When Microsoft first started revealing games for its Xbox Series X console, one of the first was The Medium from Layers of Fear studio Bloober Team. While still a horror game, The Medium is otherwise a major departure from Bloober Team's previous efforts, ditching the company's first-person viewpoint for a third-person angle that calls back to the glory days of old-school survival-horror. As one of the first Xbox Series X console exclusive games, The Medium has higher expectations than normal, with many early adopters looking to it to show what the system can do. In terms of graphics and many other metrics, The Medium lives up to expectations as Bloober Team's best game to date.
The Medium's environments are gorgeous and take great advantage of the next-gen hardware. The level of detail is stunning, with Medium's ray-tracing graphics bringing the whole thing to life with realistic lighting. The game also runs brilliantly, with zero performance hiccups or technical issues for players to worry about. Overall, The Medium is one of the better-looking next-gen games available so far.
But while The Medium is a mostly-gorgeous horror game, there is one area where the visuals will let players down, and that's with the wooden facial animations. In all honesty, the somewhat weak facial animations would not be distracting at all in most games, but they're amplified here because of how good the rest of the game looks. It can be distracting and will hurt the immersion for some players whenever a cut-scene is playing.
Most people will be able to look past this one issue, as otherwise The Medium is a game that delivers the goods in terms of next-gen visuals. It uses lighting and shadows to create an intensely immersive atmosphere, which in turn helps the game's scarier moments land like they should. There is one particularly memorable moment early on in the game, during one of the first encounters with The Maw, where players see the creature emerge from the darkness and lumber full-speed at protagonist Marianne. It's one of the scariest things that happens in the game, and it's also one of the game's standout visual moments.
The Maw is the main antagonist of The Medium, voiced by Troy Baker. It's a towering monstrosity with demonic wings that pursues Marianne relentlessly whenever it finds her in the spirit world. To survive The Maw, Marianne has to sneak around the environment, strategically holding her breath at the right times to avoid being caught. Many horror games have a tendency to make stealth sections frustrating or overwhelming, but they're used sparingly enough in The Medium that they are actually a welcome change of pace to the usual gameplay and should sufficiently keep players on their toes.
When players aren't hiding from The Maw, they will be exploring The Medium's game world, looking for clues and solving puzzles. The Medium's puzzles take direct inspiration from classic survival-horror games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, often revolving around collecting objects and figuring out where to use them in order to proceed. None of the game's puzzles are obtuse or really challenging at all, which may be disappointing to some, but the benefit of that is that the game maintains a brisk pace and players should never get stuck to the point of frustration.
The Medium isn't shy about its Resident Evil and Silent Hill inspirations. Besides the puzzles, The Medium's influences bleed through in other areas of the game as well. Famed Silent Hill composer Akira Yamaoka worked on the soundtrack, and the game also uses fixed-camera angles to masterful effect. However, The Medium's fixed-camera angles feel modernized, with the camera following Marianne as she explores the game world, giving the game a decidedly cinematic feel not found in the horror games of yesteryear.
Where The Medium differs from its inspirations is through some of its gameplay mechanics. As the title suggests, Marianne is a medium, meaning she is a psychic who can interact with the dead and the spirit world. Marianne's various psychic abilities are gradually introduced to The Medium players as the game goes on. Some of the basic ones include being able to sense for helpful objects in the environment as well as being able to speak directly to the dead.
Marianne's psychic abilities in The Medium become a little bit more complicated when the spirit world itself is involved. This is where The Medium's dual-reality gameplay is featured, with the game using a split-screen to show what Marianne looks like in the real world while simultaneously showing how she appears in the spirit world. Actions taken in one world can impact the other, and this where the game's more interesting puzzles are highlighted. The Medium maintains its frame rate during these moments as well, which is a testament to the next-gen technology at work as historically, the vast majority of games lower their frame rate in split-screen.
While in the spirit world, Medium protagonist Marianne can use a psychic shield to protect herself from butterflies that block her path, and that is basically all the "combat" there is to the game. There are some other, slightly more action-oriented moments later on that we won't spoil here, but even those are fairly benign compared to other games. The Medium doesn't need to have Marianne running around guns blazing to be entertaining though, and luckily the more lowkey gameplay is still plenty fun.
Bloober Team has created a haunting world in The Medium that is, oddly enough, a joy to explore. It's fun exploring the game world, finding clues that reveal more details about the story, and progressing from one puzzle to the next. The game has an almost Life is Strange, "walking simulator" quality to it as Marianne remarks on the various objects players find, and thanks to some great voice work and writing, these tidbits are interesting to listen to and it's rewarding to find them. Plus, more impatient players can simply skip through all of the voiced text if they want, though they'll be missing out.
Unfortunately, The Medium fails to maintain this narrative momentum throughout the entire experience. The Medium's story is interesting for most of it, though things start to peter out near the end and the ending itself is going to leave a lot of players feeling frustrated and shortchanged. It's far too open-ended to be satisfying, and while there is a hint at what players may be able to expect from a potential Medium sequel, it's not enough to make up for the lackluster conclusion.
The Medium's replay value is another area where the ball is dropped. Like Resident Evil, The Medium is a short game that can be completed in roughly five hours or so, or even faster if players simply sprint through everything to get to the end. But where The Medium and classic Resident Evil differ is that the latter makes sure to load itself up with a ton of replay value, making it worthwhile for players to keep going through the game. The Medium does not, and in fact, it's possible to 100% the game in a single playthrough if players explore the environment thoroughly enough.
If players do miss some of the game's collectibles on the first time through, they will likely be frustrated to discover that The Medium has no chapter select of any kind. This means that if players missed something late in the game, they will have to replay it from the beginning if they hope to unlock all of The Medium's achievements and fully complete it. The bright side is being able to skip through the dialogue makes this a relative breeze, but it's still an unnecessary inconvenience. Then again, old survival-horror games tend to be the same, so perhaps this was another design decision meant to pay homage to the classics, though like tank controls, there may be some aspects of old-school survival-horror that would be better left in the past.
The Medium is a short game that does not offer much in terms of replay value. Normally this would be a serious problem, but The Medium is available through Xbox Game Pass, and so its short length isn't nearly as pressing of an issue. It's short but mostly sweet, and will definitely appeal to fans of classic survival-horror games. It's easily Bloober Team's best game yet and something Xbox Series X owners should check out as soon as they can.
The Medium launches January 28 for PC and Xbox Series X. Game Rant was provided with an Xbox Series X code for this review.
