Every October, I always like to consume as many horror games as possible. Oftentimes, I like to go with a theme while playing them, whether it be playing all of the games in a franchise, games that came out in a particular year, or games in certain genres of horror like Lovecraftian horror or Gothic horror.
This year, I decided I wanted to play a variety of Indie horror games and while I was searching for games that fit the bill, I came across a scientific study that piqued my interest about a game called MADiSON.
The study, done by a group called the Science of Scare, conducted a study back in 2022 in order to determine which horror game was the scariest game ever made. They had several different measures of fear, whether it be through heart rate or blood pressure, and they compiled the results together to determine what the scariest game of all time was. And it wasn’t a major game like Silent Hill 2, Dead Space, or Amnesia. Instead, they claimed that it was MADiSON that was the scariest game of all time… technically.
I have to qualify that statement because while MADiSON did indeed garner the highest results from games that were commercially available during the study, one game did score above it – P.T.. That shouldn’t be surprising at all given how genuinely unsettling that demo was when people played it back in 2014, but seeing as how Konami is Konami, that amazing demo was delisted. Because of that, P.T. became ineligible for the list since it’s sadly unavailable to be played. Enter MADiSON, which I will charitably call the next best thing.
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I know that may sound disparaging against MADiSON, but I don’t mean that in a negative way (yet). I was just skeptical of the game not only because it was really the second scariest game of all time, but because whenever anything is given such a lofty title I’m of course going to balk at that. Is this random Indie game I never heard about until now really the scariest game ever made? Seriously? So with that in mind, I borrowed a copy of the game from my friend and over the course of a few sessions, began to see what the hype was about.
MADiSON places you into the shoes of a 16-year-old boy named Luca. He receives a camera for his birthday and shortly after, begins to see visions of a mysterious woman named Madison Hale, who may or may not be possessing his body in order to murder his family for the purpose of conducting a Satanic ritual. Luca then has to navigate around his grandfather’s house with his mind and body mind slowly deteriorating as he sees hallucinations and paranormal activity with the space he used to find comforting slowly but surely twisting into something unrecognizable.
From the outset, I was curious as to what type of scares MADiSON would employ. There are plenty of ways to chill and unnerve a player and MADiSON opts to go for environmental dread. Luca’s grandfather’s house is borderline dilapidated to the point where you’re not surprised that it’s the home of some demonic being. The halls are dark and poorly lit and you’ll frequently hear creaks and groans from all around you implying that something is there with you. But it all feels a bit too deliberate. As I navigated my way through the house, I kept on having the feeling that it didn’t feel like a house but rather a location designed specifically for video game puzzles.
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You spend most of your time navigating the house and over time you do learn the layout, but you do such an incredible amount of backtracking that I felt more annoyed when I discovered a puzzle because I just knew it would lead me to running all around the house looking for the necessary piece to solve it. It was most evident towards a late-game puzzle wherein you have to run around the house switching the faces of clocks around and matching them to the correct time. But during the entire time I was running around the house, I wasn’t afraid of what may be around the corner because I knew for a fact that I was safe. Scares were highly telegraphed and segmented to the point where outside of two unique set pieces, they never actually occurred inside of the house.
At first, I was unsettled by the ghostly visage of Madison Hale as she wandered the halls of your grandfather’s house. She appeared just frequently enough for me to worry if I was being stalked or followed like in Clock Tower and I would have to evade her in order to complete tasks. But after two hours of solving puzzles, she never appeared other than as a jump scare. I then had a moment in the basement where I was placed into a dark room and was slowly cordoned off by police tape, only to have her jump out at me at certain intervals. It was then I realized that the only moments I had to be genuinely on edge for was when I was transported into a different environment, and even then the biggest thing I had to worry about was jump scares and not some unsettling idea or foreboding environment.
I will give the game credit for how it utilizes light and having the player initiate the scares. Oftentimes, many of the environments you’re placed into are incredibly dark and the only way to light your way through is with the camera you’re given at the start of the game. Each time you take a picture, the camera flashes and you get enough light to see the area surrounding you. And if you’re taking a picture, then you may unintentionally take a picture of something creeping out of the corner of the frame, or see something in the distance watching you. Those moments are few and far between, but when they do happen it makes you tense up for just a split second before you take that picture.
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Most of the time though MADiSON will be very deliberate when something is supposed to scare you. When you take a picture and the game intentionally wants to scare you, there’s usually a loud musical sting and a creature running towards you menacingly. It’s a jump scare in its most basic incarnation. I’m not opposed to jump scares in concept, they’re a valid tool that a creator can use to scare a player, but when you over-rely on them then they lose any and all meaning behind them. By the time you reach the finale and you do have a genuine monster chasing you around an environment and forces you to interact with mechanics in a way that fills you with dread, I wonder what took it so long to get to a relatively tense sequence like this, especially because the game ends immediately after that segment.
I gave Madison the benefit of the doubt, but the more I played the game the more I realized it was just a P.T. clone and not a very ambitious one. The game was kickstarted back in 2016, shortly after P.T. was delisted, and you can feel that game’s DNA all throughout MADiSON. The familiar environment that’s distorted as the game progresses. The female monster that makes its presence known to you throughout the game. The obtuse puzzle design. The narrative that forces the player to read between the lines to understand what’s happening. MADiSON replicates a lot of what P.T. does but doesn’t attempt to elevate it or try something new. It just replicates.
Granted, if you’ve never played P.T. you’ll probably find some of its moments to be scary, but even then I never was terrified playing it. I was more scared playing games like Iron Lung or Amnesia: The Bunker, games that forced players into situations they were uncomfortable with and always worried about when they would die. I was scared playing those games because they understood that the unique thing about horror in video games is that you have to be proactive. If you want to beat this game, you need to chart this dark and dank world or navigate this abandoned bunker with a monster constantly hunting you. MADiSON touches on that by making the player take pictures to illuminate its world, but most of its six-hour campaign is you running back and forth from room to room solving puzzles with zero threat of a game over.
I guess my negative outlook on MADiSON may be because I went into it with lofty expectations, but I want to stress it isn’t a bad game. I probably wouldn’t recommend the Switch port to anyone given the frequent performance issues I ran into, but the other versions seem to run fine and the story itself is competent enough. But that’s just the thing. It’s a competent game, but nothing truly remarkable. It wears its inspirations on its sleeves and does a good job at replicating what P.T. did, but it doesn’t surpass it. It’s firmly in its shadow. If you want a great Indie horror game, I’d recommend any of the games I’ve listed before over Madison in a heartbeat as those actually scared me in some capacity. I don’t know which test subjects were used in the Science of Scare’s tests, but if MADiSON is the scariest horror game ever made, then those same test subjects probably haven’t played many horror games
