The Medium

Developed by Bloober Team, The Medium tries to blend the point-and-click = with survival horror, failing to live up to both genres. With a problematic story that quickly derails after a promising start and a main gimmick that is wasted by poor puzzle design, The Medium eventually falls short of all its ambitions.

The game starts with Marianne, a young Polish woman, looking for a tie clip in her father’s house to adorn his body. After putting the finishing touches on the corpse – she used to help him in his own Funeral House – the lights go out, and Marianne sees herself in the “other side”: she’s a medium that sometimes, against her will, is pulled to this other plane of existence – the game calls it a spirit world – where she must help the dead move on.

It’s an eerie scene that perfectly establishes the somber mood of the story and some important details of the setting. The spirit world is depicted as a hellish landscape, tinged with a reddish hue, rife with sand, ruined buildings, and grotesque objects, such as stones with faces carved on them – The Medium’s vision of purgatory is a harrowing one. The dead seem lost, with vague memories of who they were, wearing face masks that appear to hide something horrifying beneath. Marianne is always gentle, though, saying comforting words to her father, helping him find peace with a sorrowful tone of voice.

The Medium presents these scenes in a very fascinating way: it splits the screen in two, showing Marianne in the real world and her white-haired counterpart in the spirit realm both moving and acting in tandem. This reinforces the otherworldly aspect of her ability, as the player is watching Marianne talking to the dead on one side of the screen, but saying the same words alone in a room on the other. On one side, she’s altruistic and heroic; on the other, she’s acting as if she’s crazy. Showing both scenes at the same time – instead of cutting from one to the other – has the benefit of putting us in her shoes: Marianne lives in both worlds simultaneously, feeling like they are both sides of the same coin.

After helping her father move on, she receives a mysterious call from a man named Thomas. He claims to know all about her abilities and promises to explain everything to her – that is, if she meets him in an abandoned resort. When Marianne arrives there, however, Thomas is nowhere to be found, and she immediately senses there’s something wrong with the place. The resort – which is rumored to have been closed due to a massacre – appears to be “a landfill of memories, emotions, none of them good.” It doesn’t take her long, then, to discover that the rumors are true and that something horrible lurks inside the Niwa resort.

In other words, The Medium makes a great first impression. The first scenes are effective in presenting the main character and her world, while the Niwa resort is a perfect haunted building, with its austere Soviet architecture contrasting with the innocent flyers and posters inside.

The game uses fixed camera angles, harkening back to games like Silent Hill (from which The Medium also borrows the composer), where the fixed camera was highly effective in heightening the tension: by removing from the player the ability to control where they look, the game leaves us feeling more vulnerable, with less control over the situation. This kind of camera also allows for some unusual framing of the action and the environments, which can give the world a stranger, more twisted feel. Here, they are used to great effect, usually framing Marianne from above, showing her small and fragile, while also allowing the split-screen gimmick to work flawlessly.

It’s just unfortunate, then, that the split-screen is a wasted idea. The game mainly employs it as a way of blocking progress: since both Mariannes move at the same time in two versions of the same room, if there’s an object blocking the path on one side, neither of them will be able to pass through, as she can’t just turn off her connection to the spirit world. The rub, as it tends to be, lies in the execution.

First, there’s an inherent artificiality to this restriction, as Marianne’s link with the other side is activated and severed randomly, with no apparent reason. There’s no clear rule attached to her ability – linking the split-screen to the presence of a restless spirit, for example –, which makes it feel arbitrary whenever it happens: her ability seems to be turned on and off when it’s convenient for the designers or the writers. This can lead to some frustrating moments, as when we have to figure out how to pass through a room just because there’s a door blocked in the spirit world, with the passage open in the real one, and the split-screen ends precisely after we go through the door, signaling that it was there… only to momentarily halt our progress.

Despite its name, the spirit world is also devoid of spirits. Marianne meets only one character there, after arriving in Newa, and this happens only in cutscenes. When we have control of the events, it’s an empty, barren place, where nothing of interest to the narrative happens, barring the eventual monster chase.

The spirit world, then, is treated more as an obstacle than an actual place: when it appears, it means we’ll have to solve a puzzle, and that’s it. The puzzles themselves, however, are nothing to write home about, sometimes being so simple that they basically solve themselves. We are rarely forced to interpret something or observe the environment for clues, for example, but just have to collect some items in a room and then put them in very obvious places, such as finding a doll and putting it on a nearby bench alongside two other dolls.

The Medium confers a clear “videogame-y” feel to the spirit world: if there are moths blocking Marianne’s path, for example, what she needs to do is to fill up her energy meter to create an energy shield to pass through the animals unscathed. It makes sense only because this is a video game: this feels like a level and not an actual, tangible place.

And there’s also little to no exploring in the game, wasting a good setting. Marianne will often stumble upon a machine that lacks a lever or fuel or both, but these items are just… around the corner. In the game’s last area, for instance, which is supposed to be more complex and difficult than the others, we find a valve that lacks a handle, which can be found just a few steps away, making us wonder what the point is of having us search for it.

The result is that The Medium rarely asks much from the player, who will be just going through the motions to get to the next part of the story, which, in turn, only gets worse as it progresses.

