An uneven but engrossing horror mystery

The Medium is an unforgiving game, but not for the reasons you might think.

It’s not that the horror adventure from Bloober Team, the Polish studio behind 2020’s Blair Witch and the Layers of Fear series, is particularly challenging from a mechanical standpoint. It embraces a mix of play genres across 10-or-so hours, but everything you do is really there to serve the story. It’s the hook meant to keep you playing.

For most of the time you spend in The Medium‘s clutches, that story is hard to look away from. It’s an ever-deepening mystery in which you play as Marianne, a woman who lives with each foot firmly planted in two different worlds: The real one that we know and live in every day, and a metaphysical one inhabited by the spirits of those who have passed on but not moved forward.

Mary is a medium, and she uses her ability to help spirits move on. It’s one of the first things we learn about her when the story opens shortly after her adoptive father’s death. In what ultimately amounts to a tutorial sequence, we see Mary step over to the other side and usher the man who raised her into his afterlife.

It’s a quietly powerful tear-jerker of a scene that plants an early marker for the kind of emotional resonance The Medium is shooting for. Even as the game introduces basic afterlife concepts that will define future puzzles — many of which involve leaping back and forth between the real and metaphysical planes of existence — it’s smacking us in the face with instantly moving imagery and ideas.

That duality of purpose quickly comes to define the rest of your journey through this story, though neither piece gets it right at every step. The result is a slow-building litany of frustrations that do more to sour aspects of the experience in hindsight than actively push you away while you’re playing. At least for me, the depth of the mystery and emotional execution of key scenes were enough to keep me fully hooked. It was only in hindsight that things really fell apart.

On the play side of things, The Medium leaps about constantly. It’s an investigation and discovery game, what some have derisively called a “walking simulator.” No wait, it’s a puzzle game now. Or… no no, that’s a stealth sequence.

Some of these pieces come together better than others. Throughout the game, I found myself longing for more sequences where Mary could just wander around and piece together a clearer understanding of what’s actually going on. 

The puzzle-y bits help a lot on that count. For big chunks of the game, Mary is regularly dipping in and out of the spirit world to move the story forward. The two planes of existence feature layouts that are generally the same, but the small differences between them amount to obstacles that must be overcome.

So a closed and locked apartment door in the real world might be blown off its hinges in the spirit realm. Normally, Mary and her spirit world double move completely in tandem. The game responds during these sequences by cutting to a split-screen view featuring both. But Mary can also trigger an out-of-body experience, during which you take sole control of her spirit world self for a limited (but generous) stretch of time.

So in the above example, you’d go out-of-body and send spirit world Mary into the locked apartment. There, you’ll likely find something that either unlocks the door or opens up an alternate route inside. The solutions typically involve incorporeal Mary harnessing her limited-use spirit powers to charge up dead fuseboxes or shield herself from deadly, afterlife moth-filled hallways.

‘The Medium‘ is an unforgiving game, but not for the reasons you might think.

These puzzles are rarely challenging, but they’re so intertwined with the unfolding story that the journey ends up mattering more than the hurdles you overcome. The Medium is driven at nearly every turn by deft writing. Even when the pieces don’t add up, the emotional highs and lows are strong enough to carry things forward.

The stealth bits are another matter entirely. They’re just… not great. Your first introduction, during the early hours, lays out the rules of how things work, but then those rules don’t always apply. Mary can hide behind objects and hold her breath to avoid the monster that’s hunting her, but it’s not always evident that she is or isn’t hidden or how it helps to stop breathing briefly.

For the most part, these sequences aren’t hard. But they foster a strange sort of tension that undermines the horror of the situation. You’re not on edge because the invisible monster that’s stalking you could discover you at any moment; rather, it’s because you’re frustrated that the game laid out these unclear rules of engagement that then don’t appear to mean much.

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Building fear out of clunky mechanics is an old strategy in video games, going back to the early Resident Evil games and their notorious “tank” controls. But games have matured over the past 25 years. There are better ways to elicit fear in a video game. The Medium‘s stealth bits are blessedly few and far between, but I groaned every time they came up.

