Puzzles, or the details they reveal, are either boring or suffer from the game’s unpredictable pacing. But while The Medium attempts to reskin this structure with the addition of psychic skills and stealth sequences, Marianne’s powers only barely disguise the game’s inability to make a meaningful improvement on the game’s aging structure. They dig and root around and persevere because they would die of curiosity otherwise. Typically in these kinds of games, the momentum is carried by the player’s sheer desire to see how the story plays out. Other sections are stealth or evasion-based, forcing Marianne to hide or obscure herself to escape a grotesque creature known as The Maw. Puzzles will often involve Marianne psychically projecting herself to the supernatural side and finding or interacting with an object before returning to reality to continue.

The Medium is structurally familiar to fans of horror games, in that it centers mostly on uncovering memories of past inhabitants and rooting through rooms and belongings to find ways to progress to the rest of the building. In combination these skills allow her to find clues to the hotel’s past and navigate the dangers of the ossuary that haunts it. She also has a spirit shield that fends off certain enemies with the repelling power of light energy. She can sense “spirit trails,” paths of energy that linger around anomalous objects and locations, some of which manifest in small rifts that can be explored to release memories that are relevant to that place. Using her mind, Marianne can harness spiritual energy to see and feel things that other people can’t. Illustrating the duality of Marianne’s ability to straddle two realities is a split-screen mechanism that often shows her actions in both the “real” and an “other” world. Hotel Niwa, based on a 1-1 recreation of a real hotel in Krakow, Poland, is drenched in the delicious sort of urban decay you see in disaster porn shots of Chernobyl and abandoned theme parks. Over the course of their career, Bloober Team has perfected the art of a good atmosphere. As she moves through the hotel, her journey is supplemented by a strange set of psychic powers she has had since childhood, allowing her to unravel the events by accessing a supernatural otherworld. Crumbling concrete pillars and rotten carpet mingle with blood streaks and howls of the dead. The hellish scene that awaits her when she arrives all but confirms its history of violence. In the game, Marianne is lured to the Hotel Niwa, once hailed as a communist vacation paradise for middle-income families and rumored to have been the site of a massacre some years prior. Does this latest title help reaffirm and strengthen their contributions to horror? Or does it, in its effort to churn out another hit, run neither hot nor cold? The Medium, originally announced in 2012, has been reimagined since its original inception, but its psychological thriller format is familiar territory for the team. From the early access Layers of Fear and its sequel, to Observer and 2019’s Blair Witch, their focus on the genre has firmly established Bloober as a premiere horror development studio. In the past five years, Bloober Team has all but reinvented itself.

The maw the medium