The Haunted Hoard: The Medium (PS5)
A spirit medium serves as a bridge between two worlds, but what would experiencing two separate worlds really feel like? In The Medium, Marianne has spent her whole life living with the power to perceive both worlds at once, able to see that while the two worlds overlap, they also can be quite different, a split that Bloober Team manages to capture quite creatively by having moments where the screen is split in half between the real world we’re familiar with and the desiccated realm only the lingering dead are meant to inhabit.
The striking management of this concept definitely creates a unique feeling in this third-person horror game. Whenever Marianne’s powers truly take hold, the screen will be sliced down the middle, Marianne existing in both halves. While the world around her will usually be pretty similar in both spaces, the areas are not simply mirror reflections. The spirit plane is actually not as drab and dreary as the abandoned urban spaces you’ll be exploring quite often in the material world, the space instead being a decrepit organic space often lit with a brown tint that makes the place feel dry and empty. However, the ground and walls can sometimes be formed of flesh and bone without it being immediately apparent your surroundings are comprised of organic matter, it feeling more like this world after life follows its own rules for how a space can be built. There is some visual variety to this other space, areas that are more yellow or green continuing to imply this sickly space between life and death is not one meant to be inhabited, and yet Marianne quickly learns that this area can trap more than just lingering spirits.
The game begins with the unfortunate death of Marianne’s foster father, but immediately that serves as a good way of introducing how the central concept works. Mariane’s medium powers allow her to communicate with the departed, people wearing haunting death masks when they’re lingering spirits and often not quite realizing they’re trapped between two worlds. Marianne can help them find peace by working them through the process, but while she is moving about in the spiritual realm, her physical body continues to move in our world as well. Many cutscenes will be presented with this split perspective and while the focus usually is on one half, the game even growing how much of the screen that half dominates to guide your focus, seeing how it unfolds in the other half adds a bit of eeriness to the affair. Marianne might be struggling with something dangerous in the spirit realm, but up above it looks like some invisible force is pressing in on her in a way that would certainly be terrifying to witness without that other view window to have the context. The parity between both halves is done remarkably well even when Marianne is performing simple actions, and during gameplay when you might need to look between them consistently you will always have that spacial awareness from what you’re doing carry over since you really are performing the exact same actions in both realms.
While this feature isn’t active the whole game, it is a wise decision to let the effect breathe and impress when it is around rather than dulling its impact through overuse and it does get a lot of good mileage in the puzzle solving aspect of the adventure. While exploring areas with the split perspective you’ll find there are meaningful differences between them, be they walls that are present in one half but not the other or unique objects that are influenced by actions taken in the other space. Marianne can’t move through a space if her other half is unable to do so as well, so sometimes you’ll need to work out how to make the area navigable or even rely on her white-haired spirit half’s abilities to move energy to alter the area around you. Environmental puzzles are definitely the most common but it doesn’t feel like the game is retreading concepts unless it wants to build on them, such as a photo developing situation that is straightforward the first try but asks for more involvement and thought when it reappears. You are given a special sense to help you detect items of importance that at first seems like a way of finding clues, but it turns out this actually sometimes is the only way to find a solution when none other is visible, an odd choice that weakens the few moments it does arise since thinking to activate an ability at a dead end isn’t much of a puzzle.
Things start to really get interestingly complex though when you start to find ways to operate in the different worlds separately. At first you do pack the ability to briefly have an out of body experience and send your spirit self off to quickly investigate areas, but you need to quickly realign with your material body or you will die. However, eventually you find a means of completely shifting your perspective from one area to another, and while this does dispense with the main mechanic of the experience briefly, you still manage to influence the same space and it simply allows for moments where the chains can briefly come off to allow for full exploration of one half before switching over and continuing on with the alterations you made. You may not have the split-screen present during these but the idea of a warped reflection of reality playing into the puzzles still persists and figuring out the ways one world can influence the other keeps your activities varied enough to carry most of the gameplay experience on their back.
The story itself feels like it is the bigger draw than the visually striking split presentation. Marianne leaves her home when a mysterious call lures her to an abandoned worker’s commune left behind from the time of the Soviet occupation of Poland. The run down location already brings a good amount of atmosphere thanks to the hand of time making the dilapidated resort areas into dark, dreary, and crumbling places. Odd events surround its abandonment and the only people left to tell the space’s story are the spirits of the dead or the echoes of moments from their life, the player piecing together details of the mystery as well as starting to meet characters whose histories can be gradually uncovered. While there are some people we get to know posthumously through elucidating notes that better flesh out the abandoned Niwa resort and its unfortunate history and some brief segments using understanding minor characters as a way to figure out a puzzle, the central cast members still get most of the focus and it benefits them greatly to have such a strong spotlight.
The two main characters outside of our playable heroine would be a dead girl who only wants to be known as Sadness and a man who seems to have different personalities in both the material and spiritual planes. The player gets a surprisingly intimate look at the lives, traumas, and personal relationships of these three central players. Marianne, despite her rough life of constantly seeing dead people, hasn’t become a dreary person for it, her reactions to the world around her fitting and her personality fairly unguarded. She can get along rather sweetly with the child ghost Sadness but she can stand confident against some of the meaner inhabitants of the other side while still showing reasonable fear, anger, and anguish to flesh her out. Unfortunately her facial animations don’t always show this as well as it should, so perhaps it is fortunate that many of the spirits have the death masks or are warped into terrifying shapes.