It is, at least, gorgeous as a piece of digital art. The design of the spirit world is inspired by the works of Polish surrealist Zdzisław Beksiński, delivering what feels like an H.R. Giger interpretation of Silent Hill. Konami’s hit horror series influences The Medium in an unexpected way, as well: Composer Akira Yamaoka and singer Mary Elizabeth McGlynn, both of Silent Hill fame, helped to define the soundscape of the game’s afterlife sequences. Meanwhile, composer Arkadiusz Reikowski handled the real world spaces, and his heavy reliance on synths immediately summons up Stranger Things vibes.

So yes, the artistic side of things is rock solid. Unfortunately, the technical presentation leaves a lot to be desired. Playing on PC, I was simply unable to take advantage of the ray tracing-enhanced graphic because the DirectX 12 version you can launch into is so buggy. Textures pop in and out almost everywhere you go, sometimes flashing around the screen at a rapid clip even when you’re standing completely still. (You can fix this by launching in standard mode, but that kills ray tracing.)

There’s also one stealth encounter late in the game that might just be flat-out broken. Mild spoilers here, but toward the end of the sequence that sees Mary escaping through a set of water tanks, the monster that’s been hunting her pops up in the spirit realm. You’re supposed to (apparently) sneak past it and… do something to neutralize it. I’m still not clear what that something is.

In my game, every time I loaded into that spot the monster just stood there motionless, staring at the place I had to get to from a few feet away. There’s no way to distract its attention, and it outruns you whenever you’re spotted and trying to run away. I only got past this point accidentally (I think?) when, after several failed attempts, the monster just suddenly… got electrocuted while it was chasing me.

So. Yeah. Inexplicable progress isn’t generally the sign of a technically stable game. All of these hiccups can be patched, and definitely should be patched, but they make it hard to recommend jumping on The Medium right away.

My bigger problem, though, is the story’s resolution. This is hard to discuss in detail without delving into heavy spoilers, but broadly speaking: The Medium does a shaky of explaining itself as the story unfolds and a downright poor job of keeping players aware of key story points at the later stages. I followed the final reveal easily enough, but I’m still foggy on a lot of the events and relationships that led to it.

Mary is often picking up notes, letters, and other ephemera that, over time, paint a picture of what’s actually going on in The Medium. Most of this stuff is stored in your “Memos” menu for future reference. But even by the end of the game, this collection you’ve amassed offers a woefully incomplete account.

It’s here that we come back to the idea of The Medium being unforgiving. I’ve little doubt that there’s a path to understanding this story, but following the twisting and turning timeline requires absolute focus. That’s not something everyone can sustain full time across a 10-hour game (even the ones who take notes like I do!), and one missed point can end up confusing everything down the line.

As the credits rolled, I was left with big questions about the relationships between key characters and the overall sequence of events. There’s a stinger scene that suggests at least some of questions are left unanswered (or raised in the first place) with intent, because this story isn’t over. But that’s a crappy note to walk away on.

I’m sure plenty of people will make their way through The Medium and pick up on every nugget of info. But I’m equally sure that plenty of others will have an experience that mirrors mine, where blink-and-you-miss-it exposition dumps combine over time to lessen the impact of the eventual final reveal.

That’s not a good kind of challenge in my book. I’m not suggesting that this (or any!) mystery-driven story absolutely has to reveal itself in full to end up in a good place. But it does have to sensibly arrange the information it wants to share, especially as a game that most aren’t going to finish in a single sitting.

The story’s emotional beats are written and executed well enough that I was nonetheless happy to go along for the ride even if some of the pieces didn’t make much sense in hindsight. I’d still recommend waiting for a few patches to hit before you jump in, especially if you’re planning to play on PC. But despite all the issues, I was invested the whole way through and came away with the feeling that The Medium is a journey worth taking.

The Medium comes to PC (via Steam) and Xbox Series consoles on Jan. 28.