The horror genre, which was on the rise in the early 2000s, is going through hard days today. Of course, it’s too early to talk about death: the Resident Evil series shows good sales, and various indie teams again and again issue noteworthy projects, but there are not enough really large and expensive games. A small but proud Polish company Bloober Team is striving to fill the niche: five years ago it popped up out of nowhere with its Layers of Fear and since then has strived to surprise the players with enviable regularity. The pinnacle of her creativity today has become The Medium – developed in collaboration with Microsoft, the novelty strives for the niche of high-budget horror games. What came of this – read below.
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It all started with a dead girl
The adoptive parent must be independently prepared for burial. Small but strong scene
Marianne is an unusual girl. Her gift is the ability to interact with the spirit world: using special powers, she is able to give peace to those who, for some reason, stay on Earth after death. Arriving at the funeral of her adoptive father, Marianne is confronted with an unexpected call: a certain Thomas promises to reveal the secrets of her gift and foggy past if she arrives at the abandoned Niva Hotel, which has been empty since Soviet times. The girl, poorly remembering her past, immediately agrees.
Even before entering the hotel, Marianne realizes that in front of her is a place full of monstrous secrets, literally oozing with hopelessness, hatred and other no less dark emotions. Here she meets Sadness – the soul of a girl who, for some reason, remains in the “Niva” and now seems to be trying to help the medium. The cherry on the cake is Maw, a strange creature that will pursue Marianne in an attempt to take over her body.
Childhood diseases
Layers of Fear flirted with the artist’s madness
For five years, starting with Layers of Fear, the Bloober Team has been on a clear path towards continuous improvement. The first title could boast of the “psychedelicity” of what was happening, and the subsequent ones developed the ideas laid down earlier. All the games released in five years (two parts of Layers of Fear, Observer and Blair Witch) at the same time fit into a rather classic by modern standards format of a “walking simulator” with rare intersperses of immortal monsters and mysteries that appear – the formula laid down by Amnesia and Outlast, in the hands Poles has undergone rather minor changes.
The studio games were taken to others. If there weren’t much revelations in the gameplay, then in terms of finds and visuals, the titles easily surprised: anyone who had a chance to play Layers of Fear remembers the changeable geometry of locations and a gramophone capable of melting the surrounding reality with its music. And those who have passed the Observer will not soon forget the journey through the crumbling minds of dying people.
Each new title showed that Bloober Team had an interesting future, but it was not so easy to predict the direction of movement. True, the announcement of The Medium came as a surprise even against the background of constant leaps between different settings: the first-person view was replaced by a “retrograde” camera with a fixed angle of view, and the mechanics moved more into the adventure game from the usual “walking simulators”.
Steal like an artist
There is also a small flirtation with the emotional component in the game: in another world, individual feelings can take on physical form
After the first trailers, most gamers began to compare the new product with the cult Silent Hill – they say, the same alternative realities, monsters and hints of psychology. The presence of Akira Yamaoka, the legendary composer of the “foggy town”, added fuel to the fire. Of course, expectations skyrocketed, and The Medium was expected to be at least as good as Silent Hill 2, if not even cooler. But the developers did not promise anything like that at all.
The parallel world of The Medium refers to restless souls, not personal nightmares. The central conflict is not tied to internal experiences, but to very specific mystical entities. And the soundtrack for the most part belongs not to Yamaoka, but to Arkadiusz Reikowski, a Polish composer who performed in the field of horror at Kholat (there, by the way, one of the vocal parts is performed by Mary Elizabeth McGlynn, a longtime ally of Yamaoka), Husk and Layers of Fear 2.
Other conflicts, plot hooks, approach to history – with Silent Hill the novelty is related only to the very idea of parallel worlds and a couple of techniques. In particular, the journey between worlds through mirrors was implemented in Silent Hill: Origins, and the plot amnesia and enticement in a place that clearly means more than meets the eye, easily refers to Silent Hill 2. Separate camera angles bring to mind the original Silent Hill, which also inflated the atmosphere with “impossible” angles and a constant change of perspective.
