![]() The super-popular suit can strike fear in almost anyone who comes face-to-face with it, but Kraven isn’t just anyone and his highly trained Hunters aren’t afraid of a brawl. My advice: get cozy with the L1 button because you’re gonna love it. Symbiote tendrils aggrandize Spider-Man’s silhouette, slamming foes against hard surfaces, dealing no mercy to Kraven’s Hunters. We’re no stranger to Spider-Man knocking heads, but never like this: he’s much more aggressive and punches certainly aren’t being pulled. But what he’s wearing perhaps deserves one: he’s donning the highly coveted, iconic, and beloved Black Suit and he’s more than ready for a fight.īeyond serving looks, our Symbiote-bound hero has some new tricks up his sleeve. We don’t waste any time: bursting through basement doors is Peter Parker, our original Spider-Man in this story, who needs no introduction. We kick things off at Connors’ home across the East River in Queens, one of the all-new playable and explorable boroughs we’re introducing in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. Curt Connors, AKA The Lizard, and Peter needs to stop him. Review code provided by the distributor.Setting the stage for our gameplay reveal: Kraven’s Hunters, a new enemy faction, are in pursuit of Dr. While Madison fails to coalesce into a satisfying exploration of that theme, it remains a mostly entertaining spooky puzzle game. The closest thing to a central theme in Madison is the constant push and pull between Luca's sanity and the unbridled chaos that Hale's action has unleashed on his family home. There is an argument to be made that the confusion works to put you in the mindspace of the main character, but whether this is a clever bit of game design, or a total deal-breaker is something you have to make up your own mind on. New routes and events trigger with very little knowledge once you hit certain invisible milestones. The game lacks a helpful journal or recap feature, so you'll probably want to take notes if your memory isn't great. They are also spread out evenly across the game to make sure you're never doing one thing for too long. Requiring you to use your camera along with a familiarity with the level design to find and use key objects and tools that slowly open up more of the house to you. More often than not, the puzzles in Madison are genuinely clever. ![]() Objects of interest are marked to let you know to photograph them, but you can disable that hint system if you want (though I personally found the resulting trial-and-error more disruptive than fun). Some puzzles require photographing specific objects to trigger environmental changes, as if the flash is burning away the veneer of mundanity from the environment. In moments like this, I felt something resembling genuine dread, where the anticipation of a jump scare was as mortifying (if not more) than the scare itself. Every time you click the flash, there's a chance you might spot something dangerous or scary, only to then immediately be blinded by the dark again. At times you'll be forced to explore pitch dark rooms, relying only on the momentary flash of your camera to see what's around you. The only places where Madison really comes close to being something special, is whenever the camera is involved. Every once in a while, a monstrous apparition or a creepy face might shock you out of the blue while you're sneaking in the dark, but I'd hardly classify that as "psychological horror." ![]() So the atmosphere failing to conjure dread really hurts the game's overall vibe. This is particularly bad because Madison is one of those "walking simulator" horror games where you're rarely in actual immediate danger. The air is abuzz with what I can only describe as stock creepy noises: creaking doors, buckets falling over, water droplets, crickets, you name it. ![]() While the house definitely feels lived-in, it rarely feels alive in the way that's required of a good haunted house. Pill bottles clutter the rooms in quantities suggesting conventional medication's failure to thwart whatever it was that was happening here, while more mystical speak to the family looking into more occult remedies. Like the best Resident Evil locations, the house feels distinctly lived-in, even when this get more zany and the game progresses. The house itself feels like one giant puzzle box, which Madison does its best to contextualise within the internal logic of its story. ![]() The core premise, while interesting, never grows beyond being an excuse to throw you into progressively bizarre hallucinations and scary set-pieces. The main thrust of the story is uncovering how Madison and these murders tie into your house and family. Very soon into your adventure, you start learning about a string of grisly ritual killings conducted by a witch named Madison Hale. ![]()
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