Bloober Team’s latest horrifying title and Xbox’s newest exclusive, The Medium, takes the classic fixed camera exploration of games like Resident Evil and brings it into the modern age. While the game’s story and gameplay are a great look back in time with the benefit of improved graphical quality and animations, there are still several areas where the game falls short.
As an indie title, it should be expected that The Medium won’t have the polish that triple-A titles have after their first round of patches, though some of the issues that bring The Medium down seem as if they’d have been relatively easy to notice in testing.
10 Echo and Memory Shard Tracking
One of the ways that Marianne and the player discover what happened to the people at Niwa Resort is by finding Memory Shards, audio clips that can be found by interacting with certain objects, and Echos, which work in a similar fashion but are usually limited to sections of the game where Marianne is in both the material and spirit worlds at once. Unfortunately, these pieces of information can’t be listened to again without returning to the object that unlocked it and the game doesn’t let the player know which Echos and Memory Shards they have already listened to. Some simple means of tracking these collectibles while also allowing the player to listen to them whenever they wanted would go a long way in helping them keep on top of the story.
9 Movement Speed
As is the case with most horror games in confined spaces, Marianne’s movement speed is fairly slow, preventing her from simply sprinting away from Maw or dashing through a swarm of moths without needing to use her Spirit Shield. That being said, even her regular walking speed can feel like she is wading through mud at some points, and even with the addition of a run button, her speed doesn’t increase all that much. Giving the player some way of moving around Niwa faster would make backtracking to ensure the player has found every collectible much less of a chore.
8 Frame Rate
Despite being an Xbox Series X/S and PC exclusive, the frame rate can take a series dip from time to time, particularly during split-screen moments and the game is trying to load two versions of the world at once. Surprisingly, this frame rate issue is usually only limited to the material world split and not the spirit world split despite how much more detail is in the spirit world.
This could be a simple issue that can be fixed via a patch, but considering this has been around since the most recent gameplay trailer that was released just before the game came out, it may not be such a simple fix.
7 Certain Animations
In general, the gameplay animations are fairly solid and look like they belong in a high budget indie title for next-gen consoles. However, there are certain elements of cutscenes that look like they weren’t actually animated at all before release, most notably in the cutscenes with Marianne’s flash forward conversation with Spirit Thomas. In these scenes, not only are her hands barely moving at all, despite the fact that she is smoking and pouring drinks with them, but her eyes also tend to stay fixated on a point somewhere in the background, barely moving while she talks about what she has discovered.
6 Audio Volume
Audio quality in a horror game is essential if the developers want to get the most out of the horror aspects, as the creepy noises coming from the back of a dark room are often among the easiest ways to elicit a feeling of terror in the players. However, while The Medium is great at portraying this side of its audio, some of Marianne’s dialogue, particularly when she is talking to herself, can sound incredibly muted and barely audible. If it weren’t for the fact that the game has subtitles, there are several important lines that can be very easily missed.
5 Camera Angles
Games that are inspired by classics from the past often have to contend with outdated mechanics that drag the title down in the modern age. This isn’t a new occurrence, as I Am Setsuna, a fantastic RPG inspired by classic JRPGs, was brought down by its strict adherence to older game design, something that The Medium also suffers from with its fixed camera display. While the fixed camera isn’t necessarily bad, it often unnecessarily limits the player’s view of the world that can make some collectibles or, even worse, Maw’s chase scenes, difficult to see.
4 Lighting
Getting the lighting right in a game with many dark elements can be difficult, as the game needs to present its world without obscuring too much of it from the player’s view. While The Medium gets this right most of the time, there are some instances where the room is so dark that parts of it are completely obscured even when the brightness is turned up to the maximum setting.
This isn’t helped by the fact that Marianne’s flashlight fails to light up a room if she is too close to a wall, even though the light should be reflecting off of that wall to some degree, which makes finding certain story elements more difficult.
3 Different Marketing
For most of The Medium’s marketing, particularly once gameplay trailers began to release, many gamers saw this as a return to classic horror games like Resident Evil, with the player exploring a confined space with fixed camera angles, item collection for puzzle-solving, and a need to run from combat rather than engage with it. However, while some aspects of this are true, The Medium is more of a supernatural mystery game than a dark horror game. There are horror elements in the game, particularly when it comes to the monsters, but they aren’t the focus of the game and The Medium could have benefited from the marketing team conveying this more accurately.
2 Being Able To Fight Back Against Maw
Many games like The Medium will present the threat of a monster that is capable of killing the player incredibly quickly, though will give them very few ways to fight back against their aggressor. In Marianne’s first interaction with Maw, she is given the chance to fight back with her medium abilities to release herself from its grip, but this mechanic is never used again. Considering Maw shows up many times in the story, giving players the chance to do this again would have helped prevent having to sit through loading screens and cut scenes every time Maw catches up to Marianne.
1 The Ending
The biggest fix that The Medium needs, more than anything else, is in its ending. After finding out the secrets of Thomas, Niwa Resort, and how Maw came into existence, players are treated to a fairly intense cutscene that forces Marianne to make a world-altering decision, though the screen cuts to black before they are shown exactly what she did. Considering she was given a choice between two outcomes, players should have also been given this choice, as the final result is the same either way: Maw is prevented from leaving Niwa.
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