From the appropriately named team at Bloodious Games, Madison VR has players stepping directly into the role of teenage protagonist Luca, who wakes up inside a house and very quickly gets embroiled in a supernatural mystery involving a terrifying demon. Armed with effectively little more than an instant camera, he has to solve a variety of puzzles and make sense of the gruesome reality of what has happened in this house of horrors. Debuting on current generation consoles and PC as a non-VR game back in 2022, Madison VR arrived last year as a reworked experience for headset users on Steam, before this month finally dropping on the bespoke Meta Quest store. Roughly 5-6 hours long, it is available for around £24.99.
Any horror fan will usually be able to pinpoint the best films and TV shows that make up the genre. They are the ones that keep the suspense and tension crawling along like a rusty nail on a cracked and unstable floor. They are the ones that show just enough of that monster in the corner before the audience even has time to take it in. They are the ones that use sound to play with the viewer’s emotions. Madison VR is never going to win any awards when it comes to an original story – demonic possession is as old hat as it comes in the genre – but, boy, does it knock it out of the park in relation to the key elements of a good horror tale.
That tale begins in a horror house, as protagonist Luca awakens to his angry father, before embarking on exploring his grandparents’ home, soon discovering the twisted role of Madison Hale in this plot and the really dark turn of events that eventually spins out of the narrative. Without giving away any major spoilers, some really messed up stuff has happened in this house and even if it is not a tale that hasn’t been told before, the premium quality of the narrative presentation in VR is excellent.
One early standout moment in particular has Luca surrounded in water down in the basement of the house, as it is revealed a police officer tried to confront Madison Hale and, in the process, discovered a number of dead bodies. Moving through that water in VR, in darkness, all the while hearing something else in the room out of sight is truly terrifying in the most thrilling way. There aren’t many outright jump scares – this is an experience that leans more towards the slow build up for big payoff approach – but when they come, they really pack a punch.
While Luca visits other locales during the story, this house serves as the central theme, and playing in VR really is a sense for the eyes and ears in terms of a theme park level horror ride. Cockroaches crawling over every surface, lights flickering, thunder in the background, the creaking of floors and doors – Madison VR hits those horror beats that any good experience in the genre will do, the senses heightened exceptionally thanks to the VR medium of delivery.
Given this is a reworking of a PC and console game, it’s possibly not surprising that despite the good work done to bring the world into a VR space, it is definitely easy to tell its origins. The level of static objects in the world that are simply scenery and not interactable is a bit of a letdown in this otherwise immersive experience. Equally, among the objects in Luca’s inventory for puzzle solving, the physical objects he comes across – such as the hammer and shovel – lack the weight and physics behind them that some bespoke made-for-VR titles really excel at.
That said, to bring the 2022 version of this game into the VR space and not have a watered-down experience is to be applauded. This is the full-fledged portrayal of Madison, and the controls and puzzle solving are arguably amplified by the headset. It never loses its satisfaction using Luca’s main puzzle-solving tool – his portable camera – and seeing pictures instantly pop out and have to be physically shaken in order to develop them right there and then. Those puzzles also never feel too abstract – a common complaint among some in the genre.
Where developer Bloodious Games could have refined the VR experience a little is in the comfort options available. While never bad, anyone of a more fragile VR disposition is likely to feel some aftereffects following a full play session. It’s definitely a tell-tale sign that this was originally a non-VR game when some of the basic accessibility options such as teleport movement are missing. There are some compromises here; the ability to turn off camera shake and head movement help. However, no cone-of-vision restriction, which helps alleviate the issues of motion-sickness, seems like a missed opportunity and one that feels odd, given this is a considered and slow-paced experience that wouldn’t be limited by it.
Speaking of that moment-to-moment gameplay, while there are certainly times those playing will be left scratching their heads for a minute or two, the puzzles – usually involving locks and objects – generally always require just a bit more exploration as opposed to really out-of-the-box thinking. This is very much an interactive experience featuring puzzles, as opposed to an outright puzzle-solving Myst adventure.
