Post Script
The risks and rewards of invoking a real place in a horror game
The Medium might lean on the supernatural, but it’s got one foot firmly in reality. Its Niwa resort is a careful recreation of the Hotel Cracovia, built in the 1960s opposite Krakow’s National Museum during the heyday of the Polish People’s Republic. The real hotel lacks Niwa’s supernatural taint but has known its fair share of scandal. Once operated by state-owned tourist company Orbis, it was bought by Echo Investment in 2011, which planned to replace it with a shopping centre. The government then added the hotel to Poland’s list of national monuments, making it illegal to tamper with the building’s structure. In 2016, Echo sold the land back to Poland’s state treasury for three million złotys less than it had paid in the first place.
Designed by the architect Witold Ceckiewicz with a vast, imposing facade of glass and aluminium, the Hotel Cracovia was inspired by modernist housing estates in 1950s Paris. It marked a departure from the grandiose columns and arches of socialist realism which, in Stalin’s chilling phrase, viewed the artist as an “engineer of the human soul” – certainly, a sentiment that resonates in the game. Decked in avant-garde paintings and with its own in-house casino, the hotel was designed to symbolise a new age of prosperity after
Stalin’s death, but it was mostly used by western tourists, well-off party officials, sex workers and the secret police. Bloober digs into these seedy associations without (as far as we can tell) drawing any direct connections. Outside the main lobby, monuments portray a socialist paradise for upstanding patriots, but as you learn from notes and conjured memories, the resort’s long-dead guests were mostly people with something to hide.
Recreating a historical site in a horror game poses difficulties that go beyond looking up forgotten architects or photographing interiors. As a genre, horror is steeped in the concept of history as fundamentally corrupting, a collection of oily fluids bursting through the surface. This precludes more hopeful or, at least, nuanced readings of places, the ultimate test case being Chernobyl. Generally represented as hell on Earth in games such as STALKER, it has become an unexpected haven for wildlife in the absence of human activity. You wouldn’t want to live there, but there’s more to Chernobyl nowadays than its ghosts.
The trickier propositions for critics, however, are games that take direct inspiration from real-world sites without saying so. One game we’ve wrestled with on this count is Frictional’s Amnesia: Rebirth. This includes a labyrinth of stone pillars that, as we learned after publishing our review, takes some inspiration from the design of the Berlin Holocaust memorial. Given that Rebirth’s wider narrative involves mass incarceration and torture, this seems worthy of a longer discussion, but the link isn’t obvious in the game. Much as we enjoyed Rebirth, the labyrinth seems to bear out the accusation levelled at the Berlin memorial by critics such as the New Yorker’s Richard Brody. According to the latter, the monument is too vague and featureless, easily abstracted away from the events it is supposed to commemorate.
This is Bloober Team’s second horror game set in its native land, for which it clearly has very mixed feelings. In The Medium, the hotel building has been transplanted from Krakow to a Blair-Witch-esque woodland, and squats alongside a crumbling 19th-century fortress and a Second World War bunker. The game’s backdrop is, in other words, a dense collage of periods, which together form a gloomy portrait of a country still ankle-deep in the detritus of ancient wars and corruption. Marianne’s apartment from the start of the game, meanwhile, is based on a real building in Krakow’s Matejko Square. The apartment is also the setting for Observer, which extends this rather hopeless vision of Poland into a distant cyberpunk future.