of this game is literally mad son he’s probably just in a k-hole somewhere watching daytime tv as we wander underground into some sewers one thing i do feel pertinent to mention is the use of jump skiers this game employs a lot of jump scares which it layers on top of this crippling atmosphere pretty thoroughly i’ve never played pt myself but it looks like the kind of game that aims for the same atmosphere as pt without ripping the out of it and personally i’m in two minds about
it i don’t feel like madison needs to have so many jump scares this game is really creepy without them but they work so like i don’t know because i’ll be honest this game is rancid with them they’re constant enough that the game is a series of gunshot volume barks right in your ear and they’re exhausting and endless and they absolutely batter you both ends but they’re placed just sparsely enough that you’re lying if you say at least one didn’t really get you and me who hates jump scares because i jump so hard that it hurts
well i found a weird respect for them some of them were evil normally i can’t stand them but i felt as though alongside the atmosphere of this game they ended up really working like this is a horror game it’s supposed to be scary its goal is to scare me and it did that really well is the story flimsy yes are the characters weak oh yes are the monsters actually a bit goobery yes but this game had me walking backwards through the house with my headphones off because it’s a move the devs would never anticipate and
if that hasn’t done its job then i don’t know what has they don’t prepare for players like me i’m just too smooth with it despite the cheapness of the jumpscares in places they’re not entirely relied upon at some point several statues in the house will begin to move around and yeah sometimes it’s fairly noticeable but sometimes you’ll be solving puzzles on one wall only to turn around and there’ll be a statue right behind you no movement no noise no sting no dramatic flare just presence and by god those weren’t the moments where i was propelled
15 feet off my seat in a fear response that could be measured on the richter scale see you later man there is one bit that i feel kind of sucks the game has you walking through a pitch-black underground maze for a really really long time even if you do it quickly you’re still walking in silence for what feels like forever and even on my first playthrough having the mental sturdiness of one of those marshmallows spongebob places bars with i managed it okay i think it’s supposed to be slowly slowly raising the suspense before one utterly
crippling jump but it goes on for so long that you get a bit bored and you zone out and then that final jump scare just isn’t that bad for a segment of gameplay that should have had me crying under the weight of my own mounting terror it was mostly fine and that’s probably a failure i’d say this maze incidentally leads us to a really unusual choice for a setting well actually the setting is okay it’s the church where madison’s wake was held and consequently where her coffin now sits waiting for us but god damn if
you aren’t gonna laugh when you find out who’s here lucas steps out of the maze into a graveyard and has this moment of how did i get here which comes off as a bit trite yeah you know we did enter a maze through a hole in the attic so you know it shouldn’t be possible for us to move so far above ground but we were walking for like six minutes luca it’s not out of the possibility that we will be somewhere else now the church is a cool setting at first glance we walk around between
photos on the wall with different dates and colors assigned and when we photograph them we appear in different times the present day church is a graffiti mess it actually looks fantastic this rundown piece of hollow shell there’s an old place of worship now ruined and sabotaged it looks really good and it’s really eerie it’s only when we go into the past that we meet him hans hans the nazi ghost we get our introduction to hans through a woman crying in the confessional who whispers to us that she was living with a monster who never loved
her who lied to her and tried to pretend he wasn’t garbage but his past followed him you know yadda yadda and then she whispers in this hushed voice he was in charge of the gas chamber and i don’t know i just laughed oh yeah of course let’s put nazis in the game for some reason why not he can’t just be a ghost that haunts the church he’s a nazi ghost so he’s like 10 times worse oh yeah you can hear him breathing when he’s nearby because he has a gas mask on because he’s a nazi
ghost who is in charge of the gas chambers so what put a pillow over his head or something make him a normal dude who got strangled i make him a nazi he could work for nintendo or be a professional cyclist and it would have had zero bearing on the story he could be a runaway fry cook with a penchant for stabbing it would have been so much more interesting the nazi angle here is picked up and dropped like a newborn with a drunk mother-in-law never mentioned again on any level not even reference not even relevant
