Could MADiSON be the scariest game of all time? According to “The Science of Scare Project”, that’s very much the case.
We’re going to take that claim with a pinch of salt, though MADiSON, which sees you collaborating with a cursed camera, is a superb survival horror game. And we did remark, in our review, that “No game has horrified us quite as much as this debut from Bloodious.”
The Science of Scare Project wasn’t, in fact set up purely for the purposes of patting MADiSON on the back and has been ranking movies and games for a while. Founded and funded by Broadband Choices, it uses heart rate to “calculate” how scary a piece of media is. In the case of MADiSON, “the average heart rate when playing was a staggering 97 BPM, peaking at 131 BPM.”
The second scariest game was Alien Isolation which, which its non-scripted scares, we could well believe. Silent Hill 2, which is currently in the process of being remade, was the 23rd scariest game, according to the 2022 study. However, Silent Hill 2 isn’t just scary, it’s consistently, stomach-churningly unsettling, which heart-rate wouldn’t necessarily measure.
If you’ve not played MADiSON, and can put up with that one lower case “i”, it’s currently 30% off on Nintendo Switch and PlayStation. Sorry, Xbox and PC owners, you’ll have to wait for a different sale. But you can still check out the full “scariest games ever” list here.
