The Medium

The Medium is uninspired, from puzzles to characters. If you’re looking for an interesting world to explore, it delivers with stunning art direction, but for those looking for a richer experience, The Medium feels skin deep.

Medium is definitely the most ambitious project of Bloober Team, albeit it cannot completely avoid the moniker of an “AA” production. The visuals of both the real and metaphysical worlds are of high quality, the story keeps the interest high and the music is the glue that holds firmly together the whole experience. If only it tried to offer more depth in its overly simplistic environmental puzzles and gameplay in general.

The Medium is a step in the right direction for Bloober Team and I hope that it’s a sign that the studio is moving out of its comfort zone. It’s definitely the most dynamic title from the devs so far. At its best times, The Medium channels Silent Hill, but the rough pacing and limited gameplay outside of puzzle-solving hold it back. Additionally, the unsatisfactory ending leaves a sour note that detracts from the overall experience.

While The Medium’s design stumbles are disappointing, its human characters and gorgeous world are ultimately the things that stuck with me. Once I finally made it to the end of the road, I immediately restarted the campaign to experience all of the narrative breadcrumbs with the newfound clarity of the ending in mind, which is the sign of an effective story. And the game’s day one availability on Xbox Game Pass is just another in a long line of reasons why the service is a must-have. It might not reach the unforgettable highs of James Sutherland’s time in the town of Silent Hill, but The Medium carves out its own corner of the genre that’s worth losing a bit of sleep over.

The Medium is an interesting and enjoyable game, but one let down by some awkward animations that constantly threaten to break the immersion created by an otherwise captivating game world, and those weak stealth sections that Bloober Team can't seem to leave behind. It's very much a one-and-done game — you can easily see everything it has to offer inside of ten hours, so the pricing might be a little questionable for both the quality and quantity of what you get here. Still, price won't be an issue for Game Pass subscribers, for whom The Medium is a unique yet flawed gem that we'd absolutely recommend checking out as part of the service.

The 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.

The Medium is a decent horror game that has some really good ideas, but ultimately fails to live up to its potential.

The Medium is well-worth checking out for fans of old-school survival horror, and it's coming to Game Pass on day one, but despite being entertaining, it will inevitably leave players wanting more from a promising but ultimately uneven experience.

In short, The Medium is a good game with a well-told scenario, tortured and complex characters and its dual reality system is original: the whole is very cinematographic and the relationship to death is well treated. However the gameplay, although charming, is dated which makes that pleasure is a bit wasted. Finally, even if we have a good time, Bloober Team's game is not memorable once finished.

The Medium is a fascinating horror with a great unexpressed potential that falls short in being an experience that never feels truly ambitious: on the contrary it proves to be kind of limited, withheld and not exactly deep.

The Medium is less survival-horror and more adventure-horror like the studio's past games, but so long as Bloober Team is still refining this style, the team is clearly getting better. Characters and story are stronger here than in anything this team has done yet, and the world is rich in detail and atmosphere, made all the better with a moody soundtrack.

Ambitious, mesmerizing and scary, The Medium's parallel worlds provide a brilliant atmosphere without reaching the full potential of their promises. Its lack of gameplay is balanced by an impressive narration, nonetheless.

More than an allegoric hodgepodge, but not by much. The Medium offers an interesting, layered mystery with a lot of beauty, character and atmosphere, but fails to be wholly entertaining. The gameplay is often too simple to be fun, due to some rather tedious trial & error sections and a lot of scouring the environment for an object that will most likely send you to the next search. You’ll probably need more patience for this than the end feeling is worth.

The Medium has grand ambitions, but stumbles under the weight of them all. The story is emotionally engaging, but the environments fail to leave a memorable impact. Puzzles are repetitive and typically solve themselves, while slowly moving through the hotel loses its threatening aura. The Medium is a great story to watch and listen to, just not to play.

The entanglement of two realities is an interesting concept. But The Medium shows too many design weaknesses, can become tedious and doesn’t live up to the expectations you might have in an intense horror game.

The Medium is, without a doubt, Bloober Team's most ambitious game in terms of scope and scale. It successfully leverages fixed camera angles and strong sound design to inspire a horror experience that's unashamedly nostalgic. Despite its successes, it never really capitalises on its unique dual reality mechanic and ultimately feels the same as the team's previous games.

