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.
Chuck Tingle‘s writing is embedded with a particular tonal trick that makes him perfectly suited to horror. “Propulsive” is the first word that comes to mind when I think of Tingle’s energetic prose, and when his books start wrapping themselves around characters and digging through their various complexities, it’s easy to be pulled along, absorbed in the feeling that an old friend is simply telling you a story.
Then Tingle will drop one of the single creepiest bits of imagery you’ve ever read, and you’re right back in the horror space. It’s not always a jump scare, but it is always a pulsing feeling of dread that keeps you hooked through the rest of the book.
Fabulous Bodies, Tingle’s latest horror novel, carries on these gifts, and the promise Tingle showed on books like Camp Damascus and Bury Your Gays. His fiction’s growing ever more confident and precise, and his eye for horrific detail hasn’t dimmed in the least, making this a summer reading delight for horror fans.
Poppy is a single mother determined to make a better life for her daughter, particularly after growing up in group homes and foster systems. By day, she works hard to keep up the flow of upbeat, enthusiastic content as a fashion influencer, and while that’s going well, it’s not yet making ends meet. To make up the difference, she moonlights as a grave robber, lifting bodies from morgues and funeral homes and selling their pieces on the black market. It’s grueling, dangerous work, and it’s about to pay off big. Out of the blue, Poppy gets a call to transport the newly dead body of her musical hero, the legendary Eddie Michaels. It’s a weird gig, but the payout is big enough that she could walk away from her macabre side gig forever. Poppy takes the job, and things get complicated when Eddie turns out to be, well, only mostly dead.
From the moment Eddie’s corpse enters the picture, Fabulous Bodies takes on the vibe of a road novel, as the grave robber and the undead rock star make stop after stop, and Poppy tries again and again to wrap her mind about what she’s gotten herself into, and how she might get herself out. It’s a delightful premise, and Tingle never loses his grip on the fun of it. No matter how dark the novel gets, and it does get quite dark, the narrative keeps barreling forward, delivering macabre laughs and moments of beautifully gruesome invention along the way.
Because he’s set his protagonist up as a fashion influencer, Tingle has lots of room to play in the space of how we view human bodies, both alive and dead, how we use them, and what we value in them. This is the emotional core of Fabulous Bodies, and while it’s sometimes overshadowed by the runaway train of the plot, it remains a potent source of thematic exploration throughout the book, and it gets more complicated when you consider certain gifts Eddie’s been granted in his strange supernatural state.
In essence, we’re looking at a story about a grave robber who discovers a body that not only fights back, but takes control of any given situation. That throws Poppy for repeated loops and keeps the plot moving, but it also makes us consider on a deeper level exactly what we value about our own physical form, and what might happen when we lose our grip on it entirely.
The book’s themes and emotional concerns hum through the whole narrative, but the overwhelming impression I got while reading Fabulous Bodies was just how much damn fun this book is. I couldn’t stop reading it, not just because it’s so filled with sudden swerves and ghoulish setpieces, but because Tingle has honed his horror storytelling down to a fine, very sharp point. Fabulous Bodies moves like a roller coaster, complete with a tension-filled ramp-up and a finale that’ll leave you breathless by the time the ride is over.
If you haven’t been reading Chuck Tingle’s horror work up to this point, it’s time to get on board, because he’s just getting started, and he’s already mastered the art of the scary page-turner.
Fabulous Bodies is available now.
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