izigame.me

Madison is a wildly mediocre experience that keeps things just interesting enough to keep playing, but not interesting enough to walk away with anything memorable. The best parts of this game are good...ish? And the worst parts are pretty asinine. Particularly the horror aspects of this game. This whole review is written free of spoilers
First the goodish stuff.
The story I guess? The story is kind of all over the place. Just enough is there to make sense, but not really enough to make you care or get deeply invested in the game. But I am rather ADD so when you ask me to listen to a recording of a monotone man monologue for a solid 5 minutes, I'll actually literally get sleepy. The most interesting parts of the story are all at the end. Like there's little references here and there to what's going on, but I found myself thinking "oh this is kinda cool" only for the game to be done at that point.
The visuals are also pretty decent. Mostly the lighting does the heavy lifting here. But there's some really neat areas where the imagery is eye catching.
Okay so for the things I didn't like.
The horror...I wouldn't say the horror elements are absent from this game. It's just that it tries way too hard and it's unfortunately incredibly predictable. Now yes, I've played an obscene amount of horror. However. The game seldom goes beyond a dark hallway with flickering lights (more on that) and a cheap jump scare with an orchestral hit. It ranks a little bit above those static png jumpscares with the shrilly loud jumpscares.
This ties into the horror aspect a little, but I think devs have learned that super loud high pitched audio is not a fun jumpscare. However, I feel like the new obnoxious thing to do is to have very bright flickering lights. There's a certain amount of it that's fine and adds a touch of atmosphere but this game just right off the bat hits you with it and it's really annoying. There's no setting to adjust this. I wish there was. Not only is it an accessibility concern, but it really is just annoying to shield your eyes because the screen is flickering so much. A setting to lower the intensity or frequency would help, but really aggressively flickering lights do nothing for this game.
There's a few moments where I was wandering around trying to figure out what to do. Sometimes the puzzles are incredibly stupid and other times it's a bit vague. I liked some of the puzzles though, it was just weird to have a good thoughtful puzzle mixed in with others that were incredibly straight forward and easy.
Once again, spoiler free, but the ending just had me going "....what?" and that's it. There's also a lot of dark depictions the game warns you about, but sometimes the game just has it in there and it feels like it's just trying to be edgy.
Once I finished up this game, I forgot how much I paid for it and good lord. I can safely say this is not at all worth it's price point. There's so many other great horror experiences out there for significantly less. Steam reviews seem to think this is a great horror game so maybe I'm wrong! But I just had a really hard time enjoying this game.