he’s scary sure but he’s definitely the weakest aspect of this whole game from what i understand from other people this game tries to go for a visage format where each section of the game has a different main enemy i’ve not played visage so i can’t comment still i thought it might be pertinent to mention it in case anyone can confirm in the comments if so i can see that the game has a rough three sections with three respective enemies you can only die in two of them and the first two are madison and hands the
final one oh man the final guy is called blooneys and no before you say blooneys was not my nickname at university it wasn’t my mom’s nickname at school it was my dad’s obviously so blooney’s is interesting there’s a lot more to him than the game is directly telling us and if i didn’t explain video on this i’d probably go into it but just google it his section is the final of the three there’s a lot about him that the game doesn’t really tell us but he’s kind of implied and yeah we’ll cover him as we
go blue knees is one amounts to a final boss there’s no specific fight with him you know this isn’t doom but his section forms the most dangerous and hectic part of the game with very real threats to luca’s life what’s cool is that he’s foreshadowed throughout the game there’s a mirror in the bathroom with the words blue knees is real on the back we find out that luca’s grandma was haunted by blue knees until her eyes went completely white and suffered constant pain while her husband accused her of lying before blooney’s killed her her medication
for eye pain is scattered across the house everywhere it’s when we find a book of blooneys that he becomes active one thing i really liked about my copy of the game the possessed edition was that it came with a few bits and pieces that i really appreciated i might just be buying the wrong games but it feels weird to me to find stuff packed into boxes nowadays sure you know you occasionally get a map but unless you’re pre-ordering you don’t tend to get anything at all madison came with a bunch of awesome bits and pieces
some in-game ritual cards some polaroids of madison and blooney’s respectively and the blooney’s book i was really pleasantly surprised by the amount of effort that went into these boxes and if the cards hadn’t been double-sided i probably would have put them on my wall or something but i love that the book that was cursed and haunted their house ended up in my house like i thought that was cool it made me appreciate the team very much they put a lot of effort into all these bits and pieces thanks guys it was actually wholesome as to
get jump scared by a cat eyed zombie witch when i opened the box for the first time the premise of blooney’s section is fairly cool you go back to the house but the layout has now changed grammar phones have been placed in various rooms and you need to spin the crank for the length of an entire music clip some tiny tim style song about bloonies it’s about 30 seconds long until the end when an eyeball might pop out that we need to collect there are two eyeballs to grab from these gramophones and they’re randomly placed
around the house the only catch blooney’s is now roaming and he will spawn on you every roughly 30 seconds or so with a loud noise to notify you that he’s arrived at this point the camera comes in handy and functionality around it develops again flashing him with the camera causes him to momentarily stun and despawn i really like the way the camera develops here if you’re pardon the pad it’s very scary though when you take a photo luca takes five minutes to tenderly remove it from the camera flop it back and forth until it develops
and then stare lovingly at it just to see what he’s captured in film so if you startle too hard when blooney spawns and flash him too early he’ll miss the window and luca will be four seconds into a 25 second animation by the time bk grabs him and kills him so it’s kind of cool in the way that you not only have to adapt to the way the camera now works but you also need to get used to bk popping in and out of existence enough so that you don’t completely blow your beams prematurely i
think it’s a really effective escalation and i love the way the camera starts as a light source becomes an object you can collect clues on activates aspects of the environment becomes your conduit between worlds and times and now is kind of like a shield of some kind what’s more is that the gramophones are placed so that your back is often to the door or any exits and they are designed to keep you locked in that location for roughly 30 seconds blue knees can attack you during this time so you need to quickly disengage from the
ground the phone turn around wait for him to get into range and then stun him with the camera then carry on before he respawns i don’t know what you’re supposed to do if you’re hard of hearing i don’t remember any visual clues but you know hopefully they’ll add some accessibility options if they don’t have them already one good thing about this segment is that if you die you respawn with all gramophone progress saved this segment could really potentially drag if you had to still be doing 30 seconds at each station every time and you can
