Reviews
[Review] ‘The Medium’ Echoes Classic Horror Games, But Still Has Its Own Modern Identity
When the first trailer for Bloober Team’s The Medium debuted, my heart skipped a beat. Based on the look and feel, I was certain it was the long-rumored Silent Hill reboot. While it’s clear that the team was heavily influenced by the classic horror series (the Polish developer even went as far as to get composer Akira Yamoaka to work on their score), it has created something unique that stands out in the genre.
One of the biggest things that echoes back to Silent Hill is The Medium’s dual-reality gameplay. Much like the classic series, there’s a more sinister version of the world, and The Medium’s protagonist Marriane has a unique power to be able to interact with it. During certain parts of the game, you are presented with a split screen, showing both the real and spirit worlds, allowing you to navigate them simultaneously.
In the spirit world, Marianne has access to powers that can help her change the world to open up pathways in the real world. While it seems a bit gimmicky at first, it eventually creates opportunities for clever puzzles that force you to fully explore and engage with the abandoned Niwa Hotel that the game takes place in. Some sections you’ll see the split screen, some you’ll be in fully one or the other, and some you’ll be allowed to switch from one to the other, constantly keeping you on your toes. You’re also given an Insight ability that resembles the Detective Vision from the Batman: Arkham series that highlights important or hidden objects in the world.
Despite the new wrinkle of dual reality gameplay, exploring the Niwa feels like a classic horror game. Instead of giving you control of the camera, you have semi-fixed camera angles, allowing the game to control what you see and build tension at its own pace. Bloober Team clearly isn’t doing this just for nostalgia; they find smart ways to frame the scene so you can see something round the corner just at the edge of your screen before having to confront it moments later.
Puzzles are handled in classic Silent Hill-like fashion as well, usually involving locating some object, then doing some light problem solving to figure out how to use it. I found myself busting out a Post It note at one point to keep track of information during one puzzle, which was incredibly fun. You will frequently have to rotate objects to access psychic imprints, which can get tedious but doesn’t detract too much overall.
As a medium, Marianne communicates with spirits to help send them on to the next world, so many of the game’s puzzles involve finding out about the person’s life, smartly marrying gameplay and narrative to create a beautifully satisfying moment when you solve it: not only do you get to progress, but you also set a victim free from the hellish spirit world they’ve been trapped in. There were some puzzles that ended up being slightly frustrating, but there’s usually enough breadcrumbs to find while poking around with your Insight ability to find your way through.
Even though it takes a lot of inspiration from older survival horror games, there’s no bullet-counting resource management in The Medium. Much like many other modern horror games, there’s no combat, forcing you to hide from creatures and figure out ways around them. For the most part, it’s a host of stealth sequences in simple mazes, but there are a few encounters that add clever twists to the formula. This does tend to cut the tension of the game because you always know if you’re under threat or not, but they do manage to ramp up the creepiness with some wonderful voicework for the creatures.
In addition to taking atmospheric cues from the Silent Hill series, the developers specifically were inspired by Polish surrealist painter Zdzisław Beksiński, creating a hellish vision of loneliness and sadness. The real-world hotel section is beautifully dilapidated, and the spirit world reflects the tragedies that took place within its walls. The mood is topped off by a haunting score composed by Silent Hill’s Akira Yamaoka and frequent Bloober Team collaborator Arkadiusz Reikowski.
This dedication to mood goes to enhance an already well-told and resonate story that plays out over roughly eight hours. After a brief, melancholy intro that effortlessly gives you both character exposition and gameplay tutorial, we’re presented a vague but intriguing mystery that slowly becomes more and more personal, with plenty of twists and turns that kept me on my toes until the very end. As Marianne uses her abilities as a medium, she discovers more and more about the events that caused the Niwa Hotel to end up abandoned, full of sinister creatures and trapped ghosts. The development team isn’t afraid to explore mature themes, and does so with a deft touch that never feels exploitative, exploring how tragedy can shape our lives.
The Medium is a big moment in the evolution of Bloober Team as a studio. After making it big with some well-liked first person horror games (Layers of Fear, Observer), it moved on to being trusted with the iconic Blair Witch license and now, with this game, is positioned as a big, early Xbox Series X exclusive. The Medium feels like a real labor of love from a studio that’s been learning from each title. Its move away from the first person perspective has paid off, creating a game that is reverent of past horror titles while still having a modern-feeling identity all its own.
With its inclusion on Xbox Game Pass from day one, there’s no reason not to check it out.
The Medium review code for PC provided by the publisher.
The Medium is out January 28 on Xbox Series X/S and PC to buy and through Game Pass.
Reviews
“AHS: Delicate” Review – “Little Gold Man” Mixes Oscar Fever & Baby Fever into the Perfect Product
‘AHS: Delicate’ enters early labor with a fun, frenzied episode that finds the perfect tone and goes for broke as its water breaks.
“I’ll figure it out. Women always do.”
American Horror Story is no stranger to remixing real-life history with ludicrous, heightened Murphy-isms, whether it’s AHS: 1984’s incorporation of Richard Ramirez, AHS: Cult’s use of Valerie Solanas, or AHS: Coven’s prominent role for the Axeman of New Orleans. Accordingly, it’s very much par for the course for AHS: Delicate to riff on other pop culture touchstones and infinitely warp them to its wicked whims. That being said, it takes real guts to do a postmodern feminist version of Rosemary’s Baby and then actually put Mia Farrow – while she’s filming Rosemary’s Baby, no less – into the narrative. This is the type of gonzo bullshit that I want out of American Horror Story! Sharon Tate even shows up for a minute because why the hell not? Make no mistake, this is completely absurd, but the right kind of campy absurdity that’s consistently been in American Horror Story’s wheelhouse since its inception. It’s a wild introduction that sets up an Oscar-centric AHS: Delicate episode for success. “Little Gold Man” is a chaotic episode that’s worth its weight in gold and starts to bring this contentious season home.
