I HATE horror games. I've played lots of them, the last game I played was Resident Evil 7 and killing an enemy just for him to reappear over and over is beyond annoying for me. I also recently played Maid of Sker, a second rate horror game that's slow pace as with all horror games frustrates and bores me to the point of uninstalling. The Medium is different.
I initially downloaded The Medium after hearing it has some pretty easy achievements and as someone who has 315,000 gamerscore (cheap flex I know) I thought I'd give it a shot but expected to run into yet another dull horror game. Instead I found a game that kept my attention from start to finish, had me applauding some of the puzzles and had me looking for deeper meaning behind some of the storylines.
The game starts fairly slowly by dropping you into a very nice house and tasking you with finding a specific item but also letting you discover a few hidden notes and extras along the way. Exiting the house after about 5-10 minutes is when the story really kicks off. You travel to an abandoned hotel called Kiwa and are greeted by a mysterious young girl called sadness, she runs off and you must use your skills as a medium to not only connect with her but guide yourself through locked doors, find hidden areas, solve very well laid out puzzles and ultimately figure out what the hell is going on and why everyone is dead. The Medium uses a very unique style of split screen single player at many points which brings a new element to problem solving and story that I've never seen before in my 2 decades long gaming history. You appear in the split screens as yourself and also a spirit version of yourself, This works flawlessly and adds that extra challenge as you try to keep and eye on both the "real" world and the spirit world looking out for clues or collectibles that could appear on either and be easily missed.
Graphically this game is wonderful. It uses ray tracing effects which is still super rare and only used by a handful of games currently on Xbox Series consoles. This makes lighting extremely realistic and I was blown away at certain scenes while playing on Series X. 4K on Series X and 1080p on Series S.
Performance wise this game has its issues, while its solidly locked to 30FPS which is very sufficient for a "horror" game it does suffer from "frame pacing" issues which occur on occasion. This is hard to spot though unless you know what to look for. For more detailed analysis on this check out digital foundry on YouTube. The bigger problem I had was with game crashes. The game crashed 3 times while I was playing and because of the rather awkward save system it meant I had to track back through up to 10 minutes of gameplay to get back to where I was. The save system as a whole isn't my favourite as it saves only after certain story progressing events meaning you could lose that 10-15 minutes of exploring if your game does crash.
Story wise this game had me hooked. Most horror games try to frighten you with jump scares and try to leave you in a constant state of panic while running from an unkillable enemy. Instead The Medium tells a very disturbing and unsettling story that allows you to explore certain situations at your own pace and discover more troubling items that unravel the story like peeling back layers on an onion. The pacing is perfect for me as it moves the plot along fairly quickly but you never feel anxious or pushed, you have time to look around for a few minutes and discover everything before you go forward, something most horror games don't allow you to do. As someone who is very OCD about collecting everything this is the style of gameplay I love. Don't get me wrong though at certain points quick thinking is needed, especially during a certain section of Richards area where countering tentacle like creatures had to be timed perfectly or else they wouldn't die and continue to attack.
The medium has about 85% play time and 15% cutscenes which works very well, giving you time to take the story in after solving a puzzle or fighting your way past a tricky section.
Overall this is honestly the first "horror game" that I have truly applauded, it takes risks in its gameplay style, implementing a fixed camera, adding split screen single player gameplay, puzzle solving that is intuitive and well rounded and a story that had me genuinely intrigued to see where it would take me. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this game to anyone who owns a series console and from someone who detests horror games I have been truly surprised and shocked by The Medium. 9/10.
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