From the warm and lived-in feel of an apartment building in the game’s opening, to the decrepit remains of Niwa, to some beautiful natural environments, the settings throughout The Medium are a joy to experience. Thankfully, the game’s visuals more than make up for any of these frustrations.
THE MEDIUM THE MAW PS2
Coupled with a slow character speed and certain arbitrary moments where you just aren’t allowed to run, and this whole aspect of the game felt a bit too much like it came out of Silent Hill’s PS2 heyday. A few spots contained finicky camera transitions that made navigating Marianne to the exact spot I wanted her to go a bit of a hassle.
That’s probably a good thing, because the fixed camera and floaty controls aren’t anything to write home about. Unlike other games cut from a similar survival horror cloth, The Medium has no traditional combat to speak of. The puzzles never got too tricky to really impede my progress, but they also weren’t deep enough to ever elicit that “aha!” endorphin rush that comes from solving a well-crafted challenge. This feeds into The Medium’s light sense of adventure game-style puzzles, such as needing to search the environment for keycodes, repairing broken machinery, and moving objects in the real world to create fountains of energy in the spirit realm. You’ll oftentimes reach an obstacle in one world that requires something specific to be done in the other in order to advance. And seeing a specific location in both worlds adds a sense of weight and gravity to the physical space. There are different button prompts for each version of Marianne to observe elements of her specific environment, leading to more on-screen real estate being given to the world that’s currently the focus of the story or action. These sections unfurl naturally, as the screen will sometimes split horizontally and other times vertically. Controlling the two of them at once never got confusing and instead helped strongly define the parallel worlds I was exploring. The dual-character presentation has shades of games like Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons and FromSoftware’s forgotten PS2 gem The Adventures of Cookie & Cream, and I mean that in a good way. One side is still Marianne in the ruins of the Miwa resort, while the other is a version of her in the abyss of the spirit world. At prescribed points throughout the game, Marianne’s vision begins to blur, and suddenly the screen tears in half.
This melding of dual worlds is The Medium’s standout feature and the one that’s received the most coverage leading up to its release. Though the ability to speak to your loved ones after they’ve passed might seem like a gift, the tortured hellscape that the other world is presented as makes it clear that, to Marianne, this ability is a curse. As the game’s title might suggest, Marianne has the power to transcend our plane of existence into a spirit realm. You play as Marianne, a woman with a lot of questions regarding her past that travels to Niwa in search of answers. Most of the game is set in Niwa, a remote Polish resort that’s been abandoned for years after an unexplained tragedy led to a massacre that locals only speak about in hushed tones.
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This game largely embodies the studio’s visual style and understanding of how to ratchet up tension without relying on cheap jump scares (though there are still a few to be found in its 8 hours), and it stands as one of the most confident horror experiences from the studio thus far. The Medium is from Polish developer Bloober Team, whose previous works include the PT-inspired Layers of Fear, the cyberpunk horror mystery Observer, and its own take on Blair Witch. But The Medium also stumbles in some design decisions that feel frustratingly stuck in the past. And in a lot of ways, The Medium does its progenitor justice, through gorgeous and spooky environments, a twisting story that melds a lot of human trauma with supernatural terror, and some fantastic music by iconic composer Akira Yamaoka. And this makes sense, considering that Konami’s 2001 PlayStation 2 classic still holds up as one of the greatest horror games ever made, nearly two decades after its release. Let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way - The Medium is a psychological horror game that wears its Silent Hill 2 inspirations as a badge of honor.
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