As the hype for the launch of the new consoles ramped up last year, one exclusive I had my eye on was Bloober Team’s The Medium. Available now on Xbox Series and Windows, this latest Bloober Team psychological horror experience casts players as Marianne, a woman with a troubled life who can walk the fine line between the material and spiritual worlds. She’s very in tune and able to exist within both worlds, but it’s not something she’s necessarily happy to be able to do, as players will quickly find out.
Like other Bloober Team games I have played, such as Layers of Fear, its sequel, and Observer, The Medium presents and atmosphere of dread and unease. While there are a few jump scare moments, the game’s tension is derived from an unrelenting sense of dread and stress. Immerse yourself into that, and you’re bound to get invested in the well-being of Marianne and the outcome of the story, but it’s not too hard to take a step back and remember that this game is more experience-based rather than skills-based. Indeed, there are several times when your character is in grave danger and a checkpoint reload is assured if you aren’t careful. These situations are typically sequences where you have to sneak and hide (Marianne can even hold her breath for a short period if you press R3) while making it from point A to B without a creepy entity detecting you. It’s a little bit tongue-in-cheek because even if you are caught you might have one shot to escape, and worst case your checkpoint is very close by, but these were times in the game where I really sat up and focused to make sure that, well, thing, didn’t catch and kill me.
For an experience like this, story and characters are key. The devs did a nice job of keeping a lot of the critical details hidden until the very ending moments of the game. For the eight hours or so leading up to that, you’ll have snippets of info, some closure, but not a whole lot of certainty of what the heck is really going on. That type of story-telling is part of the dread-building atmosphere I mentioned earlier, it keeps you uneasy and unsure about how things are going to twist and unravel as you go. The game begins dauntingly enough, with Marianne visiting her step-dad’s funeral home by herself to say her last goodbyes to him. As a medium, with this strange ability to communicate with the dead, she is called upon at a few points in this game to lead the dead to the ever-after. This happens by releasing them of some critical discomfort that is keeping them from peace. You’ll get your first case of this right at the start. Before she can leave the facility, she gets a mysterious phone call from someone who seems to know who she is. He beckons her to come to the abandoned Niwa Resort, a socialist-built resort hotel for Polish workers built around the 80s. It’s here that the majority of the game takes place as she tries to piece together who this caller is, why she’s been called there, as well as dealing with other complications that happen along the way.
So, two major design elements to The Medium that I really liked were how it was played from the third person perspective, with a fixed camera no less, and of course the times when players are viewing and manipulating things in both the material and spiritual worlds. I have to admit I was very pleased to see that The Medium played from that fixed camera third person perspective, kind of like, oh, Grim Fandango for example. Every time you enter a room, the preset camera angle sets the scene and it makes for some very compelling visual experiences. Yeah, there is a little bit of goofiness with you walking your character into walls, invisible or otherwise, but that didn’t really take much of anything away from the otherwise intriguing art direction.
Of course, the decision to go with this kind of perspective probably became quite obvious when the developers decided players would be mirrored between two worlds, a singular first person view just couldn’t have worked. For the majority of the game, you are playing as Marianne in the material world, but for the portions that you are in the spirit world the game splits the screen, horizontally. Sometimes, the split favors one world or the other, for emphasis, but typically it’s an even half and half. Simple puzzles are put in the players path at pretty routine intervals, often requiring you to physically move to some location and then have your spirit self use a burst of energy to power something up. Other times a physical barrier requires you to have an out of body experience so that you can explore and find some clue in the spirit realm. Another blend of the two worlds comes in the form of reliving echoes and remnants of past events using Marianne’s insight. Physical objects can be picked up and turned over to examine, and many of them have a mark you can find and look at with RB to unlock an echo from the past that provides more insight into the intentionally hard-to-follow story. Other times in the spirit realm you will see faint outlines of people and with some wiggling of the right analog stick you can unlock a memory. I actually managed to get the Achievements for finding all of these in my lone playthrough.
Speaking of Achievements, this game will drop them regularly for players that take the little bit of extra time it takes to explore and find the extra items and story tidbits. It’s worthwhile and easy to explore around a little, there is frankly very little in the way of free-roaming exploration or alternate paths, but I enjoyed finding out more about the crazy events and trying to piece together who was who and what did they do when, etc. I’ll take this opp to admit that some of the content of the story is tough and in no way pleasant — hence the trigger warning at the start of the game. I don’t see myself playing through The Medium again in part because of the difficult subject matters it traverses, and that’s not a knock on them, it just is what it is.
A few other items I’ll mention as I peruse my notes, starting with some gripes. For one, I didn’t care for the foul language in the game; it just didn’t click with me and did not make the game any more interesting, intense, atmospheric, etc. In fact, for me, it worked against the game in that respect because I actually became further detached from the character because of her choice of words at times. Second, I’d suggest disabling controller vibration. There are parts, mostly in the first half of the game, where vibration is used to try and immerse you more, but it didn’t pan out that way. The XSX controller was noisy, felt very mechanical, and for me at least those moments of vibration worked against the game’s presumed intent. Lastly, the way your character runs is pretty silly. It’s the slowest, tiny-steps jogging you could imagine. In rare, pre-determined times late in the game running is opened up and you’re off to the races — but for the most part, even in the scary times when you think Marianne would want to turn off her lapel-mounted flashlight and run, the best she musters is a slog, i.e., slow jog.
Some random good points I noted were the music, which worked nicely to add to the atmosphere. Great voice-acting and writing, excellent graphics, so an all-in-all solid presentation that deserves a hat tip. Great checkpointing, a nice mixture of puzzles and exploration, and a good pace overall as well that compels you to play this game to completion in just a couple or few sessions.
In sum, The Medium is a great game with a few quirks, and it’s the best from Bloober Team to date. Available on Game Pass, it’s well-worth playing through as it makes for a nice early next-gen experience.
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