Author Archives: Tristan Ogilvie

With an elaborate set of puzzles to solve and no shortage of jolting jump scares to shock you with, unraveling the morbid central mystery of Madison is a bit like trying to evacuate an escape room while simultaneously struggling to prevent the vacuation of your bowels. Taking clear inspiration from Hideo Kojima’s superb 2014 Silent Hill teaser demo, P.T., Madison layers on the clever use of a Polaroid camera for puzzle-solving and exploration with consistently compelling results. It might not be as expertly structured as the spiraling, psychological horror hallways of Kojima’s much revered concept, but Madison’s haunted house is certainly scary enough to be situated somewhere in the same neighborhood.

In Madison you play as Luca, a teenage boy who wakes in his family home covered in blood and haunted by a malignant presence. Luca’s only chance to escape is to puzzle his way through a sequence of increasingly taxing riddles and complete the distressing steps of a demonic ritual, in a structurally unsteady homestead that shifts and recalibrates around him in frequently disorientating ways. It’s a hair-raising residence that I found consistently absorbing to explore, since I could never be sure if the basement I was descending to would suddenly morph into the hellish hallucination of a murder scene, or would merely be a basement that was creepy for… Well, regular creepy basement reasons.

Armed with only a Polaroid camera, Luca’s plight is one that strictly favours flight over fight. Although there are supernatural nasties to encounter at times there’s no real combat to speak of, and instead the only thing that Luca has to battle with is the growing realization that there’s more than a few alarming truths buried amidst the roots of his family tree. Actor Jacob Judge delivers a panicked portrayal of Luca that comes across as a bit too whiny at times, but I was happy enough to endure his hysterics since they at least seemed more in step with each disturbing revelation than the oddly apathetic performances of certain other horror game leads (looking at you, Resident Evil Village’s Ethan Winters). I was compelled by Luca’s journey all the way to its bleak conclusion, even if the increasingly predictable events of Madison’s final hours didn’t quite have the same surprising twists and turns as the contorting corridors of its setting.

Snap Decisions

Madison’s puzzles may seem initially straightforward, like finding triangular-shaped keys to fit triangular-shaped locks, but they quickly grow into more complex riddles that demand a considerable amount of lateral thinking. In one standout section you have to use the supernatural powers of the camera to blink back and forth between three distinct time periods as you explore a maze of art exhibits in the darkened corners of a creepy cathedral, which requires a particularly methodical approach. It rarely repeats the same type of puzzle twice, and more often than not each brainteaser it springs upon you successfully manages to generate some head-scratching without ever resulting in hair-pulling.

The Polaroid camera can often be used to reveal puzzle clues in the environment that are otherwise obscured to the naked eye, and it was always rewarding to shake a freshly snapped shot and see a hidden message slowly come to light, typically smeared in blood. But the camera doesn’t just provide satisfying “A-ha!” moments – it also has its fair share of spine-chilling “Argh!” moments, too. I frequently found myself in pitch-black environments with the camera’s flash as my only means to briefly light up my surroundings in order to find my way forward. Not knowing whether a quick snap would expose a dull dead end or a dead-eyed demon made me hesitate every time my finger hovered over the camera’s shutter release, which kept my anxiety levels high.

The Polaroid camera isn’t the only piece of retro tech at Luca’s fingertips; in the absence of any other human characters to interact with a lot of Madison’s plot is delivered via audio recordings found on cassette tapes. I reveled in the disturbing details drip-fed through each recording, although such is the surreal nature of Madison’s surroundings that I couldn’t tell if the curious way Luca listened to cassette tapes by holding them in his hand while the spindles spun was by abstract design or just an unfortunate graphical bug that rendered the tape player invisible.

One thing I am confident of is that Madison’s ambient audio design is extremely well done, particularly when experienced through headphones. Each tentative step taken through this foreboding abode is accompanied by a nerve-scraping symphony of rusty door hinge-squeaks, demonic whispers, and distorted TV news bulletins flickering on and off, which kept me constantly checking over my shoulder. The actual musical score itself is minimal, but its sudden orchestral stabs are used to reinforce each jump scare to startlingly good effect. On that note, there are a lot of jump scares in Madison and they really ramp up in frequency towards its end, but they’re conjured up in so many creative new ways that I never became immune to them. Channeling everything from Layers of Fear to the sinister storybook imagery of The Babadook, it inflicted enough sharp spikes to my heart rate to make my smartwatch wonder if I’d suddenly started a workout.

