The Medium
Ferries third-person horror into a new life.
The Medium plays like an old-school Resident Evil game, minus the gunplay. You navigate Marianne around crumbling, abandoned hotels and claustrophobic Cold War bunkers from fixed camera angles. It can be a bit cumbersome, but it’s a deliberate and effective design choice. The Medium is excellent at making you feel like you’re always being watched, and that danger could be lurking just out of view at any time.
The added gimmick here is that Marianne can sometimes see into the spirit world, which is handled by splitting your screen in half, down the middle. All inputs will affect the real and spirit world versions of Marianne identically, but there are often small differences in the terrain or enemies that only exist in one world or the other to complicate things. Unfortunately, Bloober Team definitely didn’t push this idea to its limits. Most of the puzzles are fairly simple, and there were only a couple of those Portal-like ‘a-ha!’ moments that made me feel like I’d done something really outside-the-box and clever.
The star, though, is the story.
The Medium is exquisitely paced and plotted, with a complex, but not convoluted, supernatural mystery to uncover. It kept me guessing throughout, but the big reveals always felt earned and well set up. I had several running theories about what was going on at the haunted Niwa Resort that all made sense, but the true answer ended up be-ing even more elegant and poignant than I guessed. And yet it doesn’t seem to come out of left-field, M Night Shyamalan-style. It’s some of the sharpest writing I’ve seen in a videogame in a long time.
Despite some technical foibles and the simple, unchallenging stealth and puzzle solving, I fell completely in love with The Medium. The writing stacks up to the very best in the genre with its well-crafted mystery that explores difficult, often very relatable themes on its way to a satisfying, though not uplifting conclusion.
LEANA HAFER A sharply written, thoughtful, and emotional horror game with a clever mind-twisting gimmick.