The Medium Review – Parti Poltergeist Polonai

What is happening beyond? It is a question that has dominated the human psyche since the dawn of consciousness. And beyond this ridge? This horizon? Or the ultimate question, the most unanswered of all: what is it beyond this deadly plan? What happens when we pass?

Without answers, indices or even the slightest idea of ​​an idea, it is not surprising that so much time and effort have been devoted to the media exploring death. The whole kind of horror and most thrillers are directly based on death as part of history, and games are not different. Resident Evil and Silent Hill have launched the ball decades ago, and the trend is maintained today.

The fascination around death is so deeply rooted that almost all angles or approaches have instantaneous credibility, and as such, the latest creation of Bloober Team The medium has immediately captivated the market when it was revealed. Equipped with a mysterious division mechanism in the world, The Medium was to be one of the master parts of the Xbox Series X at launch. The exit slid until January, but would it be a bad omen for the spell of experience?

The medium features Marianne, a Polish who is fast learning that she is burying her adoptive father, Jack. It is a mystery for us, and that it is by choice or lack of knowledge, it reveals little on itself right away. Except on a key point: she sees dead. Walk, like ordinary people.

Marianne is a medium, and she is able to help those who have gone to the next plan of existence by interacting with the deceased in a kind of spiritual kingdom. This is an excellent configuration for a mystery, and of course, Marianne quickly receives a call from a man that she does not recognize. He seems to know her and he needs his help. For a reason that she seems to not understand, she goes to Niwa Resort to investigate. Although it drags at the beginning, the following adventure covers a lot of land. Generously using Marianne's powers, this slow combustion warms up as it continues. He goes to places I expected, places I did not have and finally tell a story I wanted to see through.

The medium relies heavily on the environments in which it places the characters to provide a context for history, and it's really well done. Being in Poland, there is a ton of history on which to rely, and that's the case. Pieces of history are scattered in the levels, told either directly through an audio flashback or implied via an overall dressing. It is largely intriguing, and I wanted more. I found myself plunged into various aspects of Poland's history after a number of game sessions, and I congratulate Bloober Team for bravely installed The Medium in their home country. For me, offer foreigners a platform to dive into the history of Poland is the greatest success of The Medium. I really wanted to zoom and look closely Niwa, although the first person's camera control is unfortunately limited in some places.

Troy Baker makes one of the newspapers in pretty much everything he does (and he is literally in everything at this point, I think), but it ends up being a small piece of a successful voice distribution. The characters you recognize in a game or another, but who will have trouble name their turn in a really frightening line throughout the adventure.

Is it scary, however? Not really. I'm not the kind to crack for jumps as easily, and fortunately, The Medium avoids using this crutch too often. This succeeds better to create a psychological tension, even if I have never found myself physically dreading to enter the next room. The fingerprints of the past arouse the desire to know what happened, but the voiceover often frightening rarely receives a lot of visual support. It was definitely _in trying to scare me at times, but never quite found this delicate balance.

It has a lot to do with the way the medium is rhythmic. It's off. Effective thrillers, mysteries and frightening content skillfully balance the public on the razor wire. The voltage must be maintained constantly high, with brief respite that provide only the most fleeting expiration. The medium has moments that I absolutely adored from the visual and narrative point of view, but they were too far away for the impression that I needed a metaphorical security cover nearby. Gameplay segments guiding Marianne from A to B or working to recover a tool may be expected in an experience like this, but failures were too long. Long exploration sections show environments, but also made me feel too safe.

In the stretched scenarios, I was far too capable of guessing when the danger was past. I desperately traveled my notes, trying to understand why.

The only idea I had is that The Medium _se feels like it was from the same time that Silent Hill. You know, the time when script triggers were obviously obvious and the monsters could certainly not open this door. It may have an intentional choice, but too many mechanical parts have hurt the experience. Marianne is slower than a turtle in the molasses, and if the usually fixed camera angles are certainly kinematic, they drive too much hiccups when the angle changes. For my money, history and the environment are absolutely the reason to play The Medium, and if they had reduced a good half of the gameplay, it would be a more tense, tighter and more satisfying story.

The division mechanism of the world of which we are talking about in The Medium defines a good part of the visual and audio presentation. In these sections, the game simultaneously returns the physical and ethereal world. Yeah, two worlds. Marianne moves through the two worlds in locked mode, while physical characteristics and interactive points vary. It's a simple system, but it's a proof of concept for a game mode that was almost impossible before this generation of equipment. The world of sorry minds has dropped land everywhere, its masked characters taking a quality similar to that of ruined clay. Meanwhile, the physical world is infinitely more complex. The sound landscape fully matches the visual presentation, leaving no mistake in the world in which you are now.

The game looks excellent, with excellent artistic direction at all levels. The lighting has distinguished particularly, featuring a truly impressive rebound lighting of the Marianne flashlight, while the tiles and wood floors look remarkably at real surfaces. The reflections plotted by rays look great when they stand out and add a ton to the atmosphere even when they are less visible. Unfortunately, in the sections presenting a divided world, the resolution takes a pretty notable blow. The reflections are more pixeled and the image as a whole is much less clear. Other times, the scene blocked badly by entering a kinematics, or the textures did not load. It is far from being seen, but still disappointing since I played on the most powerful self-proclaimed console in the world.

As a whole, The Medium is a story of compromise. Despite all its successes in terms of visual narration and interesting setting, it is surrounded by a bad rhythm and a dated game design. Yet it is worth a glance for history lovers and those fascinated by the unknown. So what is it beyond? It's still in debate. In the present, The Medium offers an intriguing possibility of reflection.