Bloober Team is back with a new horror proposal that, with its lights and shadows, manages to trap us until the end in its beautifully dark world.
Almost without asking and without thinking about it, the Polish studio, creator of titles like Layers of Fear or the recent Blair Witch, has become one of the pioneers of the new generation of consoles. This very fact has made The Medium the center of attention and the reason for the age of a host of expectations, of which we are not sure they were fully charged.
However, we were already able to enjoy this whole adventure of psychological horror, one that fits better in the world of AAs who make a good profit with discretion than those stars who eat the industry but who has managed to keep us tied until the end by their a story full of secrets and especially for its world (or its worlds) as beautiful as they are dark, where it is easy to have good times and bad times.
The medium
The story of The Medium takes us to Poland in 1999 to meet Marianne, a young woman who has the gift of being able to contact the spiritual plane and all those who have been trapped there. With this particular protagonist, the game does not take long to take us to the Niwa hotel, a place where a huge tragedy has left several loose ends.
It will be up to us to unravel all the secrets related to the event and discover who has been trapped there, although not all of them are friendly.
Clearly, the narrative part is something that the Bloober Team is good at, and its new title confirms it again, the story is one of the most vital points of the experience .
Beyond the history generated with the cinematics and Marianne’s dialogues, it is exciting to discover what happened in the hotel in question and with all its characters through different notes, documents, and echoes that are distributed around the place .
A very well achieved location stores a lot of information for those who want to visit each of its corners.
The fight of two worlds
In the previous one, The Medium was compared with old survival horror such as Resident Evil, Alone in the Dark, and Silent Hill. Still, the truth is that the comparisons have little reason to be beyond its fixed camera and some artist in common who has worked behind the scenes.
The Polish studio’s title is not a survival game. It is not a classic horror game either, but instead offers a kind of psychological horror mostly focused on generating a suffocating atmosphere.
Without becoming a walking simulator, as his previous works were, this new installment of Bloober Team proposes we constantly go through its scenarios to search for the secrets that are hidden there. To do this, we must make use of Marianne’s powers, which allow her to travel regularly between the real and spiritual world, even transiting both at the same time when necessary.
This is the most distinctive mechanic of the experience and gives us the most both visually and playable.
The most significant challenges that are presented to us throughout The Medium are found precisely in this spectral plane, which will help us to unblock paths that are not visible in reality, discover memories of the protagonist, unravel events that occurred in the Niwa hotel, and solve some puzzles, most of which are too simplistic, with objectives such as gathering objects and placing them in the correct order or passing through portals accurately.
And we say that those are the biggest challenges of the game because that’s the way it is, there is practically no action in the entire route that The Medium involves, and the main antagonist, a very well designed being called The Maw, mainly offers us infiltration sequences that are also easy transit.
Even in its final stretch, the title does not offer us significant challenges, clearly demonstrating the intention.