Title: The Medium
Format: PC, Xbox Series S/X
Price: USD 49.99
This game was clearly a labour of love for developer Bloober Team. They even included a full-screen message telling you so. This is the developer behind both Layers of Fear and Observer, both innovative, tense, and enjoyable horror titles, and the more generic but serviceably scary Blair Witch. Originally conceived in 2012, the title was put on hold as the generation of console hardware at the time was not able to deal with one of the game’s core mechanics.
Searching for glorious workers’ bike parking
With current gen PC and the Xbox Series S/X, the idea was resurrected and given full form. More than that, following a gameplay demo, the legendary Akira Yamaoka, famed for his Silent Hill scores was persuaded to contribute to the soundscape. Considering these factors – high end hardware requirements, a track record of good-to-great horror titles, a big name persuaded by early gameplay, and labour of love status – you might be forgiven for expecting something truly ground-breaking. Honestly, it’s not, but that should not distract, as it’s still a thoroughly enjoyable and, yes, a great game.
It’s a great game, and Marianne is doing a great job. Everyone give her a big hand.
As the game begins, protagonist Marianne is handling the funeral arrangements of her adoptive father, which may perhaps be easier for her than most as the family business was running a funeral parlour. This is also how Marianne has come to learn of her abilities to communicate with the recently deceased, helping some of them to pass on. This section serves as an introduction to the game’s backstory and some of the mechanics. She then receives a mysterious phone call from someone claiming to know of her powers, asking her to come quickly to the old Niwa hotel and resort. Swayed be her need for answers, she determines to go.
Fun fact, Eastern European communists idolised rare trees. No really. Except for actual teak trees. Because as we all know, “proper teak is theft.” Ahem.
Niwa is a fascinating location. The game is set in Poland, not the first of Bloober Team’s games to be set in their native country, and I am glad that they do so, it is far more interesting than another haunted American locale (such as the good but flawed Little Hope). The game intro uses reel footage from various times and events of the Communist era rule, and the game itself is set in 1999, the year Poland joined NATO having completed the transition to democratic government in 1991. The resort is now closed down and abandoned, and exploration reveals it to have been built at the height of communist power as a place of rest and relaxation for the workers. While the grounds certainly seem pleasant, the building itself is a huge sterile monolith, still imposing in its decrepitude.
Thoroughly evocative, this ruined lobby reminded me of an abandoned hotel I found with friends in the mountains of Japan, which made its way into my second novel
On her way to the main hotel from the gates, Marianne passes through the ruins of an old fort, and another of the game’s mechanics is introduced. On entering a place with echoes of the past, Marianne’s consciousness will split, placing her in both the real world and a ghastly corrupted version of it. These are inspired by the works of Polish artist Zdzisław Beksiński and are appropriately disturbing, simultaneously decaying and organic.
A real fixer-upper. Nothing some dusting, a lick of paint, new carpet, and being in another reality entirely couldn’t fix.
Marianne moves in both worlds, with the player’s screen split in two. There are small differences between the two, and Marianne can focus on either the real world version of an object, or the otherworld version, and the actions on these two versions solve puzzles or blockages allowing Marianne to progress. It is apparently this split screen rendering of two worlds which required the technical progress of the current generation. I’ve no idea why, but certainly did have a little bit of texture flicker even on quite a high end PC.
While this particular puzzle wasn’t taxing on my brain, rendering the screen was taxing for my graphics card.
Later we learn Marianne can concentrate on just the otherworld, presented as an ‘out of body experience,’ allowing her to work in just the otherworld when the real world is blocked. Marianne’s self dissolves if left too long in the otherworld, serving as a time limit. Later still, she gains the ability to step into the otherworld through mirrors. The otherworld Marianne can also find wells of energy, which she can absorb and use to power up objects or to dispel clouds of moths, the latter insects being a sign and portent of the game’s ultimate monster, the Maw.
If it looks like he stepped into a painting, that’s because he has.
I’m sure it could be argued that these puzzles are neither innovative nor challenging, but I appreciated the light touch and certainly the absence of busywork sidequests you see in far too many games these days to pad the run time. The focus here is on the story, and I did like how the puzzles supported exposition and discovery more than they did to serve as a temporary obstacle. There are collectibles as well, in the form of echoes of the past, notes, and postcards from a caretaker that were never sent. These are not obtrusive and do serve as further exposition of the events which have taken place.
I’ll bet whatever they were doing here, it turned out to be a really good idea.
The story itself is detailed and intriguing and I really did enjoy the detective work. Marianne is a well fleshed out and distinctive protagonist. She ‘thinks out loud’ a lot, which is typical for games particularly in the mystery solving vein, but it never reaches film-noir parody levels, and she is a sympathetic and well-acted character. Throw in a delightfully perverse performance as the voice of the Maw by veteran voice actor Troy Baker and this completes a well-written, well-realised world. It is only towards the end, as the threads get drawn together, that we find ourselves walking a familiar path from a narrative perspective, a reveal to the overall backstory we’ve seen before.
Entering the minds of others allows for a variety of locations, and reveals some very unpleasant and unsettling topics of abuse.
Troy Baker has provided the voice of many a game character, from Persona to Batman to The Last of Us. He also was the voice of James Sunderland in Silent Hill 2 HD, the second Silent Hill link. The Medium used a fixed perspective for its environments. I wasn’t aware of the involvement of Akira Yamaoka before playing the game and I am glad of that, as I wasn’t assuming homage to the Silent Hill series and having my mind do unnecessary comparisons.
An artistically framed shot, yesterday
Again, it could be argued fixed perspective is very old school for a game claiming to need next-gen hardware to run, but it does allow for the game’s director to have a more movie-like influence on how the player sees the game, and I thought the scene changes were very effective at conveying scale, desolation and more than occasionally disquiet.
I may be jumping the gun a little, but my detective instinct tells me something bad may have happened here.
The Medium is, then, a first-rate next-gen old-school horror. An imaginative and intriguing setting, a mostly original and compelling story, excellent acting and an absence of busywork makes for an enjoyable and engaging piece of supernatural detective work. 8