A Review of The Medium – Invention Puzzles

The Medium can be evaluated from two angles. For example, it can be said that the game is not scary at all, that there are no monster fights in it.

That it is not a successor to Silent Hill, to scold it in general for everything it is not, that is, for not living up to the expectations of reality. This look has every right to exist. And in this case, the list of works of Bloober Team will surely include another lost game, on a par with Layers of Fear 2 and Blair Witch.

On the other hand, you can appreciate what we have for precedent: an unexpectedly good and very atmospheric magical epic served up in the spirit of traditional early 2000s adventure games. Yeah, yeah, playing The Medium doesn't bring that many horrors like series like Syberia, Dreamfall or Still Life. The still camera, good puzzles, and engaging cutscenes are all in their place. Looking at The Medium from this point of view, one can only praise the Polish creators, who have managed to release a really good game. In fact, that is exactly what we are going to do. However, without a reviewer it will of course not work.

The game is set in late 1999 in Poland. The main events revolve around Marianne, a psychic girl capable of moving between the material world and the spirit realm. Not long ago her adoptive father, Jack, died. And no sooner had the woman prepared her body for the funeral and helped her tormented soul to rest than a mysterious call came from a certain Thomas. The stranger immediately informed him that he could reveal to Marianne the origin of her abilities and discover the meaning of the mysterious dreams that had haunted the lady for a long time. However, to find out all these secrets, she must go to the old abandoned vacation house «Niva», where once there was a terrible accident that killed all the staff and residents. Here begins Marianne's journey into the mysterious world of her own past.

For the most part, El medio's chronicle feels like Marianne's stroll through forgotten parts of Russian times, her own family's excursion to 70s-80s Poland with detective and mystery components. And wait, this aspect of Bloober Team works insanely well. The game is pretty good at manipulating your expectations, throwing out different hints from time to time about what exactly came out in Niva. And just when at first glance it might seem that everything that happens around her is soon going to fit into a coherent puzzle, the script closes that story, which turns out to be another dark situation that Niva has told us.

For all these reasons, only part of the story is told directly through video. A large part of the story requires various notes and memory fragments that form the accumulated context and perception of what is happening. The medium is a big part of the world's history, revealing the past of the characters and telling the stories of each of the residents, even giving clues to solve some of the mysteries.

The puzzles themselves are not very difficult: often you have to correctly apply one object to another. However, the circumstances in which this pattern is used are many. And none of them return to the starting point, for which the creators have to be thanked separately. For example, in one case you have to pick up three pieces of a Chopin piece, tie them together and place the sheet music on the piano stand, while in another you have to correctly place dried moths in a chest to open it.

Certainly brains are not kept within their limits by this agreement alone. In certain circumstances of the plot, Marianne will also solve the problem of time by moving the hands of an old grandfather clock, and determine the name of one of the victims by reading the notes and matching the names on them with the numbers on the chairs. The conference room.

A special memory is reserved for puzzles whose solutions are woven with efforts in 2 dimensions: the present and the spiritual. A simple example: to open the passage, it is necessary to correctly mount the globe in the spiritual universe, and then move it in a particular way, it is already in a routine reality. This often happens with similar puzzles, as both worlds are shown on the screen: where Marianne goes in our world, her astral shell moves there too.

Of course, sometimes the protagonist manages to let her own spirit "walk" to go to parts of the territory that are unattainable in the ordinary world. For example, while she is in another world, she can look into a room that is locked in our reality and activate some mechanism. This mechanism is activated in the ordinary world and unlocks the passage that suits us. In this case, the part of the screen that reflects our reality dims slightly, focusing all of the player's attention on the spirit world.

In fact, it is precisely the idea of ​​showing 2 realities on the screen that is considered the main characteristic of The Medium. Unfortunately, all of these circumstances are strictly scheduled. Not to mention that, in part, seamlessly jumping from one world to another is only possible on specific maps with mirrors – the idea that the creators obviously went for in Silent Hill: Origins.

And basically, when talking about The Medium, it's impossible to advertise that the game allows you to go in all four directions and turn in the opposite direction. No, everything is extremely linear. Naturally, there are small branches in this linear pipeline, but they always lead to a dead end. Of course, it is worth encouraging the creators: in every such stalemate, some kind of note with fascinating information can always be found.

On the one hand, similar linearity is good. At first touch the puzzle - you always know correctly where to go and what to do to solve the puzzle. On the other hand, it occasionally leads to some not-so-glorious gaming excesses. For example, the moments when Marianne escapes from Pasty, the monster voiced by Troy Baker. These scenes are more reminiscent of late 2000s QTEs: one wrong move and you're headed for the checkpoint. The same goes for stealth segments, which can only be traversed in one direction.

The local still camera also aggravates this problem. Yes, in dimensional situations it works fine. Sometimes the virtual videographer even manages to pull off some amazingly beautiful shots. However, when it comes to local action, the camera is always ready to pan around to better understand where the enemy is, how to get away from them, or how to get to the next room.

Fortunately, the creators foresaw the possibility of giving at least some resistance to the enemies Marianne encounters in the spirit universe. If the protagonist gets caught, she can emit a blinding beam of light to enemies, and to get through a swarm of deadly moths, it will be necessary to use the light shield.

In the other, we have before us a game of great quality, which has had a bit of bad luck with the marketing campaign and the slightly inflated expectations of a part of the public. Yes, The Medium is not the successor to Silent Hill. Worst of all, not in the way almost everyone expected: The Medium may be a horror, but it's definitely not survival horror. There are a couple of BU moments in the game that have the ability to make you cringe, but for the most part it's a faster magical thriller. A magical thriller of great beauty and atmosphere that was far from being a bad game to being a good work.