The Medium from Bloober Team tells a fairly straightforward story, for the most part. The game’s weirder concepts are introduced at a gradual pace, and players shouldn’t have too much trouble understanding what’s going on. However, The Medium‘s ending can be a little confusing, especially since it fails to truly answer all of the questions players may have about the story, and leaves things open-ended.
Some The Medium reviews have criticized the ending for this, whereas others have praised the developer’s decision to leave some things ambiguous. Regardless, some opinions may sway when way or the other after fans get a better understanding of exactly what happened at the end of the game.
The Medium is short, so even though it’s only been out for a couple of days at the time of this writing, it’s safe to say that many people may have already managed to finish it. In order to discuss The Medium‘s ending, this post will have MAJOR SPOILERS. Those that don’t know what to what happened at the end of the game should turn back now.
Before diving into the events of The Medium‘s ending, it’s important to explain the game’s general plot. Essentially, players take on the role of a medium named Marianne whose adoptive father recently passed away. Marianne has psychic abilities that allow her to not just communicate with the dead, but occasionally travel to the spirit world. Marianne soon receives a strange phone call from someone asking her to travel to the abandoned Niwa Hotel, claiming that they need her help and that they know about her powers. To prove their validity, the person on the other end reveals their name to be Thomas and that they know about Marianne’s recurring dream of a girl being chased down a pier by a man with a gun.
Intrigued and unsettled, Marianne heads to the Niwa Hotel immediately to investigate what’s going on there and learn who called her on the phone.
Upon arrival at the Niwa Hotel, it becomes clear that the location was home to some grisly events, with ghostly echoes dotted all over the building. Marianne meets a young girl spirit named Sadness, who helps Marianne make her way through the hotel. Thanks to The Medium‘s dual-reality gameplay mechanic, players are able to explore both the real world version of the Niwa Hotel as well as the spirit world version while they follow Sadness around.
Sadness is a mostly benevolent spirit, but there is another being in the Niwa Hotel that is not. The Maw, a hulking monstrosity voiced by Troy Baker that relentlessly pursues Marianne whenever it sniffs her out in the spirit world, desperately wants to take over Marianne’s “skin.” Marianne has no way of fighting The Maw, and instead must resort to hiding from it and sneaking around.
During her investigation, Marianne starts to learn more about Sadness and Thomas, who was a medium himself. Marianne has visions that lead her to some startling revelations. For one, Sadness is actually Marianne’s supposedly deceased sister Lilianne, or Lily. Not only that, but Thomas is her biological father, and he was equipped with some unique medium abilities. For instance, whereas Marianne is in control of both her real body and her spirit body at the same time, the spirit version of Thomas had a completely separate personality and consciousness from the “real” version of Thomas.
It seems as though when Marianne was born, her mother died in childbirth. The family lived at a house in the woods not far from the Niwa Hotel, but the Soviet government became aware of Thomas’s special abilities. A KGB spy tortured Thomas and burned down the house while both Lily and Marianne were both inside. The only way they managed to survive was Lily allowing a horrific part of her medium abilities, The Maw (perhaps created due to the trauma of her mother’s death), loose on the world, in exchange for it helping them escape the burning house safely.
The Maw proceeded to kill everyone else at the Niwa Hotel, while Marianne went into a coma from her injuries. Thomas abandoned Marianne at the hospital, while he locked Lily in a underground bunker that was evidently built by the Nazis as a hidden stronghold for Hitler. In present-time, Marianne finds herself in the bunker, where she encounters the spirit version of Thomas, who helps fill in some of these blanks.
Thomas explains that the only way to stop The Maw is for Lily to die, revealing that Lily isn’t actually dead. Eventually, Marianne finds the living Lily at the end of a pier, harkening back to her nightmare. Marianne then has a choice to make: she can kill Lily to get rid of The Maw, or she can kill herself to prevent the creature from taking over her body and becoming stronger, and eventually it will die out.
Armed with a handgun, Marianne points it to her own head, seemingly deciding to kill herself. Unfortunately for those who want definitive answers, Bloober Team doesn’t make it clear if Marianne killed herself or shot Lily. The screen fades to black and players hear a gunshot, and that’s pretty much it.
However, an after-credits scene does seem to confirm one detail: the spirit version of Thomas is apparently alive, and it has managed to leave the Niwa Hotel. If a Medium sequel is ever produced, perhaps it will follow his exploits, or maybe it will be about Marianne trying to find him (assuming she didn’t kill herself). Whatever the case may be, fans will have to wait for Bloober Team to announce a sequel to find out what happens next.
The Medium is out now for PC and Xbox Series X.
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