argue that it’s too easy with this but i think they prioritized fun over challenge here and didn’t put you in a situation where you’d just be redoing seven 30-second stints with travel time between them every time you die since blooney’s is an instant kill and i respect that although i am biased because i died here a lot blue knees would come running at me and i would scream and suddenly the flash would go off in my hands and i’d have a polaroid soaking the inside of my jeans while blooney’s fingers my eye sockets i don’t
think i managed a successful stud on him once with this final puzzle out of the way i head to the final segment of the game the game then crashed as i went back to my homepage i saw it had updated and when i checked the update description it said improved stability which i found ironic on a reload there wasn’t much left to retread thankfully considering the unbelievably cruel auto saves in this game and i reached the final scene so we get to the final scene and this final scene is for lack of a better word
weak indicative of horror stories that have a lot of fancy ideas but nowhere ready to take them this game does wrap up logically and the ending does make sense but it feels more like a mid-game plot point or a fail state than an actual cohesive ending and if it’s sequel bait then that’s even worse considering the team have no track record of making good sequels or any games considering i believe this is actually their first game i feel like you have to have a good few individual titles under your belt before you start acting like
your good name carries enough weight that people need to trust you that the next game in the series will definitely be good we promise but enough preamble so this is basically the culmination of a ritual that’s been taking place over the course of the game beginning long before the game began you’ll have some numbers at this point that you can use on a padlock to grab an urn and with this being the final piece of the puzzle your character climbs up onto a chair and hangs himself as madison’s spirit approaches him her camera takes a
photo of him without any human input shortly thereafter spitting out the burned polaroid and in the final shot of the game luca gasps awake presumably now possessed by madison presumably after finishing the game myself i watched a few people play this on twitch and not one of them assumed that this was the ending of the game everyone was confused by this although this could comfortably be the ending of a game with enough build up i feel like this hits out of nowhere it’s the kind of ending where you look back and realize where it came
from and yeah it does make logical sense but it’s not built up to in any meaningful way and it feels random in its execution it’s hard to explain i hope i’m making sense the ending is all far and no but it could be if there had been more of a struggle between luca and the demon more of her resistance more foreshadowing maybe knows from the priest it could work i mean the noose is hanging right there from the start of the game so it’s kind of foreshadowed but it feels so left field those of you
who’ve played madison do you know what i mean i soaked up this story while i played it and i was still confused as to what on earth was going on by this final scene essentially luca had been following madison’s will the whole time and her final command to him is that he hangs himself and the only way we know that is because it suddenly says so in his notebook so he hangs himself i feel like he was basically mind control to do it but we don’t really see that so to us he sees a piece
of paper that says the hanged son and then he hangs himself it’s quick it doesn’t work but hey collectibles carry over through saves so i have no complaints anyway thanks for sticking around to the end of my madison review i finished this game four or five times now and i still have to play it in increments even knowing what’s coming up the atmosphere is a quagmire and it is so hard to sit down and commit to it gets sweaty it is really scary and if you told me you weren’t scared by this even a little
bit i honestly would not believe you this game didn’t have an exceptional story the characters were basic the plot was fully cobbled but the puzzles were hard enough that i felt challenged without needing to google them and the scares had me painting my sofa brown so i think it does what it sets up to do fairly well horror wise i often feel like that in horror good stories are a cherry on top but not necessarily the core selling point and although i don’t think we should settle for less i do think this game does what
it sets out to do very well and i would recommend it for any lover of horror games anyway don’t forget to click the link to atlas vpn in my description below or the pinned comment and thank you again atlas vpn for sponsoring this video finally hop over to patreon check out those pledges if you haven’t already and thank you to my patrons for their support if you enjoyed the video drop me a like comment your own thoughts on the game and subscribe if you haven’t already thanks for being here folks and i’ll see you in
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