Hallway to Hell

While Madison regularly trapped me in environmental loops of the intentionally unsettling variety, it also occasionally forced me to retrace my steps for all the wrong reasons; namely to ferry items back and forth thanks to the needlessly restrictive inventory management. Luca can only carry up to eight items at a time – although practically speaking it’s more like five since his camera, notebook, and collection of photos can’t ever be discarded – and everything else must be stored in a stationary storage container a la Resident Evil. Being pressured to decide whether to carry pistol ammo or extra medkits might be an effective way to maintain tension and risk in survival horror games, but here it just feels like an arbitrary inclusion that made solving certain puzzles more cumbersome than it could have been. Having to slowly backtrack from one end of the house to the other because you opted to carry the crowbar when you actually needed the bolt cutters just adds unwanted padding to the overall sense of progress – particularly since Luca’s running speed is relatively sluggish.

Similarly, while many objects in your surroundings tend to shift around when your back is turned to often terrifying effect, Madison also introduces crucial new items in the same manner, which means they are often easily overlooked. As a result I found myself completely stuck for a handful of lengthy stretches at a time, trying and retrying every item in my inventory on a puzzle and wandering around snapping photos of everything in sight to see if I could uncover some hidden clues, when it turned out what I actually needed was a tiny object sitting on a door sill somewhere that simply wasn’t there the first dozen or so times I walked past it. That’s not creepy, it’s just annoying. I remained thoroughly engrossed more often than not throughout my six-hour stay in Madison’s manor, but I can’t help but feel that ditching the inventory management and progress-halting pixel-hunts could have knocked an hour or two off its runtime and kept its tension levels even tighter.

Beyond any grisly homicide or nasty insurance fraud arson case, the biggest crime suffered by LA Noire fans was the shuttering of developer Team Bondi, since any prospect of a sequel has seemingly been snuffed out with it. The announcement of Sherlock Holmes Chapter One, a reboot of developer Frogwares’ long-running detective series that shifts its established sleuth-’em-up gameplay into an open-world, revived hope for a second coming of Cole Phelps and company, but I’m afraid those have been dashed as well. Chapter One’s underfeatured open world and uninspired combat prevent it from solving the case of the missing great detective game.

Chapter One sees the world’s second most famous detective (sorry, but Batman has a better marketing team) return to his childhood home on the fictional Mediterranean island of Cordona after he learns that there may have been more to the death of his mother than was initially reported. Sprawling in size and rich in period-accurate detail, Cordona gives the initial impression of an Assassin’s Creed-style sandbox in which you must solve the murders rather than inflict them, using Sherlock’s razor-sharp intellect in place of a hidden blade. However, a disappointing lack of interactivity means it’s not nearly as interesting to inhabit or as dense with discoveries as it first seems.

Uncovering what really occurred within the walls of Stonewood Manor becomes the focal point of Chapter One’s story, but getting to the bottom of this central mystery requires solving a roughly 12-hour-long series of intriguing and diverse detours; from tracking a stampeding elephant to sneaking into a sex cult, a number of which resolve themselves in surprising and occasionally comedic ways. When was the last time you solved a crime using a homemade inflatable elephant love doll? (Please say, “Never.”)

This young Sherlock is presented to us as being a novice private eye, but he’s already got a near-supernatural perception of the superficial, able to effortlessly surmise suspect behaviour from studying the abrasions on their skin or the bags under their eyes. The problem with him being a superhero out of the gate is that I didn’t really get the impression of him being anything less than a fully formed investigation sensation from Chapter One’s outset, which meant there wasn’t even the potential for any sense of skill progression to allow the crime solving process to evolve over time.

Really, the only thing missing from Sherlock’s toolkit is his usual offsider, John Watson. Presumably he’s still serving in the military when the events of Chapter One take place. Instead, Sherlock is flanked by his imaginary friend Jon, who’s similar to Watson both in name and purpose in that he acts as a sounding board for Sherlock while he studies each crime scene, using the established concentration and evidence-corroborating techniques that return from previous games in the series.

