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The Madison Blue Knees demon and gramophone puzzle is one of the most challenging moments in the game, as players have to navigate the monster in a distorted house while finding his severed eyeballs.
It's a lot for anyone to deal with because unlike something like the Madison picture puzzle you can't take your time to figure things out - you're constantly being pursued in a similar set up to the Madison Church maze and candle puzzle. But you are, at least, nearing the ending at this point and hope is on the horizon, so we'll lay out simply and clearly how to beat Blue Knees and solve the gramophone puzzle in Madison below. We'll also explain Blue Knees' backstory and lore, as much of the entity's purpose isn't clear on the first playthrough.
How to beat Blue Knees in Madison explained
There's no way for players to kill Blue Knees in Madison, but that doesn't mean there isn't a way to escape him. The goal here is to find both of Blue Knees' lost eyeballs, which are stuck inside gramophones that have sprung up all over the house for some reason. The process goes something like this:
- Search the rearranged house for any gramophone.
- Hold down the interact button on the gramophone to start playing a song about Blue Knees.
- The song will take about 30 seconds, but will stop if the player lets go of the button.
- Once the song is done, there is a chance that the gramophone will have an eyeball inside it.
- Pick up the eyeball and find another gramophone, repeating this process.
- Once you have two eyeballs, head back to dad's room where this began, and interact with the hole in the floor.
- Drop both eyeballs into the hole.
- The room will go fairly dark. Photograph the eyeball hole and everything will go totally pitch black before Blue Knees jumps you, transporting you back to the normal house.
Putting Blue Knees aside for the moment, the issues here are that the house layout has changed and all the gramophones have spawned into new locations, so you won't know where to look at first and have to organically find them.
Not only that, but the gramophones that drop the eyeballs - what a sentence - are random, meaning we can't tell you which ones to search. Simply work through them methodically as much as possible, starting with those close to the eyeball hole and working your way out. The actual song goes as follows:
"Blue knees is behind and will find what he has been looking for. For so long, all alone, where he belongs. <music sting>"
Again, this roughly takes thirty seconds or so, but has to be played in a single go - if you stop at any point, the song has to start over. And Blue Knees himself is doing his best to stop you.
Protecting yourself from Blue Knees
This is the final part of the Madison lock code, which we have a full breakdown of here.
Aside from that header sounding like a medical column from the 1920s, this is one of the only occasions in Madison where an actual NPC enemy is attempting to kill you, and you can defend yourself from them. Blue Knees randomly teleports in and kills the player with little warning, the lights flickering to telegraph his incoming presence, with roughly five seconds at most between his materialisation and his killing blow (depending on how far away he appears from you).
During that brief interval, Luca needs to take a photo of Blue Knees to save himself. As alluded to in the kids' book and earlier diary entries from grandma, the demon is vulnerable to light, and your flash serves to exploit that weakness nicely. Photograph Blue Knees and he'll thrash for a second and vanish, giving you a short window before he returns. Use this power to keep yourself alive until you can complete the challenge, and don't worry - if you're killed after getting an eyeball, you still get to keep it when you respawn.
Once you complete this section you're very near the conclusion and having Madison game story explained.
Blue Knees' backstory and lore in Madison explained
Enough people have wondered about it that it's worth addressing - Blue Knees kind of comes out of nowhere in Madison, and the creature's presence is odd enough to deserve explanation.
What little we know or can infer about Blue Knees isn't much, and he feels more like a tangential aside to the greater plot, in the same way that Hans the Nazi Ghost in the Madison church mazes doesn't really impact the wider story. Blue Knees just kind of appears to be… its own, horrible thing, possibly awoken to greater power by Madison Hale's evil in the camera. The only other possibility is that the witchcraft Madison was trying to perform was an attempt to summon the demon Blue Knees itself, but there's no real proof of that.
To clarify, Blue Knees was a figure that Luca's grandma, Elizabeth Maxwell, brought a creepy book home about for her son Johnny (Luca's dad). The book details how Blue Knees was a lonely creature that sickened and lost his eyes - as in, they literally fell out and started rolling over the floor - and his constant search to find them led to his knees becoming blue and diseased, hence the name. The eyes eventually crumbled into dust, but Blue Knees obviously didn't know this and kept searching regardless.
Granny Maxwell was haunted by visions of Blue Knees not long after bringing this creepy book home, though her husband Albert scoffed at the idea. The book was presumably possessed by Bluey, because over the next few months Elizabeth started to gain a strange form of cataracts and near total loss of vision that no medication could cure - the influence of Blue Knees himself. There were also several incidents of her jewellery being spread everywhere as though somebody was searching for something, presumably the demon looking for his eyeballs. Later on Elizabeth passes away, and Albert hides the book to prevent further evil, now regretting not having believed her.
When Luca uncovers the book again later within the game, Blue Knees comes back and starts trying to take his sight too, as Luca frequently complains of eye pain in the final act of the game. Dropping the eyeballs down the hole presumably… lures Blue Knees away? Dispels him? It's not clear if Blue Knees is even gone, as once the process is over, Luca's sight is notably rimmed by darkness for the rest of the game, implying permanent damage. I guess Bluey and Madison can fight over which of them get to torment Luca in the hellworld forever.
