The Medium – Zero Punctuation

Oh but this isn’t another first person walking simulator – it uses a fixed third person camera in direct reference to classic survival horrors! Hm, consider me on board for now, Bloober Team, but the moment you make me backtrack through a door that inexplicably leads to somewhere different I’m making you play my new get kicked up the arse simulator. For you see, that camera thing tells me something significant: that someone gets it. Someone gets that the third person fixed camera adds to the atmospheric sense of detachment that survival horror benefits from. Feels more like you’re being watched from the shadows by parties unknown and less like you’re nestled up against the protagonist’s nice warm buttocks the whole time. Some people might say The Medium hardly needs it though since the atmosphere of detachment is adequately created by the personalities of all the characters but those would be some terribly cruel people. Anyway, The Medium is about a twentysomething girl who wears clothes of a size somewhere between small and large and also has the ability to perceive the spirit world and talk to the recently dead.

She gets called out to an abandoned vacation facility and site of a famous massacre to uncover the sinister truth behind both it and her mysterious origins and get some material for her urban exploration Youtube channel. This might sound weird, but it took me a while to figure out that this fixed camera survival horror game with a gloomy atmosphere about exploring both a decrepit real world and an identically laid out scary netherworld that looks like it’s made primarily out of ham, was supposed to be Silent Hill inspired. Talk about missing the Otherworld for the crucified bodies on spikes. I guess I just wasn’t picking up the same vibe. It reminded me more of Dark Seed, that old point and click adventure game about exploring an H.R. Giger-designed parallel dark world as the protagonist struggles to overcome the horror of their moustache. Silent Hill feels organic and visceral and wet, The Medium felt more dead and dusty and as dry as a newlywed baptist who doesn’t believe in foreplay. Some kind of combat element might have helped. I don’t say that because Silent Hill had combat, Silent Hill combat was like the stick in the ice lolly, serving a purpose but not the part you want to chew on – it really seemed like The Medium was gonna have a combat element, but then it didn’t.

All the pieces were in place. We establish that ghosts can hurt us, and that we’re going to a place with more ghosts than the bargain bin at the Call of Duty shop, and that the main character can load up her arm with spirit juice to fuel a blast attack and a shield, so I was like, great, ghost laser tag, let’s Luigi’s Mansion this bitch. But then we don’t get that. Your blast attack is used mainly for clearing clutter out of the way like it’s a fucking astral leafblower and the closest thing to combat is the odd forced stealth stroke evasion sequence against a recurring monster who kills you in one hit, which is about as engaging as such things ever are, that is, as much as holding in a fart at a distant cousin’s wedding. And then at the end of each act the main character – who I seem to remember having a name but it’s one of many things about The Medium I struggle to hold in my memory – confronts a big elaborate monster spirit form of whoever’s been stirring up the trouble most recently and it really seems like a setup for a boss fight, and then whatshername just defeats them in the same cutscene with no bother. Look, I’m not asking for an exchange of ectoplasm bullets as our flaky protagonist dodge rolls about like Sonic the Hedgehog.

But the artists seem to have put a lot of work into the monster designs and I’m sure it’d feel more worth it if we had a chance to explore all their jiggly flaps looking for the weak spots. On the monsters, I mean, not the artists. Combat isn’t just a distraction to keep the twitchy kids occupied while mum and dad are stroking their chins at the random document pickups – to a horror game it adds context and engagement. Having to use a machete to hack aside the undergrowth in your path is what separates jungle exploration from a nature hike. The running theme of my time with The Medium is that I always felt like I was more skating along the top of it than getting immersed. The gameplay didn’t grab me. It’s the usual survival horror inventory puzzle stuff – explore environment, find door blocked by rabid polecat, explore a bit more, find can of rabid polecat repellent etc – but the level design constantly herds us towards progress and I never felt like I was the one coming up with the solutions. Case in point, there’s a bit where the recurring monster is stomping about and we have to evade it until we find a way to restart a generator, at which point main character lady said “Aha, now I can turn the tables on the monster!” and I was like “You can? It’s really not clear how. You gonna plug in a Karaoke machine and challenge it to a Something Stupid-off?”

I also wasn’t grabbed by the story. Although that might be retroactively because of the ending. If your plane ends up crashing in the mountains it’s hard to have fond memories of the airline’s hot towel service. Token warning: Just call me an auto shop for douchebags ‘cos there’s a ton of spoilers coming in. Basically, the main character – Marianne? I think it was Marianne – finds the person who caused everything, and said person asks her to shoot them to stop the monster. And Marianne decides she’s gotten really attached to this person in the nine seconds they’ve had to talk and proposes instead to shoot herself, which would also stop the monster by some awkward logic I wasn’t quite convinced by. The argument escalates for a bit, then cut to black, gunshot, roll credits. So she either shot herself or didn’t, guess it’ll depend on sequel viability. The Medium has good visual design and atmosphere, but I wasn’t thinking about those during my suddenly much freer afternoon. I was wondering why violent ballistic death leapt that quickly to the top of Marianne’s proposed solutions list. Just felt really out of nowhere. Failure of characterisation, I suppose. The suicide ending made sense in Spec Ops The Line, and Silent Hill 2, and my last school reunion.