Review: The Medium Is Richly Atmospheric, but Its Gameplay Is Stuck in the Past

Bloober Team’s The Medium has the prestige of being the first Series X exclusive, yet it feels like it’s two generations old, a time capsule escapee trying to stand out in a world where even stubborn old buzzard franchises like Resident Evil have found a way to get their groove back. The game clings tightly to the old ways—static third-person perspectives, wonky character animations, stilted voice acting—and is quaint in its approach. The setting and premise are doing a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of horror, as the game takes place in an abandoned hospital, which has given many a developer an easy slam dunk to deliver the goods. The power of the Series X is most certainly being harnessed to render this derelict monstrosity in painstaking, filthy detail, but it’s got no backup on the gameplay front.

The most forward-thinking thing that The Medium has going for it is that the developers had the good sense to hire Silent Hill series’s ace composer, Akira Yamaoka, to co-write the score. He brings a richly eerie and unique aural dimension to The Medium that compliments the grim, unsettling atmosphere on display throughout, moments where you’ll find yourself constantly on guard. Of course, it isn’t long before it becomes clear that most of the time there’s no threat to be afraid of. What passes for gameplay here is pure exploration and illogical puzzle-solving. Every time the game gets a full head of steam, building up fear and dread to a fever pitch, it’s broken up by collectathon mechanics or far-too-forgiving stealth against easily avoided enemies straight out of every 14-year-old edgelord’s notebook. That doesn’t necessarily make for a bad game, but it does make for an unengaging one.

Set in Krakow in 1999, The Medium does slightly better on the narrative front, placing you in the shoes of a woman, Marianne, who has the ability to not just see and talk to the dead, but also traverse their world, a hellishly forbidding mirror image of our own. After her adoptive father passes away, Marianne receives a panicked call from a man who runs Niwa, a long-term care facility, begging her to come and help. The trail to her mystery caller leads Marianne to the facility’s deep, dark, violent secrets, which are relayed to us through psychic echoes that only Marianne can revisit by tuning into these memories via everyday objects.

The Medium is at its best whenever Marianne lives up to the game’s title. The campaign is dotted with small little stories within which she plays the role of supernatural usher, guiding ghosts down the right path. These are the tales of dead people trapped in the rooms of their terrible ends, haunted by unfinished business, grudges needing to be put to bed, anger and sorrow yearning for catharsis. And these stories are often executed with a subtlety of detail and empathy for the broken and beaten that’s absent almost everywhere else in the game.

A case in point is the game’s big and scarcely impactful hook. At certain points, Marianne can exist simultaneously in the land of the living and the realm of the dead, with both worlds visible on screen at the same time, and while there’s certainly technical wizardry at work making the effect possible, and the realm of the dead is a well-imagined bit of dark artistry, we’ve also seen smarter and more compelling iterations of the same idea in recent years (Titanfall 2 immediately comes to mind). Here, it feels very much like the gimmick that it is, and in no small part because it barely bolsters the story that the game is trying to tell about the place that traps the dead, and the atrocities that put them there.

The game was reviewed using a review code provided by One PR Studio.