Oh, Bloober Team, will you ever make a good game… This Polish studio has managed to release 5 horror-themed games over the past 5 years. All of their games tend to not be very original, liberally borrowing concepts and ideas from elsewhere. And all of their games have been known to look very good. Often to the detriment, as they tend to be more like collections of visually cool looking scenes that aren’t particularly fun to play through. The Medium is their newest and, perhaps, most coherent attempt so far and they marketed it as their most ambitious project as of yet. Though, I can’t agree on that last bit, as if there was a lot of ambition in this project, it was all spent on the least interesting things.
So what is The Medium? It’s a third person perspective adventure game with some stealthy bits and a horror theme. It uses fixed camera angles and direct controls over the main character, very reminiscent of how many adventure titles were transitioning to 3D in the early 2000s, except with less pointing and clicking. It’s hard to not be reminded of something like Syberia when playing this game, though this time everything is rendered in real time, yet looks so far ahead of what was possible with pre-rendered visuals 20 years ago. The story involves the titular medium Marianne as she’s motivated by a mysterious phone call to investigate an abandoned Soviet-era Polish resort because it may help learn more about her abilities. Spooky adventures ensue.
I wish I could say that the game evoked only the best memories of those early 2000 adventure titles, but I can’t, as The Medium often falls into the same traps that has long been avoided by other games. It’s puzzles are rarely interesting and despite often involving multiple stages, those stages are essentially “open the drawer to get a key for another drawer” variety. It’s poor attempts at stealth are better simply avoided, which is relatively simple – just running through them before the monster AI has time to react works and is much less tedious than solving them “as intended”. Though that sometimes breaks the scripting of the scenes and the camera. Speaking of camera – somehow, despite years of examples of how fixed camera angles can be handled, the game does it rather poorly. Which isn’t that bad during the majority of the game due to its relaxed adventure pace, but becomes annoying during it’s faster paced escape sequences.
Yet, in addition to all the issues that plagued those early 3D adventure games, The Medium manages to inherit the worst elements of the modern story driven titles as well, keeping all of the elements usual for Bloober Team games. Really long undeserved slow walking/jogging sections? Check. Unnecessary monologuing and comments? Also present. Extreme handholding during the most obvious moments? Yep. Overreliance on “echoes” and written memos to explain the story? Of course. Psychological traumas and sensitive content used in the story with all of the grace of a 90s budget horror movie? Poorly written script? Oh heck yes and yes again. Not like the game doesn’t have its moments in the story, but all attempts are for naught if the rest of the plot is rotten and trite and the storytelling is poor.
But it’s not like the game is outright bad either. The visuals are, as mentioned, fantastic. Granted, the game is pretty demanding on current hardware (and in the current state is also very buggy, prone to horrible frame drops and crashes). But it can look very good. Exploring many of its locations is also pretty interesting and even though the story isn’t great, the mood of it is often engaging. The whole double-world split screen thing looks pretty nice. Though it’s nothing revolutionary from the mechanical standpoint, as you’ve seen this type of mechanic in many games already from LoK: Soul Reaver, to SH: Origins, to even one Borderlands 3 DLC segment, it’s just that you see both realities at the same time. Occasionally. Sometimes it’s just one world or switching between them, as in the games already mentioned.
I didn’t dislike The Medium as much as I’ve been extremely unimpressed by it. It has the visual flair, it has the technology, it has the experience from the far more interesting Observer (which was recently re-released too). They even got Akira Yamaoka on board, somehow, though the soundtrack is as plain as they go even when you practically hear the developers asking the composer to “do his Silent Hill 2 piano and guitar thing”. Yet, the game is just “fine” at best. Song of Horror had more adventurous ideas, even if the gameplay was less enjoyable. Observer was a far better attempt to make an interesting game, even if it was less cohesive. The Medium is just okay and very pretty. And if you want a pretty horror themed game, I’d rather suggest checking out Control. While if you want a great adventure about a medium, play the Blackwell series or Unavowed instead. You’d have more fun either way.