MEDIUM SCARE!
Worlds are split in dynamic adventure
The Medium
Bloober Team
Available on PC, Xbox Series X/S
A cliché can supercharge a story if it opens the door for its own subversion. That was my thought when I finished The Medium, a game that begins with a woman uttering the portentous words, “It all starts with a dead girl,” as she describes a recurring dream she has had since childhood.
In it, a man chases a girl through a wooded area to a pier, where he shoots her with a pistol. The first time I watched the scene play out, I thought of other stories that revolve around dead girls: Twin Peaks, The Virgin Suicides, the two True Detective seasons worth watching, etc., not to mention the articles I've glanced at that have examined the trope in Young Adult fiction. Skeptical of such a setup, I was gratified to see how the tale of the murdered dream girl ends up running aground on the shore of reality.
Set in Krakow in 1999, The Medium tells the story of Marianne, a woman who can communicate with spirits and travel between the lands of the living and the dead. We meet her at a low point in her life — she visits the funeral home that, until recently, was owned by her beloved foster father, Jack. She is there to pin a tie on his corpse. But just as she completes her task, the lights in the room start flickering and her reality splits in two.
On the left side of the screen is the Marianne we've been following to this point. On the right, in a twilit world, is Marianne's spirit self. On one side, we see a brunette-haired Marianne talking to herself in Jack's office while on the other we see a white-haired Marianne addressing Jack's spirit.
After other developments, Marianne goes to the Niwa Resort, an abandoned, government-run resort intended to showcase the triumphs of 20th-century communism — a workers' playground, if you will. As she approaches the building she is unsettled by its aura. Her subsequent exploration of it, as well as its vast underground structure, uncovers a tangled history — e.g. parts of the facility were once used by the Nazis.
As players explore the Niwa and its environs, Marianne's reality will fracture when she comes across areas haunted by traumatized spirits she can help, or a malignant spirit who means her harm.
I found The Medium, billed as a psychological horror game, to be consistently unsettling rather than scary. There is a vengeful monster Marianne must deal with intermittently, but except for one breathtaking scene where he chases her through different realities — resulting in shifts in perspective that strike like tidal waves — I didn't think much of him. Nothing robs a creepy game of its power as forcing a player to confront the same monster too many times, so thankfully the monster encounters are nicely spread out.
The Medium might not have the most nightmarish adversary, but its blanketing, foreboding atmosphere and uncompromising ending amply makes up for it.