There are two big moments in the game when we enter the mind of a character to see what made them monsters. It’s not an attempt to justify their behavior – the character inside their mind is completely unsympathetic to their past plights – but to try to understand what events pushed them in that direction. As Marianne tries to understand the story behind the Newa massacre, The Medium presents a narrative concerned with the origins of evil: it shows that sometimes it’s the result of abuse, of trauma, but that sometimes it’s just there from the beginning, just looking for excuses to grow.

Despite their thematic importance, these lengthy scenes – which were also present, but in a more indigestible way, in The Observer – are responsible for making the story derail fast. First, there’s the fact that it’s not Marianne who’s the protagonist in them: she’s just watching them, as if inside a memory, after touching a random object.

Then there’s the problem of perspective. If it’s a memory, whose memory is it? Through which eyes are we watching these events unfold? There’s the character who has the power of entering another’s mind – let’s call him Luigi for spoiler reasons – and there’s the vile one who is going to have their past exposed to us – let’s call them Toad. When the flashback starts, we are in the third person, seeing Luigi from the outset as he ponders what to do, talking with his other self: unlike Marianne, who is the same person in both worlds, Luigi’s spirit, Gooigi, just happens to have a mind of his own. But when the vile Toad enters the scene, we are suddenly in the first-person, seeing things through Toad’s eyes – but Toad was not there at the beginning, which means that the perspective in the flashback has just changed for no reason, telling us that we are not watching a memory, but a badly directed… cutscene.

Now, let’s say that Toad has butchered Toadette, consumed her body, and made a post on Twitter laughing about it. Luigi, of course, is enraged, so he plans to break Toad’s spirit from the inside as a form of revenge. And so, the perspective changes again as we are now controlling Gooigi inside Toad’s mind as he attempts to destroy it – all within the same flashback.

However, things get even more confusing, as Toad’s mind looks and behaves exactly… like the spirit world. After all, the whole game has been building the spirit world as a kind of purgatory, where souls with unfinished business linger. But now, it’s presented as a world that exists inside a person’s mind and houses their memories and inner demons, changing its shape and color to reflect that person’s personality – and it’s a world that exists while that person is still alive.

The spirit world that Marianne visits is a different beast entirely: it’s not the product of a single person; it doesn’t have any memories stored in it, save some small, scattered fragments of random people talking; and it’s where the dead are trapped, not the living. And yet, despite being different things, they are presented with the same aesthetic: the monstrous representation of Toad is exactly the same in both spirit worlds, for example.

Everything about Luigi basically functions as if he belonged to a different game altogether. And to make matters worse, the story becomes much more connected to him, to Psychopathic Toad, and to an even more evil, communist Yoshi, than to… Marianne. The Medium is about inner demons, trauma, and repression, so an ability to enter a person’s mind is more fitting than one that lets us speak with the dead. As a result, after these flashbacks, the protagonist doesn’t fit in her own story anymore.

In sum, these scenes just make everything nonsensical. When we return to Marianne, we are more likely to say “what the hell” than anything else. There are some good bits in there – Toad appearing as a bloated, gluttonous monster is an obvious but effective metaphor of their crime, for example – but they don’t make up for the fact that they throw worldbuilding out of the window and never look back.

The Medium keeps bending its rules when it’s convenient. First, both forms of Marianne move in tandem, but that would limit puzzle-solving, so it’s revealed after a time that, when there’s the split, Marianne can move in the spirit world without affecting her normal self if she wants to – but there’s a time limit to it, with her form fading with each passing second. Then, there will be chase sequences where Marianne has to run away from a hideous monster in the spirit world, which wouldn’t work with this limitation, so the game introduces an arbitrary way that allows moving in purgatory without setbacks. These changes in the game structure wouldn’t have been a problem if they were foreshadowed in some way, instead of just dropped on the player, or made sense within the rules of that universe, but The Medium doesn’t care about things like coherence and internal logic: it just makes things up as it goes along.

The hideous monster Toad also stalks Marianne in the real world. Here, the game insists that the protagonist must keep holding her breath because the creature can hear her breathing and catch her – but that is not often the case. Usually, it’s enough to just hide behind an object, breathing normally, and wait for the creature to pass by Marianne or leave enough room for her to go around it – holding her breath actually just slows Marianne down. And there’s a moment in which she must use a bolt cutter to cut a rope right next to the creature, and it simply doesn’t notice her despite its incredible hearing. Toad is simply not very good at being a monster, it seems.

Finally, we have the cop-out ending, which presents two choices to Marianne – although one of them doesn’t make sense – and cuts to black… before she decides between them. These open endings only work when the answer doesn’t matter, usually when it’s an epilogue: in Inception, for example, there’s a character who doesn’t care if they’re in the real world or not, so they leave the scene before finding out, and so does the viewer. Here, we’re in the middle of the climax, not an epilogue, and everyone in the scene is interested in its outcome.

The Medium may start well, but it eventually crumbles under the weight of its nonsensical narrative. Despite some good ideas, the game ends up functioning more as a cautionary tale about Toads and the importance of coherence to narratives than anything else.

May 13, 2026.

Review originally published on February 16, 2021.