Feb 3, 2021 8:00 AM

The Medium Doesn’t Live Up to Its Best Ideas

Bloober Team’s newest horror title is a bad deal at $50 but a great way to pass a weekend on Game Pass.

Playing The Medium, a new horror game on Xbox and PC from developer Bloober Team, is like watching The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina on Netflix. The Medium has some fun ideas that it executes well, but the overall experience is bland and forgettable. It’s not bad, but it’s not good. Like Sabrina and a thousand other shows on Netflix, The Medium is inoffensive. It’s a pleasant way to pass the time, but you probably won’t finish it and you won’t remember it a month after you put it down. It’s the perfect game for Xbox’s Game Pass, the service that seeks to be Netflix but for video games.

The Medium is a third-person adventure game that follows Marianne, a medium able to communicate with the dead, as she navigates both the spirit world and an abandoned Soviet-era resort in Poland. Marianne travels to the spirit world to solve puzzles, avoid monsters, and help the dead move on to what comes next.

In gameplay terms, this has Marianne picking up objects to listen to audio logs that fill in the game’s backstory, absorbing spirit energy from light wells that allow her to fend off enemies, and using mirrors to cross over to the other side, the spirit world. At times I felt like I was playing an adventure game from 1995; think Grim Fandango. Leaving an area meant retreading old ground, looking for an object I hadn’t clicked on that would lead me to the next part of the adventure.

One of The Medium’s gameplay gimmicks is that Marianne can, at times, exist in both the spirit world and the real world simultaneously. This leads to moments where the screen is literally split and the player must navigate both worlds at the same time. Sometimes solving a puzzle in one will open a path forward in the other and vice versa. At one point, a balcony is destroyed in the real world but present in the spirit realm, and I used Marianne’s abilities to traverse the spirit world while leaving her body behind. It’s a cool effect that creates neat set pieces, but also tends to tank the game’s performance.

I played The Medium on an Xbox Series X and performance was spotty. The Series X is a powerhouse and the only system that can run Hitman 3 at its full 4K resolution, but it often chugged while playing The Medium. It’s a beautiful game with a strong sense of style. The Niwa worker’s resort is a great setting with a spooky mood. The spirit world invokes both Silent Hill and the work of Polish artist Zdzisław Beksiński. But when the frame hitches and Marianne stutters across the screen, it breaks the spell The Medium is attempting to cast. It happened frequently, but not quite enough to feel like the game is broken.

The technical glitches highlight what makes The Medium so frustrating. There’s a lot of promise here, but it’s hampered by technical issues, poor execution, and bad writing. The Niwa worker’s resort is a unique setting. Poland and other former Eastern bloc countries are littered with abandoned vacation hotels built during the Communist era. Imagined as worker’s paradises, a place for normal people to vacation, they often became de-facto playgrounds for the party elite.

Niwa is also built on the ruins of a World War II–era fort. An early gravestone outside the hotel commemorates the dead of the area who were often, “buried where they fell and became part of the land.” Poland, during World War II, is called the Blood Lands. It was an area trapped between Hitler and Stalin and purged by both sides. It’s unfortunate that such a rich and fascinating setting for a horror game becomes the background of The Medium and not its focus.

Marianne is at Niwa chasing questions of her own past. As she moves through the abandoned hotel, she begins to uncover a horrifying tale of madness and medical experimentation. It turns out that the hotel was a front for nefarious experimentation. It’s a tale we’ve seen told over and over again in a hundred horror games, and it’s a waste of a fascinating setting. As the game progresses, it becomes more cliché and boring.

Yet there are bright spots here. The sound design is wonderful and the voices of the dead pressing in on Marianne, the ambient silence of the hotel, and the voice work of a terrifying monster are high spots. At one point, I had Marianne crouched behind a desk while a terrifying creature searched for her. She held her breath, hands pressed over her mouth while the monster made obscene promises in a legion of different voices. It was frightening. The score, partially composed by Silent Hill composer Akira Yamaoka, gave me chills.

These high marks never bring The Medium to the level of its inspirations and its bad spots never make it awful. Silent Hill and the art of Beksiński haunt The Medium so thoroughly that I kept comparing the game to its inspiration, and The Medium always came up short. It’s the perfect mid-tier game, something we didn’t see a lot of in the previous console generation. It’s fun enough if you’re just looking to blow a day or two treading through a horror game.

At $50, The Medium is too bland to be enjoyed. But it’s also on Game Pass, where gamers on either the Xbox or PC can sign up for $10 a month and play it. I would never pay 50 bucks to sit through The Medium, and if I had purchased it I’d be upset. As part of a Netflix-style bundle though, it works well.

The Medium is inoffensive. Like Marianne’s ability to walk between worlds and speak with the dead, that’s both a blessing and a curse.