The Medium by Bloober Team has you traversing the physical and spiritual worlds

The Medium seeks to explore the subject of death through the eyes of spiritual medium.

The Medium by developers Bloober Team

Death sadly is a key element of a huge number of computer games usually caused by the player, but it isn’t often we get an exploration of the subject through the eyes of spiritual medium when it’s a horror game.

Horror games aren’t a new genre in gaming either. The Resident Evil games have been setting the benchmark since the 1990s, and Alien: Isolation is genuinely one of the scariest computer games ever made. But developers Bloober Team have added another worthy entry with The Medium.

The game is published on PC and Xbox, and I reviewed the Xbox Series X version. It’s set in Poland in 1999 and casts you as Marianne, a young woman with spiritual abilities who works in a funeral home and can communicate with the spirit world, using her powers to help dispatch lost souls to the hereafter.

While it sounds like the plot to a forgettable and somewhat sappy straight-to-video movie, The Medium is anything but forgettable or sappy, and does some great things with the premise – in particular, its split-screen gameplay.

 

At certain times in the game, Marianne can exist in both the physical and spiritual worlds simultaneously, with the effect being shown by splitting the screen in half – one side is the physical world, the other is the spiritual world.

Marianne must navigate puzzles and obstacles using the resources available in both worlds. For example, to get past a locked door in the physical world, she must find a source of energy in the spirit world, absorb it, and shock the spirit world’s fuse box counterpart, which will short-circuit the real world fuse box and open the door.

Some areas set the action entirely in the real world or spiritual world, with the player crossing between them through portals such as mirrors.

The horror elements in the game draw from several influences. I saw elements of Stephen King, HP Lovecraft and Clive Barker, while I also felt some broader aspects of the game Control too.

 

In a very broad sense, The Medium fits in the gaming genre sometimes known as a ‘Walking Simulator’, in that it has a linear plot and you uncover the story by walking around the game world uncovering clues and information and solving puzzles (usually not too taxing) to advance the story.

There are a few chase sequences and stealth sequences to break things up, but there’s no jumping puzzles, no shooting, no martial arts, just Marianne and her torch exploring and uncovering a chilling mystery.

The main setting for the game is an abandoned Communist-era worker’s resort which was the scene of a mysterious and horrible event that was hushed up, and the setting has been really well recreated.

The game is incredibly dark – not just in the lighting sense, but in its tone and subject matter, murder, child abuse, and insanity are just some of the themes the game explores. They are all handled in a respectable way, but there are still come confronting elements there which ensure this is very much a game for mature audiences.

The horror aspects are well done too, relying not so much on jump scares as a real sense of dread about what terrible thing you’ll uncover next.

Simultaneous dual reality gameplay

The basic story itself is intriguing, with some clever twists, but is missing a climactic beat towards the end that lessened the impact of a late-game element for me. There were also a few gameplay and story elements that weren’t used enough. The ‘setting trapped souls free’ aspect didn’t get nearly as much screen time as I would have liked, given the potential for interesting stories and mystery unravelling it could offer.

Graphically, the environments are well done, but not especially interactive. There’s only a few things in each scene you can collect or use.

I was also disappointed by the fixed camera angle. Often, I wanted to rotate the camera to get a better look at the layout of wherever I was, or just appreciate the level artist’s work, but couldn’t do it. It’s a minor thing that doesn’t break the game or anything like that, but it also would have been a minor thing to include, too.

Overall, I enjoyed The Medium. It had an interesting story, I really liked its innovative use of dual-reality storytelling via split screen, and it managed to be just the right amount of unsettling and psychologically scary without using gore or explicit violence.

While those looking for an action-horror experience will be disappointed, gamers wanting a slower paced psychological horror experience will find The Medium to be a decidedly above-average experience.