Review: THE MEDIUM Delivers Mediocre Scares From Beyond
In video games that deal with an astral plane or a parallel reality, it’s always interesting to move between them and feel some level of interaction and connection. The Medium does a great job of intertwining the two planes of existence in literally having them appear on screen at the same time. Showing both of them at the same time forces a large number of its puzzles to rely on the connection and interaction between them. While that interaction between the two planes is inherently visually interesting and can create unique puzzles and scares, the gimmick can only go so far.
The aesthetics for this game are probably its greatest asset. While the graphics themselves might not be the most cutting edge, the textures, lighting and animations are really solid. The best part of these visuals is the actual design of both the real world and alternate world. The real world is bleak, spooky and mysterious while feeling ordinary enough to be believable. Sometimes the color palette and lighting is a little too dark and stale, but it’s passable and seems to be mostly intentional.
The other world/hell/afterlife/astral plane is easily the most interesting visually. The uses of reds and whites and varying levels of decay and destruction create a world that feels livable and yet miserable. The character designs walk the uncanny valley extremely well too. The character’s initial visual appearance seems creepy at first, but as players look more carefully, the models are more disgusting, horrifying and sad (great to create a sense of dread). The use of audio in this game is very hit and miss. Players aren’t subject to too many jump scares or loud noises, which is refreshing. But the music and atmospheric noises would sometimes glitch and make it silly, odd or annoying.
The actual gameplay feels like a mix between a visual novel, a survival horror and a walking simulator. I found that narration and cutscenes happened so often that I didn’t feel in control enough of the time to be a game. And yet, when I was in control, I spent so much time walking aimlessly looking for random objects or clues in order to progress to the next cut scene. The puzzles are both very good, and very bad. The length to solve most of them feels needlessly stretched out by walking around, interacting with everything possible, instead of thought provoking and deep puzzles. This odd balance of average puzzles and long cutscenes created an unsatisfactory flow between wanting the story to progress but also wanting to solve puzzles, but neither were particularly entertaining or engaging.
If the game was more like Until Dawn and became a series of choices with heavy drama like watching a virtual novel, that would’ve been far more interesting. If there were more puzzles that challenged the usage of the astral plane and involved the less wandering and picking up random objects or there were actual elements of survival, then it would’ve fit a survival horror or detective based game. The puzzles did get better in the second half, but they still never posed too much of a challenge for the average player. Either way, I felt like this game just had a couple of great ideas but spent a lot of time doing virtually nothing of major importance in order to pad out runtime.
The Medium is a fine game. If players can engage with the story a lot and are wanting a more casual horror/mystery/puzzle game, then this will be a good experience. But if you are looking for incredible scares, mind bending puzzles and truly unique gameplay, you won’t find too much here.