It’d be one thing if “Little Gold Man” just featured a brief detour to 1967 so that this season of pregnancy horror could cross off Rosemary’s Baby from its checklist. AHS: Delicate gets more ambitious with its revisionist history and goes so far as to say that Mia Farrow and Anna Victoria Alcott are similarly plagued. “Little Gold Man” intentionally gives Frank Sinatra dialogue that’s basically verbatim from Dex Harding Sr., which indicates that this demonic curse has been ruffling Hollywood’s feathers for the better part of a century. Anna Victoria Alcott’s Oscar-nominated feature film, The Auteur, is evidently no different than Rosemary’s Baby. It’s merely Satanic forces’ latest attempt to cultivate the “perfect product.” “Little Gold Man” even implies that the only reason that Mia Farrow didn’t go on to make waves at the 1969 Academy Awards and ends up with her twisted lot in life is because she couldn’t properly commit to Siobhan’s scheme, unlike Anna.
This is easily one of American Horror Story’s more ridiculous cold opens, but there’s a lot of love for the horror genre and Hollywood that pumps through its veins. If Hollywood needs to be a part of AHS: Delicate’s story then this is actually the perfect connective tissue. On that note, Claire DeJean plays Sharon Tate in “Little Gold Man” and does fine work with the brief scene. However, it would have been a nice, subtle nod of continuity if AHS: Delicate brought back Rachel Roberts who previously portrayed Tate in AHS: Cult. “Little Gold Man” still makes its point and to echo a famous line from Jennifer Lynch’s father’s television masterpiece: “It is happening again.”
“Little Gold Man” is rich in sequences where Anna just rides the waves of success and enjoys her blossoming fame. She feels empowered and begins to finally take control of her life, rather than let it push her around and get under her skin like a gestating fetus. Anna’s success coincides with a colossal exposition dump from Tavi Gevinson’s Cora, a character who’s been absent for so long that we were all seemingly meant to forget that she was ever someone who was supposed to be significant. Cora has apparently been the one pulling many of Anna’s strings all along as she goes Single White Female, rather than Anna having a case of Repulsion. It’s an explanation that oddly works and feeds into the episode’s more general message of dreams becoming nightmares. Cora continuing to stay aligned with Dr. Hill because she has student loans is also somehow, tragically the perfect explanation for her abhorrent behavior. It’s not the most outlandish series of events in an episode that also briefly gives Anna alligator legs and makes Emma Roberts and Kim Kardashian kiss.
“Little Gold Man” often feels like it hits the fast-forward button as it delivers more answers, much in the same vein as last week’s “Ava Hestia.” These episodes are two sides of the same coin and it’s surely no coincidence that they’re both directed by Jennifer Lynch. This season has benefitted from being entirely written by Halley Feiffer – a first for the series – but it’s unfortunate that Lynch couldn’t direct every episode of AHS: Delicate instead of just four out of nine entries. That’s not to say that a version of this season that was unilaterally directed by Lynch would have been without its issues. However, it’s likely that there’d be a better sense of synergy across the season with fewer redundancies. She’s responsible for the best episodes of AHS: Delicate and it’s a disappointment that she won’t be the one who closes the season out in next week’s finale.
To this point, “Little Gold Man” utilizes immaculate pacing that helps this episode breeze by. Anna’s Oscar nomination and the awards ceremony are in the same episode, whereas it feels like “Part 1” of the season would have spaced these events out over four or five episodes. This frenzied tempo works in “Little Gold Man’s” favor as AHS: Delicate speed-runs to its finish instead of getting lost in laborious plotting and unnecessary storytelling. This is how the entire season should have been. Although it’s also worth pointing out that this is by far the shortest episode of American Horror Story to date at only 34 minutes. It’s a shame that the season’s strongest entries have also been the ones with the least amount of content. There could have been a whole other act to “Little Gold Man,” or at the least, a substantially longer cold open that got more out of its Mia Farrow mayhem.
“Little Gold Man” is an American Horror Story episode that does everything right, but is still forced to contend with three-quarters of a subpar season. “Part 2” of AHS: Delicate actually helps the season’s first five episodes shine brighter in retrospect and this will definitely be a season that benefits from one long binge that doesn’t have a six-month break in the middle. Unfortunately, anyone who’s already watched it once will likely not feel compelled to experience these labor pains a second time over. With one episode to go and Anna’s potential demon offspring ready to greet the world, AHS: Delicate is poised to deliver one hell of a finale.
Although, to paraphrase Frank Sinatra, “How do you expect to be a good conclusion if this is what you’re chasing?”
4 New Horror Movies Releasing This Week Including ‘Late Night with the Devil’ at Home
Looking for New Episodes of “Chucky” on Peacock? Here’s What Changed
‘Ready or Not’: Radio Silence Filmmakers Tease the “Absolute Banger” of a Sequel That’s Taking Shape
‘Terrifier 3’: Filming Has Wrapped on Damien Leone’s Christmas Slasher Sequel!
‘Halloween: Illustrated’ Review: Original Novelization of John Carpenter’s Classic Gets an Upgrade
You must be logged in to post a comment.