The Medium
Hard to see as anything but a misstep.
There is a lot going on The Medium. It’s a busy mix of mechanics and story threads that jostle to fit in, never settling, and rarely trusting the player to enjoy themselves without a watchful hand to guide them. I spent a lot of time tapping the run button for example, because I wanted to move faster, but you can only run when allowed. And if The Medium decides you’re in an atmospheric moment you’d better damn well walk and soak it in. It feels like a story that someone spent so long thinking about, planning, and clearly loving, that they forgot about the bit where another person has to play it and panicked at the last minute that people might play it wrong.
It’s part a love letter to the old days of fixed camera horror games (with Silent Hill’s composer Akira Yamaoka providing some great sparsely atmospheric music in places), and part an attempt to reimagine the idea by showing a split reality onscreen where the real and spirit realm overlap. The idea is that, as a medium called Marianne, you’re able to exist in both planes and manipulate things across them as you try to solve the murder of a little girl. One of the main mechanics, for example, is the idea of drawing power from a Spirit Well, a sort of ghostly energy source in the spectral world, to power a fuse box in the real world and open a door.
This odd structure of objects only becoming relevant when you find them in the right order is a constant theme: gameplay and puzzles acting to fence you into a path so you can receive a tour in the way the guide intended. There’s rarely much agency as a player – the gameplay doesn’t serve the story, but rather controls it, using object picking puzzles and treasure hunts to meter it out. It strips the fun out of exploring when you realise finding something boils down to when you’re meant to, not when you actually do.
Like the mechanics there’s a scattershot ‘didn’t know where to stop’ feel to the plotting. There is a good story here, but again: just too much. There are at least three substantial threads that feel like they could have held their own, but coiled together they heave and strain against each other until the very end explains what’s really going on.
The Medium tries to do a lot but never really seems to stop and see if any of it’s working.
Leon Hurley