Ace of Case

Unlike the overly simplified nature of the investigations in Sega’s recent Judgment games, Chapter One gives you a little more latitude when it comes to solving each case. Chasing a lead doesn’t merely require following patronising markers generated on the map, but actual methodical legwork; poring over a crime scene for clues, visiting the archive room at the local newspaper office in order to track down the last known address of a suspect, and then slipping into an appropriate disguise in order to talk your way past the landlady when you get there. When you fall into a rhythm, Chapter One does a convincing job of making you feel like a proper sleuth arriving at your own deductions, which can be genuinely gratifying for stretches at a time.

The trouble is that the general lack of hand-holding can sometimes mean that identifying how to advance an investigation can become a bit too obtuse at times. In one case I had to track down the whereabouts of a pregnant refugee using only a photograph, and I spent about 20 minutes showing it to countless shrugging citizens until I finally happened upon what seemed to be the one pedestrian in the city who could give me directions to her secret camp. In another, I tried to infiltrate a shelter for the poor but was continually turned away by the doorman who kept referring to me as “moneybags” no matter how dirty and dishevelled I rendered Sherlock’s disguise. What kind of rich person wore commoner clothing in the 19th century? Internet billionaires hadn’t even been invented yet.

It’s in progress-halting instances such as these that Jon could have perhaps played the role of some sort of organic hint system, but all he ever does is tell you you’re doing it wrong without offering any useful alternatives. As far as imaginary friends go, Jon is less Tyler Durden and more of a whining burden. Each investigative misstep is also marked by the exact same scribblings in Jon’s diary, and by the end of Chapter One’s campaign I found myself thumbing through pages and pages of the same repeated sentences as though I’d hired Jack Nicholson’s character from The Shining to be my own private secretary.

Running into roadblocks during a case wouldn’t be so bad if there were other things to do, but Chapter One fails to provide much in the way of interesting diversions to indulge in. The surprisingly large Cordona setting is certainly postcard-pretty in parts, from ornate cathedral spires down to the beautiful boat harbour, but there’s just not enough to do in it to inspire or reward exploration beyond a nice bit of sightseeing – if you can put up with the constantly stuttering framerate on the Xbox Series X.

On rare occasion I would eavesdrop on a conversation that would blossom into a substantial side case, like hunting for the culprit behind a string of sailor murders through Cordona’s red light district. Yet for the most part I’d just walk around desperate for something to interact with, besides stopping to stare at the same handful of reused NPCs, from the British dandy to the guy perpetually pissing against a wall (the repeated NPC types also make canvassing a crowd for clues more confusing than it should be). With so little to distract myself with along the way to each destination I became increasingly reliant on fast travel to teleport around, thus making Chapter One’s open world feel not all that different from the more segregated settings of previous Sherlock games.

Sherlock ‘n’ Load

When Sherlock isn’t poking holes in witnesses’ testimonies, he’s blasting holes in bad guys’ chest-imonies. Often, either at the climax of a case or on the occasion you opt to enter an enemy compound via the use of force rather than fraud, Sherlock will become trapped in a firefight against waves of increasingly powerful thugs. Whether it’s a bar room or a boatshed, these arenas are all more or less identical in layout and feature the same sort of environmental hazards you can use to your advantage, such as lanterns that can be shot to momentarily stun an assailant before you rush in and trigger a short quicktime event in order to arrest them.

However, it doesn’t really matter if you cuff them or snuff them, since aside from a light admonishment from Jon – a slap on the wrist from someone who doesn’t even exist – there are no moral repercussions for just murdering every goon you come up against. Given that Sherlock has unlimited pistol ammo, it’s far simpler to shoot baddies in the head than it is to try to slowly maneuver them next to a rupturable steam pipe in an attempt to subdue them non-violently. It’s true that you’re awarded more cash for arrests than for kills, but I wasn’t really motivated to earn more money given all there is to spend it on is newspapers or furnishings for Sherlock’s house. There are also some bizarre rules of engagement at play, like how you must first shoot the armour plating off an enemy’s shoulders before you can throw Sherlock’s snuff powder into their eyes to temporarily blind them. How exactly does that work?

The only instance in which a Holmes-inflicted homicide isn’t the smartest strategy is when you’re tackling the optional Bandit lairs that can be found scattered across Cordona. These are exactly the same as every other enemy encounter in Chapter One, but since Sherlock must raid them on the police’s behalf, any enemies killed in the process results in instant failure. Needless to say, I found the combat in Chapter One so monotonous that I completed the first of these Bandit lairs, received little in the way of meaningful compensation, and then hung up my Bandit-busting badge for good. To Chapter One’s credit, you can hop into the menus and disable combat entirely if you wish to, although that does mean there’s even less gameplay diversity outside of the main investigation fundamentals.

