The Medium finally arrives on PlayStation 5, bringing over Bloober Team's horror experience to a new audience with packed DualSense implementation and a few persistent gripes from the Xbox Series version.
In a year that has brought players Resident Evil Village and Little Nightmares II, it would be understandable that The Medium has lost some of its place in the horror spotlight.
Released earlier this year exclusively on Xbox Series X/S and PC, Bloober Team’s foray into third-person horror suffered from being delayed as a launch title, out of the ravenous grasp of 2020’s holiday season.
Yet I found myself intrigued by what I saw from The Medium. An obvious throwback to the bygone era of PlayStation 1 survival horror behemoths Resident Evil and Silent Hill, The Medium appeared to be a brave leap for Bloober Team. Their success in the exceptionally creepy and weird Layers of Fear gave me refuge from a glut of mediocre first-person “‘psychological’ ‘horror’ games” that refused to do more than scream and thrash at inopportune moments, like a child having a tantrum.
Layers of Fear certainly broke the silence with jump scares but it also dared to carve itself under the player’s skin with tricks on the mind and evocative sound design. I loved my time with it and waited with bated breath for the moment The Medium would eventually arrive on PlayStation 5.
Ultimately, The Medium on PlayStation 5 is not a vast departure from what players may have already experienced on Xbox. Because of that, I don’t want to spend too much time dwelling on the core of the game, which my comrade Steven McGehee already went in depth with on his original review.
In The Medium, players are cast as Marianne, a psychic medium who has the ability to see into the spirit world and connect with the souls of those who have departed the physical realm. She uses her ability to walk amongst the spirits to help those struggling souls move on, escaping their torment or potentially causing unrest in the mortal world. Being a medium, Marianne risks danger by interacting with particularly dangerous spirits along her journey, especially once she is called to the abandoned Niwa Resort by someone claiming to understand her powers.
Set in Poland, The Medium takes place primarily in this resort hotel originally built for Polish workers. The dank, abandoned setting is a sufficiently creepy setting but transforms when Marianne shifts into the spirit world. The Medium hearkens back to those original survival horror games with fixed camera angles meant to frame a scene to maximize in horrific potential. The catch with this game is that players will watch as the screen splits in two, showing Marianne walking through both worlds, the spirit one acting as a distorted, harrowing version of the physical.
It’s obvious why Bloober Team chose to implement this perspective in The Medium. Using a first-person perspective would have dampened the ability to have dueling puzzles and some of the environmental trickery is truly terrifying. However, controlling Marianne is not always the most intuitive. While The Medium never features the somewhat cumbersome tank controls of old, several times I would be moving in one direction, have the camera shift to a new perspective or scene and watch as Marianne would move in the opposite direction because I kept the stick oriented the same way. Other times movement would pause or struggle to align with my intended path. Additionally, I found the object and environment interaction to be slow at times, forcing me to cycle through several buttons presses just to combine objects or back out of prompt indicating I had picked up a new item.
Eventually, players will likely grow accustomed to the controls and more deftly navigate Marianne through the world. But during intense chase scenes, it’s problematic to die because the game wasn’t sure what you were doing and players crash right into danger. Plus, I eventually came to loathe the default running speed and animation. Watching Marianne oddly trot through wide open sections of the game clashed with my instinct to explore every inch of the world to find collectibles and gain a better sense of The Medium‘s lore. It felt oddly prohibitive, especially when the game tucked a puzzle solution at far ends of a scene, making me question whether I should wait to explore or not.
I found the game’s handling of heavy subject matter to be fascinating and was thankful that Blooper Team rarely fumbled the delivery with ham-fisted voice acting. Dealing with death and trauma, The Medium doesn’t always play it safe and I appreciated it for that.
On PlayStation 5, The Medium truly comes alive because of the DualSense controller features. Haptic feedback and the adaptive triggers rely heavily upon Marianne’s spirit powers. Her Spirit Blast rumbles the controller, forcing the player to push down on the trigger to execute it, while the sensation of the Spirit Shield being slowly chipped away at shows off the subtleties the controller is capable of. Chilling voices and sounds can be emitted from the controller’s speaker while audio bits and dialog can play through it. I found the DualSense implementation helped immerse me more in the world of The Medium and its gameplay.
What surprised me, however, was how relatively long the loading screens felt for a PlayStation 5. Many games I’ve played on the console have whizzed through loading, The Medium did not, making me feel somewhat like a spoiled brat. But truly, The Medium does feature a lot of loading that I just didn’t expect, especially considering how far Blooper Team went to incorporate the Dual Sense into the game. I can’t speak for the Xbox Series or PC versions but I was surprised.
The Medium on PlayStation 5 feels like the best version of the game and one worth trying if you have yet to experience it elsewhere. While its unique dual-reality perspective lifted the game up, players expecting an outrageously different spin on psychological horror may have seen these scares before. But it’s hard to deny that Blooper Team aimed for the fences with The Medium and payed homage to the classics while crafting a new universe that they may wish to refine further down the line.
