Note: Although this was posted in November the game itself was played in October.

SCHLOCKTOBER '21: This October I played a number of games with Halloween appropriate themes, focusing on older and less appreciated games in my backlog. These aren't necessarily horror games but rather games with strong horror elements. I've decided to blog about these games and whether I think they're still worth playing as a seasonal treat or the gaming equivalent of an apple full of razor blades.

The Medium reminds me of another game I got for free from a Microsoft subscription, Murdered: Soul Suspect. That was a 2014 Square Enix supernatural adventure game about a dead cop trying to find his killer in modern day Salem, and a somewhat entertaining B-level game with some stealth elements and a few laughs and scares. The Medium is a B-level supernatural adventure game and one of the only Xbox Series X games in the launch window not to have an XBONE version. Like Murdered: Soul Suspect it is about communicating with ghosts but unlike that game it takes itself pretty seriously and trades the Massachusetts setting for an abandoned Polish resort in the woods.

It's easy to compare the two games because they are both, essentially, takes on the 90’s/early 2000s genre of third person adventure games like the Gabriel Knight series or, especially, Syberia. You have direct control of your character and walk them around fully 3D environments examining objects and solving various puzzles. The Medium even has pre-defined camera angles, which makes for slightly wonky control when you hit a switch point and suddenly find your character’s orientation switched but also allows the developers to create a thick atmosphere by using cinematic tricks to focus your eye on things or use unnerving angles and object overlaps to unsettle you.

Of course neither Murdered: Soul Suspect nor The Medium want to admit that they’re just gussied up versions of an old genre so they both add some gameplay wrinkles and gimmicks to try and freshen things up a bit. Murdered had the ability to possess NPCs and some stealth and action bits. The Medium’s main gimmick is having you control your character in split screen. Like in Murdered, The Medium’s protagonist Marianne can exist in both the real and the spirit worlds, though she is a living person. Rather than overlaying spirit objects on to reality the game creates two simultaneous versions of the world, presented in splitscreen, at various points during its runtime. You are then given puzzles that might involve, for example, powering up a gate in the spirit world and then unlocking and opening it in reality. This all looks really cool, especially because the high-fidelity version of the spirit world has excellent visual design, but in the end it’s just the same kind of puzzles these games have always presented. You pick up objects, examine them, hit switches etc…

The Medium has a few things going for it. The first is that it’s gorgeous. Despite being a small team game this is a truly beautiful environment to explore and its crisp visuals really make use of the new console power. It’s not quite at the level of the AAA games released on these platforms but it’s a looker. The second is that it has a fun protagonist in Marianne. On paper she’s kind of a morose and sour young woman, with good reason, but her deadpan sarcasm and tendency to talk to objects like they’re people won me over. In a game like this where so much of your time is spent in quiet with a single character it’s important to have a character you can relate to and I really liked Marianne.

Which is good, because The Medium starts very slow. You begin in the apartment of Jack, Marianne’s adopted father and an undertaker who has just passed away from some kind of brain cancer in late ‘90s Poland. You are preparing his body for a funeral and this involves wandering around the apartment examining things and looking for his favorite tie clip. As video game beginnings go, looking through a middle aged man’s stuff for his tie clip isn’t exactly Nathan Drake hanging off a crashed train in terms of pulse pounding excitement. Marianne moves slowly and you have to painstakingly examine things (though very few items are actually possible to examine) and the highlight of the first 10 minutes is feeding the cat. This is not a game that would demo well.

After you’ve fed the cat and gone downstairs to the funeral home you start to prepare Jack’s body when the lights flicker and there’s a crash upstairs and you go to investigate. That’s when we are introduced to Marianne’s psychic abilities and ability to interact with ghosts. Predictably you must visit the spirit world to send Jack off to his eternal rest and then, as Marianne sits and contemplates the fact that he’s actually gone, she gets a mysterious phone call from a stranger named Thomas that urges her to come to an abandoned resort called Niwa. For some reason she goes, and then you walk through some woods that are teeming with detailed vegetation and almost nothing to do and break into the resort to start the game proper.

I’ve described the opening to The Medium to illustrate that this is a very slow game. Even when you enter the resort and start exploring the central mystery there is just an absolute ton of “negative” space where there’s nothing to do but walk through and hope to stumble upon something of interest. In that it reminds me of Call of the Sea, another modern take on the classic adventure formula that had a lot of negative space. That game had a lot of walking through areas without much to do, but was in first person and set in a tropical paradise, which made it more immersive and just generally pleasant. The grimy decaying hotel of The Medium is much more technically impressive but is also rather monotonous and, at times, ugly. I understand that an abandoned communist country resort from the 1970s (the game takes place in ’99 but the hotel has been long abandoned) is not going to be as opulent and gorgeous as some fantasy castle, but in a game where much of the time you have nothing to do but walk around some pleasant scenery can do wonders. The game does make some use of its very specific setting both for some vague and anodyne political commentary and to establish a sense of place, but it’s still yet another horror game set in a run down building and its grounds and the real world areas in the game are not very interesting, beautifully rendered though they are.

The game also tries to add some semi action sequences, giving Marianne the power to shield herself from spirit creatures. These are more like Quick Time events than anything else and don’t add much. It feels like the Medium doesn’t want to admit how much of a throwback it really is, but the things it adds to the classic genre just distract from the game’s main focus without adding much. Meanwhile the simplicity of the game’s “puzzles” and the lack of interactable objects mean that there isn’t even much adventure game action here.

