DaRmaZat When I bought The Medium, my biggest concern was the duration of the game. I had read that some players were able to finish it within 6 hours or even less. However, for me that was certainly not the case. Only after more than 17 hours I saw the end credits roll, so the others really must have rushed it. In my honest opinion, this is not the way one should play The Medium.
The story starts very slow, but captivating. At first it doesn’t feel like a horror game, but more like a 3D puzzle adventure game. Actually, when you’ve learned how to switch worlds and where to use Insights, you already master the hardest element of the limited control scheme. The puzzles aren’t very hard to solve either. With some of them I had a tough time but most riddles conceal a logic solution, which is often based on the order of execution or the usage of your special abilities as a medium.
At a certain point the story drags a bit on and the few escape scenes, where you have to hide for the monster or just plain old running for your life, cannot expel the thought that a lot of sections feel either unoriginal or clearly uninspired. Temporarily the embedded ray tracing feature literally lights up things a bit more for you, until it also makes your game crash.
A turning point though is the moment in the game where the character of Thomas finally arrives in flesh and blood. From then on as a player you start gaining the hope that the parallel stories of Marianne and Thomas will merge together in one big climax.
So to conclude, is The Medium a good game? Despite it’s clunky controls and often gawky camera, an over-the-top non-original story, too few jump scares, too little action, too easy puzzling and intermittent ray tracing crashes, it still deserves a positive answer here. We haven’t had that many good games so far in 2021, so we should just be satisfied with it, as it was as least intriguing…
Finally, some footage below.