Has there been a game released in the last 20 years that’s been more influential than Grand Theft Auto III? From its establishment of the open-world sandbox fundamentals to its critical role in reshaping videogames into a more attractive medium for mature audiences, GTA III’s shadow still looms large over almost every facet of the artform. If any game deserved a definitive edition that allowed fans to relive that revolution without squinting to ignore ancient graphics, it’s this. And yet, series creator Rockstar Games has decided to pay tribute to this modern gaming monolith and its two equally acclaimed PS2-era sequels, Vice City and San Andreas, by producing a collection of re-releases that cuts more corners than a Yakuza Stinger in a Liberty City street race. At best this trilogy is ill-conceived and half-finished; at worst it’s straight-up broken. If this half-baked Definitive Edition is anything to go by, I have to wonder if Rockstar reveres its own games as much as the rest of us do.

There are some positives, mind you, but almost every welcome addition is implemented at the cost of some sort of buzz-killing compromise. It seems so antiquated that my original playthroughs with each of these three games were done with a paper map unfurled across my lap, so it’s very convenient that you’re now able to just hit pause to scan the full map of each game world and drop waypoint markers to your destination, like modern gamers would expect. However, you can’t override waypoints that are automatically created during a mission, like if you wanted to take a detour across town to an Ammunation or a Pay ‘n’ Spray perhaps, and the pathfinding can often get confused as it continually recalculates over the course of a journey, at times resembling something closer to a hastily scribbled signature than the shortest possible route.

Similarly, the “GTAV-inspired modern controls” promised in this collection’s marketing have been applied somewhat unevenly over the three individual games. Weapon switching is improved across the board with the ability to use a shoulder button to bring up a weapon wheel, but auto-targeting feels far snappier in San Andreas than in GTA III and Vice City, and while you can circle-strafe while locked on to an enemy with a lighter weapon equipped, heavier machine guns and the like still root you to the spot and force you into a manually aimed first-person perspective regardless. The auto-targeting in GTA III and Vice City proved to be particularly sluggish whenever I found myself up close and personal with a group of enemies, which was fairly frequent given that enemy AI wasn’t designed to use cover and just rushes you more often than not. Thus, in both games I found myself increasingly reliant on the use of sniper rifles to thin the herds from a distance rather than run headlong into yet another spasmodic shootout.

A mid-mission checkpointing system has been implemented to good effect in San Andreas, allowing you to restart with all your health and weapons and skip the early setup phase of certain missions. That resolves one of the great complaints of the early games in the 3D series. Yet in GTA III and Vice City, choosing the option to restart at a checkpoint just boots you back to the very start of the mission no matter how deep into it you were when you died. So if, like I did, you die a number of times trying to outrun the cops at the end of the ‘S.A.M.’ mission in the lead up to GTA III’s climax, you still have to drive from the construction site to the boat jetty, take the boat to the end of the airport runway, wait for the plane to arrive, shoot down the plane with the rocket launcher, collect all the packages, return to the mainland, and then try and escape the police, over and over again. It’s odd that one game allows you to literally cut to the chase while the other two force you to repeatedly bring the car around and warm up the engine first.

Grand Theft Autocorrect

The new cartoonish character designs have certainly been met with some controversy and mockery among fans, but while I wouldn’t say they look good I don’t have any real issue with them personally. Sure, they all look like a bunch of down and out Disney Infinity dolls, and yes, the Candy Suxxx character model well, kinda sucks, but the only time I ever felt really distracted by them was in the occasional cutscene where characters would be holding objects like pistols or cigarettes in the empty space where their blocky, fingerless fists used to be.

That’s largely the problem with the overhauled graphics in the Definitive Edition; they’re like a shiny new sheet of high-resolution stickers that have been slapped haphazardly on top of an aging LEGO set. They look cleaner on the surface, but there’s no real consistency in how they’ve been applied and everything is still pretty chunky underneath. I don’t pretend to fully understand the technical process involved with taking three games created on the Renderware engine a couple of decades ago and porting them to Unreal Engine 4 in 2021. However, I can only assume due to the comparatively small size of studio Grove Street Games (whose end game credits number at around 30 members of staff), that a lot of the work has been automated, and it shows in a suite of game worlds that are simultaneously sharper than you remember but also noticeably sloppier in terms of their artistic direction and lacking atmosphere. Given how effectively AI upscaling techniques were used to sharpen Mass Effect Legendary Edition’s textures earlier this year, it’s a bit of a shock to see how poorly it’s done here.