I feel like Bloober Team made too many concessions to their gimmick when the game would have been better if it were structured more like Murdered: Soul Suspect or any other game where you can transition between realms. Controlling Marianne in split screen isn’t like controlling the brothers in Brad’s 4^th favorite game of 2013. All your controls apply to both characters, except when you have an “out of body experience” and only control her spirit form, which admittedly looks cool as your timer ticks down and she starts to disintegrate. Obstacles that would block one of Marianne’s forms block both, with a fragmented broken glass effect serving as a barrier in whichever world the obstacle isn’t in. It’s thematically quite odd that physical Marianne can’t go through places where, for example, there’s a toppled over bookcase in the spirit world but it also serves to makes the dual control scheme pretty meaningless.

If it sounds like I didn’t enjoy The Medium that’s not exactly true. I’m not a massive adventure game fan but I can get into them. I liked Call of the Sea, except for some annoying puzzles that required a lot of backtracking and had unintuitive rule sets. The Medium’s technical quality and likable main character keep it from being too boring even if it often plays like a “walking simulator” but I think that it’s a bit of a gimmick in search of a game. If instead of the split screen stuff the game had better puzzles or even better action sequences it would have been stronger, and it wouldn’t have lost much in terms of plot and atmosphere.

Now let’s talk about spooks. The Medium definitely has horror elements, not just in terms of ghosts but in the aesthetics of its spirit world, which feature things like barriers made of human skin and rows of statutes of haunted looking ghosts. It also tries for a few jump scares during cut scenes and using some of its camera tricks. On the whole it’s more atmospheric than terrifying. Many of the ghosts are friendly and Marianne chats with them, trying to help. Much of the violence and gore is implied rather than shown, with audio of screams playing in Marianne’s head, or a few bloody rags showing that something bad happened there. The location itself is scary in the way that old dilapidated buildings are, but this is not Amnesia: The Dark Descent and it’s trying to tell a ghost story more than it is trying to make you feel like you’re being hunted or anything like that. That’s something that it shares with Murdered: Soul Suspect, which was mostly about atmosphere and storytelling and not outright terror.

The game also undercuts its horror in the way a lot of games do, by having scary things happen to the main character, who then proceeds to return to her normal emotional valence after the threat has passed. If you’re actually in a frightening situation and, for example, you see some terrible apparition near a bathtub of blood, you’ll be shaken up for quite a while, or at least until you escape the location where that happened. Marianne, on the other hand, can be so scared that she leaps back and falls on her butt, but within two minutes be making idle comments and observations with no sign of fear. This indicates to the player that nothing the character is experiencing is actually getting to her, and it shouldn’t be getting to you either. Good horror games have their characters become more and more upset and disturbed, with shallow breath and an edge in their voice, as the game proceeds. The Medium doesn’t do this, and even though I liked Marianne and her voice actress, I felt like it really prevented the game from ramping up the scary parts. I should add that as far as I can tell the game can only be played with English audio, and hearing definably American voices and seeing English writing in a game that is trying so had to establish its Polish setting also undercuts things a bit. I would have liked the option for Polish audio subtitled in English or even for that to be the default.

Where the game does try to ramp up the scares is in the action sequences, which mostly take place in the spirit realm and amount to either running from something or sneaking past something in a dark and foreboding area. While these segments are clearly intended as true horror they are more annoying than anything else. Like in Murdered: Soul Suspect, which had similar sequences, these self-contained action sections just aren’t fun to play because they have no established mechanics or even particularly good level design. The running segments are infuriating because the camera angles make it difficult to know what direction you are supposed to go and some paths get blocked off as you approach them, meaning that they are more tests of memory than anything else. The stealth sections are just extremely boring, as you wait for the monster to open a path you can slowly walk through while they mutter threatening things about you.

I don’t know why game designers keep shoehorning these sequences into adventure games. They don’t have the time or resources to develop satisfying mechanics so they end up with mandatory minigames that aren’t really enjoyable. Here Bloober Team is trying to add stakes to the game to up the horror but in doing so they just call attention to the gaminess of it all. After you’ve died half a dozen times and nothing has happened the game’s stakes seem lower than they did before. And your awareness of how much danger Marianne is in makes her insistence on investigating the hotel seem dumber the deeper you go. She insists she has to get to the bottom of things or nothing will change but it’s clear she could just leave and probably be fine, and while there are spirits there she wants to help it makes no sense for her to risk her actual life in the hopes of helping some dead people she didn’t even know about before that random phone call. Later in the game the stakes become more personal and Marianne’s motivations much more logical, but that doesn’t happen until the final quarter or so.

And so the Medium comes off as pretty mediocre in the end. It has bright spots in its visuals, its characters, and some of its storytelling, and plenty of blemishes too. It’s a game that doesn’t really need to be a game and is at its worst when it is at its most videogaming. It has a neat gimmick in its split realities but doesn’t know how to do anything interesting with it. I haven’t discussed the story deeply because I don’t like spoilers, but while it has some good moments it’s ultimately unsatisfying and kind of stupid, with a supernatural world whose rules are never established in a meaningful way. It’s the kind of storytelling where the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Is the Medium worth playing for free on Game Pass if you’re in the mood for a low stakes ghost story with slick visuals? Sure. Like those old adventure games it has some decent writing and memorable characters, its spirit world locations are very cool, and it has some good moments. But it’s definitely a b-tier game and not a must play. The Medium is a game whose name very much describes its quality.

Schlocktober Rating: Slightly pretentious schlock.

The Medium wants to be more than it is. It wants its story to be deeper, its gameplay to be more engaging, its genre more expansive. This is an okay adventure game putting on lots of airs. It's not bad for what it is and if you like ghost stories and adventure games you might like it, but it would be better if it leaned into its strengths and didn't try so hard to dress itself up in costumes that don't really fit. If it were Halloween candy it would be chocolate made in Poland with a pretentious Belgian name.