The Medium (PS5)
By: Bloober Team
FROM Poltergeist's helium-voiced Tangina to Whoopi Goldberg's Oscar-winning jive in Ghost, once was the time mediums headlined Hollywood's finest. Nowadays, however, ten-a-penny ghost hunters armed with night-vision clutter up cable channels with cod panic in dilapidated dumps.
They could learn a thing or two from Marianne, star of the once-Xbox exclusive The Medium, now putting the frights on PS5 owners.
With Layers of Fear, the Rutger Hauer-starring Observer and Blair Witch, Polish studio Bloober Team have carved out a rich horror niche of late, but The Medium is a major departure from their stock first-person frights.
Set in post-communist Poland in 1999, orphan Marianne is summoned to a long-abandoned holiday resort to get to the root of her powers. See, Marianne can smell, like, teen spirits, and her psychic abilities will help players navigate a less-than-cheery cocktail of ghosts, Nazis and child abuse.
With its brooding atmosphere and a score from legendary Silent Hill Composer Akira Yamaoka, The Medium certainly looks and sounds the part, while on PS5 the creeps are heightened further with its controller pumping out eerie voices and vibrating, erm, spookily.
Essentially a walking simulator, The Medium is practically on rails. Barring the odd find-the-object puzzle, players generally plod from A to B, reading notes en route to cobble together the game's back story and avoiding its lone monster – The Maw – who occasionally pops up for some chase and sneaky hold-your-breath stealth sections.
The hook, however, is that Marianne can cross the astral plane, causing a split-screen effect as players roam both the land of the living and the dead at once. Silver-haired spirit Marianne can access areas meatbag Marianne cannot, and much is made of spotting key differences between both realms. It's a gaming first and genuinely thrilling to behold – yet even with its unique gameplay mechanics, this Medium is more rare than well done.
A brilliant premise and setting are par for the course with Bloober Team, but they often fail to stick the landing, and so it is with The Medium, which would benefit from a healthy shot of fun.
Marianne drearily monologues her way through its 10 hours, while bygone controls and a fixed camera view mean some cheap deaths during chase sequences. Fittingly for a game named after my underwear size, The Medium can be a thrillingly unpleasant place, and despite some shortcomings, it may prove the perfect Halloween aperitif for those after some split-screen spookery.