For a title devoid of action, outside of a couple of stealth sequences and a ‘run towards the screen from the giant monster bit’, The Medium might commune with the spirit world... but it fails to communicate all that well with the player.

Much like Bloober Team’s previous horror efforts, The Medium features an interesting story in a compelling and creepy world but is let down by often boring and dragged-out gameplay sequences.

There is a lot to be pleasantly surprised by The Medium. What Bloober Team has accomplished as a relatively small developer is remarkable, but there’s a drawback to the game. One that makes playing the game a next to schizophrenic experience.

The Medium, perhaps aptly, is an interesting game of “nearly there”. It is creepy but not frightening, intriguing but not wholly engaging, clever without capitalising on it. This translates to its story, which I never lost interest in but neither was I completely hooked. The Medium goes to some dark places, touching on a slew of heavy ideas like mourning, PTSD and child abuse. It doesn’t drop the ball on these, per se, but neither does it feel equipped or committed enough to do them justice.

The Medium is a chilling tone piece that's bogged down by retro influence and a protagonist that can't stop oversharing.

The Medium certainly has a story worth telling, but the stop-and-go nature of the vehicle for the narrative may prevent some from fully exploring it. The Xbox Game Pass release seems like a smart route for the game because of that, and while I’m normally hesitant to experience games in this way, I feel like I would have enjoyed The Medium much more if I’d watched someone else play it.

If you’re after action and full-on horror, The Medium will likely leave you wanting, and considerably so. This is more of a slow burn, the twisted plot unravelling over six to eight hours. I found the pacing to be ideal, with the game throwing just enough moments of high intensity into the mix to keep things interesting. There is a big bad of sorts, but don’t expect traditional boss fights, with encounters being designed to be intimidating and scary rather than difficult. Bloober clearly wanted everyone to be able to see this story through to its conclusion.

There’s certainly technical wizardry at work making the game’s big hook possible, and the realm of the dead is a well-imagined bit of dark artistry, but we’ve also seen smarter and more compelling iterations of the same idea in recent years.

As a narrative focused experience, The Medium generally impresses. In terms of gameplay, it often just feels too easy and lacking in depth. But even with criticisms towards the latter, if you're looking to embrace a horror game for one dark night or two, The Medium is a worthy choice. It's clearly the vision of a team who loved the concept and wanted to take players on a narrative driven adventure, filled with dark themes and systems such as the dual-reality mechanic that feel integral to the story. If you can accept The Medium for the experience that it is, you're in for a good time that will continuously surprise you with its story beats and absolutely incredible visuals on the Xbox Series X.

The Medium is an enjoyable survival horror that's held back by a lacklustre narrative and a signature mechanic that never reaches its full potential…Even with Silent Hill composer Akira Yamaoka's score ringing across its twisted soviet world, Bloober Team's latest project pales in comparison to the legends that came before it.

The Medium won't give you any sleepless nights, but treat it as a paranormal thriller rather than an all-out horror game and you'll find an interesting story (albeit a disturbing one at times) that will encourage you to push through its slightly repetitive split-screen gimmick to find out how it all ends. A short but intriguing tale.

The Medium isn't a bad game by any stretch of the imagination – it's just nothing special. The dual world mechanic doesn't offer much that's genuinely new or interesting, the next-gen visuals are let down by poor animation, and the controls are a bit clunky. It's also simply not scary. The saving grace is that the world that's been created here is interesting, allowing for a story that keeps you wondering what the next revelation will be throughout its eight-or-so hour running time. Still, there's good groundwork here if Bloober Team does ever deliver a sequel – hopefully with better facial animation, more grotesque enemies roaming its environments, and an actual combat system.

Despite its technical prowess and stunning visuals, The Medium is a drag. From slow, uninteresting gameplay to a confusing and poorly executed story, Bloober Team's latest makes for a good tech demo, but not much else.

This is more of an evolutionary vestige than a healthy new growth. Bloober might have done better to let it die. [Issue#356, p.92]

Yes, this is one of the first Xbox Series X’s big exclusives, yes, it’s in the Game Pass. But those are about the only reasons why you should even think about playing this mediocre horror.

Bloober Team has summoned a rich atmosphere, under all that writing, and one or two sequences offer glimpses of a purer game.