Seemingly important item hidden behind bars
The borrowing does not end there. Local mysteries are more reminiscent of Resident Evil with its need to combine items in the inventory. Meetings with a monster in reality resemble those in Detention – an indie horror from the Thai Red Candle Games, where the heroine has to hold her breath in order to successfully hide and seek from evil creatures. And the thin, almost imperceptible line with the post-Soviet legacy, which darkly “reverberates,” also seemed to come from the same Detention, in which the infamous “white terror“. And, for example, the interfaceless display of the remaining “charge” of the spirit is clearly seen in Dead Space.
Indeed, most of The Medium seems to be assembled from good ideas of “senior” colleagues, and sometimes even self-citation skips: for example, one of the first puzzles with a grandfather clock resembles that with a gramophone in Layers of Fear, and wandering through the forest and the dog encountered there send to Blair Witch. At the same time, I absolutely do not want to scold the game for borrowing: most of them have been rethought in their own way, albeit not always successfully.
Style above all else
One of the artist’s paintings
In an attempt to personalize their brainchild, the Bloober Team took as a basis for another world the work of the Polish artist Zdzislaw Beksiński, whose outlook on things was surprisingly dark and stood out from the background of most of his surrealist colleagues. A kind and cheerful man in life created wonderful worlds full of pain and suffering, refusing to give them a name. Most often, the paintings featured creepy creatures, consisting mostly of an interweaving of bones and flesh. Even the buildings in his drawings often seemed like a kind of dead organic matter, but, unlike his colleague Hans Rudi Giger, Beksinski did not try to mix mechanisms into the work. To this the Bloober Team added the idea of a death mask that covers the faces of the souls on the other side. Against the background of the fact that the creator of “Alien” is increasingly copied in video games, the world tailored according to the patterns of the Polish surrealist seems like a breath of fresh air.
It is also worth noting the work with sound here: rustles, creaks, beating wings of moths and other noises create a high-quality audio canvas that easily immerses you in history, and the voice acting of dialogues is made at a high level. I would especially like to highlight the audience’s favorite Troy Baker, who gave his voice to Pasty, the key antagonist of the story. Baker, who previously voiced Joel in The Last of Us and Ocelot in Metal Gear Solid V, this time takes on a whole new light, transforming his voice into something incredible. It is useless to describe in words – it is better to hear once.
It is easy to see that in their attempts to add uniqueness to their world, the developers forgot a little about the fact that horror should be scary. As a result, the trip turned out to be incredibly stylish, but not at all scary. For some, this can be a big disadvantage, while others, on the contrary, will only be glad of this state of affairs. There is simply nothing to be afraid of: monsters can be counted on the fingers of one hand, there are even fewer dangers in the world, and although the images of Beksinski look foreign, they rather stir up interest than arouse fear.
Between the worlds
The separation can be as horizontal …
The gameplay of The Medium does not carry any revelations: most of the time you need to travel around the destroyed hotel and solve various not particularly difficult puzzles – most often subject-oriented ones, familiar to any horror player like Resident Evil or Silent Hill. Rare chase scenes and even more rare stealth segments are called upon to dilute the puzzles.
If everything was built on these pillars, the game would be boring. This is where the main feature of The Medium comes to the rescue – the bifurcation of reality. It works in several ways at once: sometimes the screen is literally divided in half (horizontally or vertically), and sometimes it becomes possible to travel between realities using mirrors. Even less often, it happens that the heroine is simply thrown into the world of spirits, from where you need to find a way out – or realities suddenly begin to flip right before your eyes.
Most of the puzzles are built on the roll call of realities: it is impossible to transfer objects from one reality to another, but all actions in parallel dimensions affect each other. For example, Marianne can use a special power in the spirit world, releasing energy and powering sources of electricity, which is already useful in reality. Conversely, the correct manipulation of things in our world can open access to something on the other side.
Marianna’s capabilities in reality and on the other side are quite different: in another world, the heroine is able to accumulate a “charge” of energy, which can be spent to create a splash or to support a protective bubble that allows avoiding damage from otherworldly moths. As mentioned earlier, the heroine can leave the physical body to travel along the astral plane, and this is not always necessary only to search for objects or “recharge”.
