The Medium
PC, Xbox Series
Like many a horror game before it, The Medium is about escaping the gravity of the past. Set in 1999, it casts you as Marianne, an orphaned clairvoyant exploring a ruined 1960s resort near Krakow, where the spectre of Poland’s old totalitarian regime dances with the demons of a forgotten childhood. The game has plenty of baggage of its own. It harkens back to ‘golden age’ survival horror on PS1 with fixed perspectives, a persistent Mr X-style monster, and Silent Hill composer Akira Yamaoka supplying the eerier parts of its score. The element of homage is heartfelt, but limiting. There are grisly sights aplenty, but little of the ambition we saw in Layers Of Fear and Observer at their weirdest.
The real problem isn’t reverence for the classics, however, but Bloober’s refusal to let go of an idea of its own devising. Conceived in 2012 and reinvented as a new-gen showcase, its headline gimmick is an awkward rework of Silent Hill’s two-world storytelling. While scouring the Niwa resort for the secrets of Marianne’s youth, you can switch between material and spirit versions of your environment, meddling with objects in one to solve puzzles in the other. Mirrors allow you to step fully into the other realm, but sometimes you explore both at once in splitscreen as alternate versions of the protagonist (guided with the same inputs). The challenge, then, is to make headway on both planes against different obstacles, occasionally using the paranormal equivalent of holding your breath to briefly detach Marianne’s spirit self from her physical body.
All this is said to be “only possible” on Xbox Series hardware, which might be true in terms of pixel counts, but ignores any number of dimension-switching games from Legacy Of Kain: Soul Reaver onwards. More importantly, the execution is rather dull, overdependent on lock-and-key puzzles that see you gathering spirit energy to switch on mechanisms in the real world. Elsewhere, you use this energy to conjure a forcefield and push through swarms of demonic moths. The latter will kill you quickly but don’t hunt you; the same can’t be said for the Maw, a malevolent spirit that regards Marianne as its ticket to the world beyond Niwa.
Sometimes the puzzles are more involving, more of a piece with the locations and their extensive histories of anguish. You move a clock’s hands to advance and rewind a scene in the spirit world, for example, and use a doll’s house to teleport through time. But for every flash of inspiration there’s another spirit-energy puzzle or, later, goofy idea such as tossing obstacles around with telekinesis. Bloober has missed something fundamental about Silent Hill’s dimension split, which existed more for the sake of the narrative than puzzles. By foregrounding travel between dimensions as a capital-M mechanic, The Medium robs the idea of intrigue.
The game’s best features are its environments, which range from green-lit, glass-walled dayrooms to a series
Bloober Team Xbox Series (tested), PC Out now
DREAM HOMES
The Medium’s spirit-realm aesthetic is influenced by the surrealist landscapes of Zdzisław Beksinski, a Polish painter who was murdered in 2005. Beksinski’s paintings, some of which he described as “photographs of dreams”, make good fodder for a horror game. They show buildings apparently eating themselves, columns heaped with red fungus, and skeletal figures locked in a huddled embrace. Among Beksinski’s fans is Pan’s Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro, who compared his art to medieval paintings about the fragility of the flesh. Beksinski himself, however, claimed that much of his work was designed to be optimistic, even funny. We’d certainly be intrigued to play a comedy game set in worlds like these. of underground cisterns. The camera composition isn’t quite a match for them. The game does well early on by gently zooming out as you wander through a forest, gradually allowing the environment to dwarf you. As in the older Resident Evils, scene transitions create a mild disorientation that is a good foundation for a handful of jumpscares. But The Medium lacks Resident Evil’s mastery of blind spots and skewed vantage points – more often, the perspectives hinder navigation, leaving you fumbling around in the murk for interaction prompts.
The spirit version of each location is entertainingly hideous – the same layout coated in a bizarre mixture of offal, mucus and coral. It’s fun to pick apart their themes and motifs. Earlier sections resemble an insect hive, all fibrous layers of pulp hung with sucked-dry bones; later, it’s more like pushing through a huge, rotten intestine. At certain points in the story you take control of a second character, who can jump into other minds: this allows the game to string together locations and events freely, as with Observer’s brain-diving sequences. You follow children’s voices around a garden maze, and clamber through blood-red paper canyons while peeling open the soul of an undercover policeman.
Unfortunately, the more specific The Medium gets about the traumas that animate these visions, the less compelling it becomes. This is essentially a story about a young woman dealing with a complex legacy of patriarchal abuse spread across a number of characters, whether perpetrated by individual father figures or the daddy state. It could have been a powerful tale given defter writing, but the script abounds instead with lurid clichés and lumbering metaphors – drunken, bullying stepdads, a monster who calls you “my little skinsuit”, and a razor that is a literal emblem of shame and regret.
Putting together the pieces of Marianne’s past is engrossing, particularly later when there are several backstories in play, but Marianne herself is a forgettable lead – alternately maudlin and corny, with a very videogamey habit of thinking aloud. Her nemesis, the Maw, is a more striking creation thanks to an odious voice performance from Troy Baker. Sadly, you encounter the creature mostly in chase sequences and rickety crouch-walk stealth sections. The game also commits the cardinal sin of revealing the Maw’s form early on, though it claws back tension by making it invisible later, betrayed only by the thunder of its feet.
For all its new-gen glamour, The Medium feels like the work of a younger team, still casting around for its Big Idea. It’s admirable that Bloober has brought this long-nursed project to fruition, and if you’re desperate for another Silent Hill, the environments may be worth a visit. All the same, this is more of an evolutionary vestige than a healthy new growth. Bloober might have done better to let it die.
The more specific it gets about the traumas that animate the visions, the less compelling it becomes