The Medium

The Medium tries to blend the point-and-click genre with survival horror, failing to live up to both. With a problematic story that quickly derails after a promising start and a main gimmick that is ultimately wasted by poor puzzle design, The Medium eventually falls short of 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 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 details of the setting. The spirit world is depicted as a hellish landscape, tinged with a reddish hue, filled with sand, ruined buildings, and grotesque objects, such as stones with faces carved on it: 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 inside. Marianne is always gentle, though, saying comforting words to her father, helping him to find peace, with a sorrowful tone of voice.

The Medium presents these scenes in an interesting way: it divides the screen in two, showing Marianne in the real world and her white-haired counterpart in the spirit realm 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 of the screen, 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, the protagonist 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 the Niwa resort.

The Medium makes a great first impression. Its 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, which harkens 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 at, you leave them feeling more vulnerable, with less control over the situation. This kind of camera also allows for some unusual framing, which can give the world a more strange, twisted feel. Here, they are used well, usually framing Marianne from above, showing her small and fragile, while also allowing the split-screen gimmick to work.

The split-screen, on the other hand, is a wasted opportunity. 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 in one of the sides, none of them will be able to pass through, as the protagonist can’t just turn off her connection to the spirit world.

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

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

All this means that the spirit realm is treated more as an obstacle than an actual place: when it appears, it signals that there will be some problems to be solved and only that. The puzzles in the game, however, are nothing to write home about, so simple that they basically solve themselves. You are rarely forced to interpret something or observe the environment for clues. Usually, you just have to collect 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.

In contrast with this simple design is the jarring gamified logic applied to the spirit world: if there are moths blocking Marianne’s path there, 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. There will be energy spots in the room that need to be activated for that, which means that the bench with the dolls will also be shining.

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 example, which is supposed to be more complex and difficult than the others, you find a valve that lacks a handle – which is just a few steps away in a locker, making you wonder what was the point of having to 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 you enter the mind of a character to see what made them monsters. It’s not an attempt to justify their behavior – the character that is inside their mind is completely unsympathetic to their past plights – but to try to understand what events pushed them into that direction. As Marianne tries to understand the story behind the Niwa 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 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 his past exposed to us – let’s call him 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. And then the evil Toad enters the scene and 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 has just changed for no reason, telling us that we are not watching a memory, but a badly directed cutscene.

As it happens, Toad has butchered Toadette and ate her body, so Luigi tries to break his 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 – all within the same vision.

But things get even more confusing because Toad’s mind looks and behaves exactly like the spirit world.

Until this moment, the whole game was building this world as a kind of purgatory, where souls with unfinished business linger. 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. But 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 them, 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 referred to by the same name and presented with the same aesthetic: the monstrous representations of the characters are exactly the same in both spirit worlds, for example.

Everything about Luigi functions as if he belonged in a different game altogether. And to make matters worse, the story becomes much more connected to him, to Cannibal Toad, and to an even more vile, 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 one speak with the dead. As a result, after these flashbacks, the protagonist doesn’t fit in her own story anymore.

In other words, these scenes just make everything nonsensical. When you return to Marianne, you 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 his 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, just making things up as it goes along.

The hideous monster also stalks Marianne in the real world. Here, the game insists that is necessary for the protagonist to 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. All this coupled with the nonsensical worldbuilding prevents The Medium from being taken seriously for too long.

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, the protagonist doesn’t care if he’s in the real world or not, so he leaves 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 into a mess of a story. Despite some good ideas, the game ends up functioning more as a cautionary tale about the importance of coherence to narratives than anything else.

February 16, 2021.