Even the new lighting system brings mixed results. The neon facades of Vice City’s Ocean Beach district really pop and reflections on cars and puddles are appealing, but elsewhere the overly intense shadows would cast characters into darkness no matter how much I fiddled with the brightness and contrast settings. Although squinting to make out detail in dark areas was still less of a strain on my eyes than the truly torturous rain effect, which made me feel I was being waterboarded with a can of silly string.

Meanwhile, an improved draw distance – which was likely intended to make each environment seem bigger – has actually had the opposite effect. This is particularly glaring in San Andreas where, coupled with the removal of the Los Angeles-inspired orange smog haze that once concealed the PS2’s technical limitations, you can stand out front of a cabin in Flint County and see the San Fierro skyline looming in the very immediate distance. It completely shatters the convincing illusion of scale that the map was previously able to conjure, and it now feels like wandering around Disney’s Frontierland while having an unobstructed view of Space Mountain. This improved draw distance may also contribute to this collection’s constantly wavering framerate on PS5, which is prone to frequent stuttering whether you opt for fidelity or performance modes. Why you’re even forced to make that choice on a modern console in a collection of games that are each old enough to vote and still don’t look all that good is beyond me. And if you’re playing on Switch (which I have not but others at IGN have) there’s no avoiding the terrible performance.

Then there are the bugs, which were waiting to ambush me around every corner like a bunch of game-breaking gangbangers. (For the sake of transparency, I completed every main mission in GTA III and Vice City, and all the main missions in San Andreas up until San Fierro for the purposes of this review.) Hard crashes, frozen cutscenes, NPCs getting caught running in circles, bridges and building exteriors disappearing, and a particularly bizarre morphing texture glitch that has permanently left my CJ in San Andreas resembling Watchmen’s Rorschach are just a few examples of the many rough edges I’ve been exposed to in all three games. All this, I might add, was on PS5 – by the sounds of it, audiences on PC and Nintendo Switch have had it even worse. I’m assuming that the developer is frantically preparing bug-fixing patches as we speak, but it’s a bit like barring the stable door after the horse has glitched through the wall and exploded.

Bless This Mess

However, it’s a testament to just how brilliant these games remain, that I still found myself smiling during my replays of the three stories in spite of the many issues. There’s no doubt that the mission design has aged, particularly in GTA III, and creaky limitations like the lack of swimming in both it and Vice City can be tough to reconcile with. But elsewhere, these are video game playgrounds packed with personality and invention and accompanied by incredible soundtracks, even despite a few notable licensed omissions from Vice City and San Andreas that Rockstar has long since lost the rights to include. And they’re just so dense with exceedingly quotable humour, much of which has stayed with me in the years since I first played them. I can’t come home from a night out without telling my wife “Yep, I’ve been drinking again.” Oftentimes I can’t get the wah-wahing Giggle Cream jingle out of my head. And I still don’t know why men have nipples.

Not only did I enjoy reabsorbing all the hilarious writing, but it was also quite fascinating to sit and play through the three games back to back and relive the rapid evolution of a series (and genre) that would soon become all-conquering. GTA III establishes the blueprint, Vice City refines it and adds weaponised ‘80s nostalgia to its arsenal, and San Andreas expands it in every direction and arguably perfects it, at least given the technology available at the time. There’s no denying the seemingly never-ending commercial success of GTAV, but as far as purely single-player GTA games go, I personally feel that San Andreas might still be the pinnacle.

That’s what makes these re-releases such a bitter adrenaline pill to swallow. While these games may have aged too much to be attractive to new players, they are still fun to revisit for existing fans… but this is just far from being the ideal way to experience them. It’s akin to Martin Scorcese announcing a new director’s cut of Goodfellas, but palming off the actual editing work to McG. You’re still getting three iconic GTA games and they’re certainly still playable, but they’re not delivered with anywhere near the level of exacting craftsmanship we’ve grown to expect from Rockstar. I can’t help but wonder how different this re-released collection could have been had the publisher issued talented members of the GTA modding community employment contracts rather than cease and desist letters.