There are dark subjects covered and ones that rope in realistic pain alongside the unusual circumstances of a world where life and death can be so easily intertwined, this greater exploration of the core characters both as people and as participants in this specific plot helping to make experiencing more of the story quite enticing. There are some brief segments of note that play into Bloober Team’s biggest strength, the player getting to look at a few specific characters by exploring a spiritual world built from their past experiences. These aren’t as frequent as one might like once they are wowed not only by the sudden visual design shift as you explore areas built with imagery from their past like a business-focused man having an interior space built from mountains of files or a seemingly never ending butcher’s freezer for a butcher’s son. However, these are a treat as reality takes a back seat and interpretive visuals can allow for some memorable sights and darker implications that deliver information in more impactful ways. While story-wise it does make sense the game doesn’t revel in these diversions and the main split worlds gimmick provides a lot in terms of fascinating aesthetics as well, Bloober Team had made good use of such reality warping and perspective trickery in games like Layers of Fear and it would have been nice to see them continue to build on that even more due to the creativity they bring to the concept.
While it would have been nice if Bloober Team indulged us with more of the twisted but meaningful imagery they’re good at, it’s not truly an issue. However, The Medium does hark back to the issues found in Observer with how they try to introduce action into this title. If The Medium was a puzzle solving horror adventure it would have definitely been a good experience, but sometimes it tries to put more pressure on the player as a malevolent spirit will pursue them at key points in the plot. Sometimes this is a good application of danger, the player needing to sneak through a space, utilize distractions, and slip through in a tense moment of stealth. You need to manage your volume and even hold your breath at times to avoid being caught by an unhinged monstrous being, and in some areas getting around them is practically a puzzle itself so it isn’t too bad when you view him simply as a failure state for that trial. However, other moments the game wants you to be far more active in avoiding him, including moments where you are just trying to outrun him.
The problem with the running segments though is how they are framed. The Medium uses fixed camera perspectives that change when you leave the current viewing area, this useful for highlighting important objects and probably vital in pulling off the split perspective concept without too much extra work rendering full 3D spaces twice over. However, when the chase segments happen the camera sometimes swoops in a disorienting way or doesn’t even really mark when you’ve gained control of Marianne after a cutscene. The spirit will be immediately upon you if you don’t start immediately running, and even worse since the camera was moving around so much before it finally settles in you might try to move but not anticipate the perspective switch, leading to you delivering yourself into his arms. You’ll come back to life to retry without too much of a setback usually, but oddly enough this PlayStation 5 game has long loading times after each death during these segments making them much more irritating than they should be. These circumstances are spread out enough they don’t drag the game down, but while these are definitely an improvement over Observer’s bad stealth sections, the actually decent sneaking and associated puzzles now have the lightly flawed running segments to upset the balance. The Medium still mostly plays to its strengths, but this dalliance with time sensitive action was a bit of a whiff.
THE VERDICT: The Medium’s fascinating split screen effect not only leads to interesting puzzles split between worlds but also grants us a double dose of atmosphere with the rundown Niwa and the grossly organic spirit world providing different but complementary moods when sharing screen real estate. The effective use of lighting adds a lot to the ambience, and the story keeps its focus on the cast concise so we can get to deeply know some characters with intriguingly dark pasts. Its moments of stealth are a decent addition to the usual focus on puzzles and exploration but the chases have some unusual technical issues holding back what would still be fairly plain bits of action, but most of The Medium focuses on its horror story, aesthetics, and characters to good effect.
And so, I give The Medium for PlayStation 5…
A GOOD rating. The Medium handles its split world moments with style, justifying its existence with puzzles that make good use out of it while also allowing for countless moments where the player might just indulge in comparing the physical and spiritual worlds because the relationship between them is so fascinatingly intertwined. A creative approach to the other world’s appearance gives it a hard to describe feel as well, almost like a post-apocalyptic hell but without any fire and only one fiend. A desiccated and uninviting place that can still find beauty in how its decay is shaped or create horror when you realize the walls are made of tormented bodies, it’s an alternate space that doesn’t run out of tricks and by throwing in some mindscapes to explore the traumas of a few characters you even get to explore areas with entirely new visual directions and more surreal imagery. The puzzle solving feels like a smart way to enhance this exploration and The Medium has a good selection of different ideas in between some of its more standard environment navigation puzzles, although I do remember one odd moment where a chair puzzle was a good challenge but you have to walk Marianne through the steps because the solution won’t register unless Marianne herself directly acknowledges every clue first. The moments that hold it back are definitely when the monster is around, and while he has an intimidating presence and a demented sort of behavior as he is often disturbingly pleading in his calls for your flesh, the implementation of him makes him lean towards being a nuisance rather than a respected threat. While having him nip at your heels in the chases was likely to add tension it instead forces retries as something unintentionally disorienting does you in, and the stealth is mostly a decent way of overcoming him rather than a truly strong alternative to the chase. His importance means he shouldn’t just be thrown away, but his inclusion needs a mechanical rework so that he could shine as an intimidating force without such rocky implementation.
The Medium succeeds a lot where it counts, the concept realized in many different ways and remaining relevant even as new ideas like entering mindscapes or splitting Marianne’s halves are rolled into the adventure. The key moments link together into a good horror adventure even if you can spot some stumbling points in the gameplay mechanics, but story-wise it conjures an engaging and intimate tale that does its main cast members justice. A rather tidy story both in how it rolls out details and wraps them up and one not lacking in ideas for what you can do to explore the two different worlds, The Medium continues to show that Bloober Team brings a lot of creativity to their horror games and are do fairly well at realizing some ambitious but striking concepts for how a 3D space can be altered in uncanny ways.