- Publisher: Bloober Team
- Release Date: Jan 28, 2021
- Also On: PlayStation 5, Switch, Xbox Series X
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
- Unscored
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Feb 9, 2021The Medium is an interesting title to play through, but I think it is fair to say that while the split-screen, dual world element is a fascinating idea, it never truly excels at pushing the idea to its maximum potential. There are teases of what could be done here, but this is no new revolutionary way to play. Taking The Medium as an horror game, it brings a brilliant soundtrack that gives life to its locations with eerie atmosphere, an engrossing story that I wanted to see until its conclusion; the main element people will remember once the dust has settled in. Expect The Medium to be a mixture of uncomplicated investigatory item solving and walking through its striking environment art, a captivating and well presented world that is visually pleasing (or disgusting depending how you look at it), but one world where the scares are scripted to certain parts of the story, which stop any potential for this game to have a truly frightening experience.
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Feb 3, 2021The Medium is a decent psychological horror from the start, but it’s rather hollow when it comes to gameplay.
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Jan 27, 2021If you like the horror, thriller genre, I can say that The Medium is a game where you can get a nostalgic taste.
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Jan 27, 2021The Bloober Team delivers a psychological and supernatural thriller with multiple controlled influences, and a story that is both dark and touching. The Medium is an artistic work in its own right, both visual and musical, whose universe deserves to be explored. The Polish studio also manage to take advantage of this playful duality between the physical and spiritual planes without necessarily innovating too much during a linear adventure. The threat weighing on Marianne, as intense as it may be at times, loses too often in intensity to permanently mark the players. The Medium is ultimately an “arty” horrific experience like the developers' previous productions.
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Apr 1, 2021The Medium deftly ties all loose story ends and shows impressive art direction, but it lacks wholeness. The game feels like an artist who has too many ideas at the same time; he would grab a brush, then a pen or a piece of coal… but still cannot finish his masterpiece.
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Jan 27, 2021Some of the best horror games of the last decade have offered combat-free frights. After all, abandoned buildings are scarier when you can’t push back against the shadows. However, The Medium’s lack of combat highlights the challenge of letting atmosphere and puzzles carry a horror experience. The idea of exploring split realities is neat, but Bloober Team needed another gameplay hook to hang its hat on, because this horror show is a bit shallow.
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Feb 2, 2021If you go into The Medium with very high hopes, you will be disappointed, but if you walk in just looking for some eerie atmospheres, some award-winning voice acting and some nostalgic horror feels, then you will have some fun.
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Jan 27, 2021You can tell that Bloober Team loves horror and The Medium has a lot of lovable details. The atmosphere and original mechanics are the strong point. But the story loses strength and even becomes confusing. This added to the excessive linearity and the chases obtuse design don't allow me to recommend it more than to true fans of the genre.
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Feb 2, 2021The Medium is a flawed horror experience with an interesting story and a visually captivating spirit world. Fixed camera angles add excess clumsiness and the terrible framerate drops make it difficult to enjoy the split-screen views. With some glacial pacing and a lack of genuine scares or challenges, it fails to create a strong bond with either of its two worlds.
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LEVEL (Czech Republic)Apr 12, 2021The Medium is a psychological thriller with various simple puzzles, a whiff of horror and music like from Silent Hill. As a result, you will play the game mainly because of the storytelling and for its atmosphere. [Issue#310]
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Feb 10, 2021The Medium creates a nightmarish limbo for untethered souls in which players must evade, outwit and even aid its horrific inhabitants, but the strong atmosphere and effective scares aren’t enough to completely atone for a poorly constructed story and one-dimensional protagonist.
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Feb 3, 2021The Medium impresses with its next-gen graphics and unique, split-screenplay that lets you jump between the human and spirit worlds. Unfortunately, the horror game's not particularly scary.
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Jan 27, 2021As a horror game, The Medium doesn’t have enough resistance or solid scares overall, and as a tone piece, it often misses the mark with a lack of maturity and care in scripting. The core conceit of the game rears its head unexpectedly as it fails to reconcile its deep themes with its desire for shock, and its desire to create a horror experience without any strong mechanical grounding. The game doesn’t really provide anything to bridge its evocative artwork to its less than accomplished themes...For those that want to explore a fascinating looking interpretation of a spiritual world, however, The Medium is a rambling holiday in a wonderful macabre charnel house, but if you want something a little more bracing, you might want to look elsewhere.
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Jan 27, 2021The Medium is a game with neither big flaws nor anything it really excels at. The gameplay is quite simple and the story kind of reaches a mid point in between a horror book and a socio-political discourse that do not really match. In the end, it all amounts to a mediocre game by Bloober Team that, most likely, will have been forgotten by the end of the year.
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Jan 27, 2021Bloober Team does well to keep things taut all the way to the end, but there's a frustrating amount of untapped potential beneath its gameplay gimmicks and art direction.
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Jan 27, 2021Despite some missteps, there is good in The Medium. If you want a decent horror story to wade through, which offers telltale signs of the classics we’ve come to know and love, then Bloober Team’s latest is just that.
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Jan 27, 2021My favorite part of The Medium ended up being its "semi-fixed cameras," which blend old and new design philosophies in a way that seems genuinely palatable in 2021.
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Jan 28, 2021I really wanted to like The Medium. It tells a grown-up tale fitting for the genre and features strong location design and sound design. But In the end I have to say that I was bored for at least half of my nine hour long playthrough due to the repetitive gameplay and shallow presentation.
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Jan 27, 2021The Medium isn't even really a horror game, despite the setting and themes, and lacks any scares bar an early cheap jump. For a studio so focused on creating psychological horror it's hard to see this mildly spooky action-adventure as anything other than a misstep.
| This publication does not provide a score for their reviews. | |
| This publication has not posted a final review score yet. | |
| These unscored reviews do not factor into the Metascore calculation. | |
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Jan 27, 2021The Medium manages to unite in a single game four elements that are not easy to find well integrated in a single title: it maintains a good narrative tension, telling a difficult story in an affordable way, and its soundtrack perfectly complements this narrative. Its aesthetic proposal gives a unique framework and, at the same time, complements the story. Finally, it properly integrates its playable mechanics within the product. It is a risky work, which invites, like the rest of the Bloober Team games, that each one has their own interpretation of what happens on screen.[Recommended]
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Jan 27, 2021The story's emotional beats are written and executed well enough that I was nonetheless happy to go along for the ride even if some of the pieces didn't make much sense in hindsight. I'd still recommend waiting for a few patches to hit before you jump in, especially if you're planning to play on PC. But despite all the issues, I was invested the whole way through and came away with the feeling that The Medium is a journey worth taking.
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Jan 27, 2021Eventually, The Medium abandons its surprisingly empathetic take on the afterlife altogether to become a thriller, which, while honing in on a single thread, ends up being shallow and disappointing. The twists aren’t predictable but aren’t shocking, either, and while the latter half of the game sets itself up as an intricate web of interconnected relationships and secrets, it teases out hidden identities and other twists for way longer than it took for me to figure them out, leaving me waiting for the story to catch up. By the time I’d rolled credits and began processing what had just happened, I realized I didn’t have many plot points or striking moments to chew on.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 501 out of 801
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Mixed: 131 out of 801
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Negative: 169 out of 801
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Jan 29, 2021Really good game , bloomer team make narrative games that are really stunning
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Jan 29, 2021a pretty good game, but not the best, it should be longer, have harder puzzles and more mecanics
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Jan 29, 2021