Played on PS5
Playtime: 13 Hours
Play Status: Completed
Completion Date: October 28, 2022
No Spoilers

A Mediocre Walking Sim
I have to say, I was very excited for The Medium. In the Xbox showcased it was shown, it was my game of the show. It looked interesting, scary and innovative. With the recently announced Silent Hill 2 Remake being made by the developers at Bloober Team who did The Medium as well, I thought yes, it's time to check this game out. And it came out on PS Plus too.

Unfortunately, The Medium was a very big disappointment. It's not innovative, at all. It's not scary. It's just a walking sim. And it's not good at that. Our story is about a woman named Marianne. Since she was a child, she has this ability.

She can see a different world called "Spirit World". She can also interact with it to some degree. Thanks to her powers, she talked with many people who lost their friends and family and her job is actually, being a medium.

One day, she gets a call from a stranger saying that she needs to come to the Niwa Hotel, where the answers she desperately wanted about her powers are buried. She accepts the offer and goes to the hotel. She starts exploring.

The story here is, mixed. I know many people didn't liked it. But I actually really enjoyed it. It is a nice mystery that gets resolved and while the characters are not that deep, the whole game is about connections and love. There is real emotion here.

The ending is a bit wonky, not sure if I like it. But the overall mystery kept me going. And there are some actual twists here, things that made my jaw drop.

Characters are not that good. There are a few of them, with our main character being Marianne. Marianne is a good character. She has a mysterious past, she is vulnerable and her voice acting is nice. She is not a perfect character though, she has lots of missing development as well.

There is also Sadness, our villain The Maw and some other characters who might get into the spoiler territory. None of the characters except Marianne and another character called Thomas gets character development. The main villain Maw is especially bad.

But the story balances that with great twists close to the end. Anyway, enough narrative talk, let's talk a bit about the gameplay. In The Medium, you will mostly walk, explore and solve puzzles. There is no combat and no exploration sequences.

But of course, there are some set piece moments like chase sequences and some stealth sections. Starting with these, chase sequences are great. Though some of them will require you to try again and again. Stealth sections are very simple and not that scary, thankfully the game doesn't have too much of those.

Now, the meat of the game. Exploration and puzzle solving. It's, fine? Puzzles are not too hard. And they are not that original. Except one puzzle towards the very end. It involves a dollhouse, let me just say that. That was great. It was the best puzzle in the whole game. It was not that challenging but it was thematically nice and i had to use my brain at least a little bit.

Other than that, we should obviously talk about the split view thing. Technologically, it's great. Artistically, it's awesome. But when it comes to gameplay, it doesn't add much. It's automatically triggered by the game. When it's triggered, you can switch to the spirit world only for a while or you can see both of them at the same time.

There are puzzles that requires the usage of this mechanic. But again, they were easy. That's basically it from the gameplay side. There is very little here and it's not that interesting.

Technically, The Medium is good. Graphics are definitely not next gen. But I think the reason for it is obvious. Two different environments, shown to us at the same time, both of them are interactable. Basically, you play 2 different games at the same time. So, the graphics should be half the quality of a normal game, right?

Kind of, they are better than half of a normal game but they are like late PS3, early PS4. Thankfully, developers knew this and they found a way to make the game still look beautiful. When the graphics quality is actually not that good. Their secret touch was the art design.

The other world, the spirit world looks really nice. And the game does do a good job with building the atmosphere thanks to some great lighting. Music is done by Akira Yamaoka, composer of Silent Hill 2, there were some music here that elevated the atmosphere but overall, it did not feel special.

On PS5, the performance is solid. There were like 2 places where I got frame drops. Overall, it was solid. The DualSense features however were great. Adaptive triggers is not used that often but haptic feedback? It was good, it was really good.

I got the platinum trophy for this game, in 13 hours. It's not that hard. You need to find all the collectables. There is one trophy that is bugged or random or doesn't explain itself very well. That was a pain but I did it eventually.

The Medium is a mediocre game. It's not that scary, the gameplay is pretty basic and it does not evolve. It's dual world thing looks cool but adds nothing. But, the atmosphere is great, art design is good too and the story while not anything new, has some twists and turns. Overall, I don't recommend this. But if you decide to check it out, it's definitely playable and has some good moments.

As a final note, I wish good luck to Bloober Team in their efforts of remaking Silent Hill 2. This game made my both skeptical and excited for the remake. The atmosphere they built in this game is great so they can handle the remake really good as well. But the gameplay side was boring. And with Silent Hill 2 having combat sequences as well, I don't know if they can make good combat or not. We'll see though, we'll see.

Reviewed on Mar 03, 2023


2 Comments


7 months ago

Thanks for the review!

7 months ago

@Atlg540 always happy to help :)