I loved pretty much all of Marianne’s internal dialogue going on inside her head. Still, the atmosphere and the terrific voice acting by the cast sells it. Side note: are bolt cutters always painted red in real life? Just asking… It’s a formula that works but there are definitely moments where I got lost as to what to do next with only the generic “find a bolt cutter” as a hint. Sometimes Marrianne can access something real like, say, a flower, and other times, she’ll need to grab a mask that represents a lost soul. Full length mirrors are the gateway between worlds. Each level is basically controlling Marianne in the real world, the spirit, and both to find energy wells (to defeat baddies), open doors, and put restless spirits down. That last feature is the most mundane aspect of The Medium. Horror games tend to have steep learning curves as to what is fun and what just grates as trial and error. It’s not perfect but is any first-time survival horror outing? There’s a reason the sequels of Resident Evil and Silent Hill are the favorites, after all. Based on the trailers, I was a bit skeptical but having played about ten hours, I’d say this Silent Hill meets Alan Wake concoction has birthed something new. Is it nothing more than a gimmick, or is it worth it? It’s more the latter. Controlling two characters at once takes some getting used to, and I would guess, is pretty taxing on the GPU. While the ray-tracing and overall look of the game is crisp and creepy, I assume the reason this is not playable on last-gen is the split-screen. The game’s hook is that large portions involve players navigating a split-screen (both vertical and horizontal) to solve puzzles and avoid a disturbing slender man-like creature (voiced by The Last of Us‘ Joel, er, Troy Baker). Marianne could be looking at a bouncy ball and be suddenly split (literally) into two realms: the living and the dead. As anyone who has seen Jennifer Love Hewitt’s series, The Ghost Whisperer, can attest (yeah, I watched it, don’t judge me), that line of communication is rarely intentional and most often not two-way. There is something else here though…Īt its heart, this is a third-person psychological horror game in which Marianne investigates the death of a little girl, meets her (called Saddness in the spirit realm but is not like the character in Pixar’s Inside Out at all) and knows how to deal with such loss because she can, as the title alludes, commune with the dead. (Fun trivia: the apartment is the same one used in Blooper Team’s cyberpunk first person adventure Observer.) The old man has passed away, and growing up in the family business means Marianne is comfortable living in a building where the basement has her mentor on a cold metallic slab. This means a stunning but cramped feeling of being watched yet also being utterly alone in an apartment that houses Marianne, a hungry cat (feed it for an achievement!), and not much else. Exploration is key here as Blooper Team gets players used to playing with a fixed camera for the first time ages. Opening in a quiet but tense funeral parlor, Marianne’s only goal is to prep her late adoptive father for service. Unease and a good mystery await, so hit X to enter The Further, The Upside Down, or wherever our hero Marianne (voiced by Mary Elizabeth McGlynn) goes that has serious creepy rusted Silent Hill vibes. Could this have been ported to lower-powered consoles? Maybe, but that’s a question the Polish developer seemed wise not to answer considering CD Project Red’s not-so-great launch of that cyberpunky game starring Keanu Reeves last month. The only downside is that it is only for Series X/S and PC (Meaning no Playstation or last-gen Xbox versions). Why? Well, beyond being a solid scare-fest, it’s also free if you own GamePass for your Xbox Series X/S or PC. Fans of Resident Evil would be as silly as not using ink ribbons on Hardcore mode to not take this journey to a new place, with a new character, and best of all, a new way to play while they wait for the release of Resident Evil: Village in May. The survival horror genre receives a welcome new potential franchise with Blooper Team’s old school fixed camera third-person tale, The Medium.
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