horror games

Review: The Medium

TheMedium-KeyArt-HD.jpg

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. 


Review: Blair Witch

Games are very different to movies. It’s an obvious statement, but it’s worth mentioning again, because it is this difference that is at the heart of the issues with Blair Witch, the new game from Bloober Team. It is a competently made game, but the deft touch required to transfer the themes of The Blair Witch movies to a video game setting simply isn’t there and it lets the overall game down. 

As I said though, it is a competently made game. You play as Ellis Lynch, former cop and army veteran, as he travels to the Black Hills Forest to search for a missing boy some two years after the events of the very first Blair Witch movie. Ellis brings with him his pet dog Bullet, and off the two go to attempt to find this small boy. What happens next ranges from the genuinely creepy to the downright obvious, but tries to play on the idea of the titular witch in the woods. 

To be fair, the writing isn’t half bad with Ellis feeling like a fully fleshed out character who is desperately trying to get his life back on track. The characters around him and certain events that transpire add to this feeling, with flashbacks to his time in the army showing a man suffering from deep emotional distress. The good news is that this isn’t done in a ham fisted way, as you can never be quite sure if its the evil presence in the woods or Ellis’ issues that cause the incidents. 

This is all helped along by the best thing that the game has: Bullet. The dog follows you around, pointing out dangers or foraging for clues as well as helping direct you into the seemingly directionless forest. Petting Bullet or giving him a treat helps ground Ellis back in reality, again showing the character as something more than just a blank slate FPS protagonist. 

Despite all of this, the game is let down by its name and the cinematic history that comes with it. Should you compare a game and the movie it's based on? That particular debate is still open and yes, as I said at the start of this review they are very different mediums, however games can convey the themes and core tenants of their license while still being their own thing. Blair Witch doesn’t do this. 

The movies are all famous for being ‘found footage’, i.e. the movie you see is actually camcorder footage shot by the protagonists and found at a later date. The game doesn’t do this. It does have a camcorder that allows you to watch tapes you found throughout the world. If you find one with a blue sticker it's just footage you can watch, find one with a red sticker though and you can pause it when something changes and that change is reflected back out in the real world. Its neat, but found footage it is not, and it's also about the closest thing, apart from setting and the strange stick figures you come across, to the Blair Witch license you are going to get. 

Therein lies the problem. The Blair Witch Project and it’s sequels are more about what you don’t see rather than what you do. There isn’t any combat to speak of, and it's more about sinister goings on around the protagonists that mess with their perception of reality rather than anything you overtly see. The game puts the viewpoint in first person and shows enemies you have to fight off with the aid of Bullet and a flashlight, others you have to avoid, making it just not creepy enough to work with the license for me. 

I remember going to the cinema to watch the original film when I was younger and coming out with a distinctive ‘meh’ attitude towards it. I then attempted to go to sleep and that was when the films brilliance dawned on me and I had trouble sleeping for a few nights after. You don’t get that with the game, there are some messed up moments and sequences where images and sound coalesce into something that bamboozles the senses but as soon as you come out of it you are back to a standard FPS thriller, one that could have its own unique and original IP and still be just as effective, the developers wouldn’t even need to change that much about the story and in game assets. 

To be fair, I came around on the game by the time I got to the end, with the story and overall writing enough to provide a satisfying conclusion and the atmosphere doing just enough to make it work. I did not believe, and still do not, that it requires the Blair Witch license and honestly I think it would be better without it as it would have room to just be its own thing without the added pressure of living up to the source material. 

Given that the game is on Game pass, there are certainly worse ways to kill a few hours, but put the notion of this being a licensed game out of your mind, it is a unique horror experience that for some reason was given a name unfitting of its nature.