In reality, Marianne can activate special vision, which allows you to see past events and find hidden objects, as well as manipulate things, which gives access to events on the other side – from viewing memories to new objects opening. The way you move between realities has a huge impact on the gameplay. For example, when splitting the screen, the bet is made on the fact that the geometry of the levels is different in the two worlds, and the player needs to find ways to move forward in both, while when moving through the mirrors, the main goal becomes a longer journey forward: the different elements of the level allow you to overcome in in one world what is impossible in the other. And in the segments where the heroine is “thrown” into the world of spirits, the main thing is the search for a way out in dangerous conditions.
At later stages, it becomes possible to control another character, whose abilities are somewhat different from those of Marianne. Revealing both them and the hero himself will be a spoiler, so we’ll limit ourselves to the fact that his skills add variety to the established formula of the game.
It is important to understand that The Medium is not an action game and there is no need to wait for some difficult battles or elaborate battle mechanics. This is primarily a quest, reminiscent of classics like Clock Tower, in which there was also no special opportunity to repulse the advancing opponents. Here, fortunately, it is still possible to fight – just not with the help of direct attacks.
Confused mind
When it comes to plot, The Medium doesn’t work as smoothly as we would like. The central connection with the forces of the heroine and the mysterious hotel is intriguing at first: the game neatly introduces several new characters, in particular the one-armed girl with the catchy name Sadness, and sets the starting intrigue.
Soon, however, names begin to pour in in a continuous stream: in scraps of her memories, Marianna learns new details about the guests of the Niva and about the bloody events of the past, which she considered an urban legend all her life. At some point, there are even too many names, and the narration itself flows too sluggishly to remember who is who through vivid associations. Moreover, some of the characters presented later fall out of the plot, while others, on the contrary, unexpectedly emerge closer to the finale and begin to play a much more significant role.
As already mentioned, you should not expect revelations of the level of the original Silent Hill tetralogy from the plot. It is tempting to start looking for deep meanings in what is happening, but here a situation arises that is the opposite of that in Silent Hill 2: at one time critics did not try to analyze the psychological implications of the title, explaining everything with banal devilry. The Medium, on the contrary, tries to seem smarter than it really is: yes, there will be a place for unexpected revelations and restored memory, and the final scenes at the best moments literally quote games about the “foggy town”. But the developers still realize that the sheepskin coat is still too big for them, and they don’t go further than bright homages, reserving the right to create a small chamber story with a much less vivid central conflict than trying to make a new world or seeking forgiveness.
And that’s not a bad thing. By clearly realizing its own strengths and weaknesses, the Bloober Team was able to deliver a quality story – short, elegant and interesting in its own way. The characters, although they are not distinguished by deep study, are able to be remembered for their unique features: for example, a journey into the mind of the artist Richard Tarkovsky allows you to much more fully reveal the image of a minor character, and Marianne herself acquires biography details through memories, notes and dialogue details, ceasing to be just charismatic a heroine with a distinctive scar on her cheek.
Difficulties in adaptation
But what I really want to scold is the technical state of the game. You can often notice frame rate drops to an obscene 10-15 FPS (despite the fact that basically the game produces almost stable 60 frames per second), problems with textures, slow loading of elements and a general decrease in performance – especially when switching to combining two realities. Of course, we are not talking about any nextgen here, and it’s not even a problem with performance – rather, the fact that adding ray tracing and simultaneous rendering does not pull the title to a completely new level.
I ran into another problem while solving one of the riddles almost at the very beginning of the game. Logic suggested an obvious solution, but the game for some unknown reason did not give the expected result. The video driver update saved me: it was worth turning on The Medium after that, and the solution turned out to be exactly what one would expect under the current conditions. The problem was that the required element simply refused to be highlighted, preventing it from interacting with itself. You can blame it on my personal problems, but, alas, at the time of the start of the game there was simply no driver.
The Medium perfectly demonstrates the simple truth that everything new is well forgotten old. The use of seemingly hackneyed tricks, the return of the static camera straight from the late 1990s and the general adherence to the trends of the “golden age” of horror still feels good today. While the game is still far from perfect, it is becoming increasingly clear that Bloober Team is a studio worth watching for anyone who cares about the horror of video games.
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