Marianne is a Medium. Not the kind that reads Tarot cards and scams tourists, a legit one that can see dead people and help them cross to the other side. She must use her powers to uncover the truth about not just the case she is investigating, but herself as well. This is the setup for Bloober Teams The Medium, and despite technical issues that prevent it from becoming a classic, it's one of the best horror thriller games of the last few years.
The game’s world is dark, the main character working at her adoptive fathers funeral home and her first act is to get him ready for burial. It’s an effective tutorial of how the game works, which is to say as a modern adventure game, so it's a case of running around rooms and environments to find interactive elements and find what is required to solve a given puzzle. In terms of gameplay, the majority is fairly standard stuff that fans of the genre will have seen a hundred times before.
It does have some twists however, and various points in the game Marianne shifts so she inhibits the real world and ‘the other side’ at the same time. This literally splits the screen in two, either top and bottom or side by side depending on how that sequence is set to play out. This gives way to the games' take on puzzle solving, as Mariannes medium powers, for the most part, can only be used on the other side. This allows her a defensive ability, an offensive ability and to have an out of body experience which shifts her onto the otherside to move independently of the real world, though this only lasts a finite amount of time.
This is how you get past the various obstacles that lie in your path to solve puzzles and move forward, though to be honest the game does a bad job of reminding you this abilities are at your disposal, and I got stuck on a least a couple of levels because I forgot about the out of body experience ability and the game does not make it obvious that is what you need to do to continue. I am not complaining about a hint system here, this is a case of there being an in world hint to what to do, but it’s so vague that it is easy to overlook.
It’s frustrating, though once you get used to what to look for it's better than it was, you just shouldn’t have so much trial and error to get there. The puzzles themselves are not especially difficult to figure out, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t satisfying to complete. One in particular stands out, and has you switching between the real world and the other side in order to figure out the solution. It's very clever, and is one of the game's strongest sequences.
The split mechanic when it kicks in I have to admit is very clever and really cool. If you think of the remasters of Halo CE and Halo 2, where you can hit a button to switch to the old graphics from the new ones, it's kind of like that but both are happening at the same time. When this is a cutscene, it's quite freaky because the real world section plays out exactly the same as the otherside, but without the other character Marianne is talking to. She literally talks to, and interacts with, herself.
Speaking of freaky, the developers' rendition of the other side is one of the freakiest things I have seen in some time. It’s all rotten and decaying versions of the spaces you occupy in the real world, with things like a collapsed wall replaced with burnt corpse’ looking down at the ground or revealing the fate of long dead characters. Walls look like they are made out of bone underneath and doors of stretched skin block your path. It's a great environmental look, but it's the characters you meant that send it all home. These will have relatively normal things like missing arms, and when I say normal here I mean in terms of what your brain understands, but also the outskin on other limbs will be twisted with holes missing to reveal nothing in the middle. Ribcages will be exposed but look grey and brittle, while this strange, almost fungal display spreads out from various parts of the body.
It is one of the games best looking aspects and marks the talent of the art team at Bloober, though as someone who has had nightmares of freaky skin stuff since watching an old sci-fi movie as a kid, this distracted me a few times as it made my skin crawl. Which I guess is exactly the effect they were going for, and the game is all the better for it.
At the start the game is slow, not least because someone somewhere confused ‘running’ with ‘fast walk’ which even at the end of the game feels like a brazen attempt to extend the life of the game and it is no less frustrating then than it is at the start. Literally no one on earth would move that slowly. This isn’t helped by the game's biggest design decision, one that is at this point very much out of date: Fixed camera angles. I get that the team was going for an old school adventure game feel, but those games have moved on, and the problems that come with this decision, such as directions being changed because the angle moved are all present and correct, and just as frustrating as ever.
That said, once the story started to pick up, I was engaged more than I was initially expecting and it helped to set up a universe that I really hope the developers explore more in a sequel, as the lore starts to be developed in some very cool ways. I won’t say more than that to avoid spoilers, but the game does stick its landing excellently, its ending excellently acted and written and leaving you wanting more.
The last thing to mention are the technical issues. I played on PC, and it recommends a gamepad to play with, and I cannot stress that enough if you intend to play. The keyboard and mouse controls are poor beyond belief, to the point using an item to cut through a skin door on the other side actually hurt my arm it took so long with the mouse. Then there are the frame rate issues. It just dropped to single digit frames for no reason I can tell several times during my play through and I have no idea why.
I had one issue with my gamepad that wasn’t the game's fault, but when I got it fixed for some reason the look controls became inverted for no reason at all, I certainly hadn’t done it. These little things, and the frustrations around the movement speed and fixed camera angles keep The Medium from becoming a classic, but I do recommend it for fans of both horror thriller games and excellent art direction.
It is one of the best horror thriller games I have ever played, it just takes a few hours to get there, but I cannot deny the art direction is top notch and makes the game well worth a look on its own. The fact the story gets as good as it does is just the icing on the cake, and I really hope a sequel comes soon.
