The Medium

Bloober Team, it must be said, consistently does a superb job on the execution of its games. The graphics are great, the score is great, the writing is usually at least solid. And in that regard this might be their best game yet; Marianne is a really great character, and I like how the plot is closely tied to recent Polish history in a way that feels fresh and serves as an engine for the story. Unfortunately, the mechanics are day-old bread stale. The game never quite knows what use to make of the splitscreen gimmick, and honestly I wish they'd swiped a page from "Murdered: Soul Suspect," which uses a somewhat similar concept and approach to better effect. Ultimately this is just a point-and-click game with some survival horror sequences bolted onto it, and it's less scary than deeply annoying. If you're really into point-and-click, or like the story, check it out, but otherwise, pass.

THE GOOD - Amazing, multi-layered story - The setting - Well defined characters - Graphics - Audio THE BAD - Controls - Performance THE REVIEW This is a linear point and click adventure game that reminds me of many classics. The story is great and has many layers. We discover it piece by piece, but not always in chronological order. It goes back years sometimes to present us with retrospective information, which eventually all fall into place. I've had lots of fun discovering the main plot and learning about all of the characters and how their side backstories explain their place in the main storyline. There are some puzzles to solve, but they aren't very difficult to figure out. This is not a bad thing actually. They give just a little challenge, but don't detract from the most important thing - the story, which to me is the best thing about this game. Being a Polish person raised in the post-communist era, I was instantly captivated by the setting of the game that brought a lot of nostalgia and memories from my childhood. The graphics and audio are of the highest quality. However the controls are clunky and very unintuitive, which makes the experience annoying at times. The performance can be very bad, the game stuttered on an nVidia 3080 RTX card quite often. Annoyingly it would also happen during the dynamic "escape the monster" parts, which - similarly to clunky controls - has just detracted from the overall experience. I am still giving it 5 stars, because for me the amazing storyline has definitely made up for bad controls and performance issues. I really hope there is going to be a sequel!

I've just finished the game and must say, the visuals, environments, sound design, level design even the light puzzles were all great and the dual world element does add to uniqueness of the game. As for the story, it is quite fresh and well paced with a good amount of plot twists (SPOILER - the ending feels open, are we going to get a sequel?). As for the technical aspect, the optimization is not ideal. The game does look beautiful, the ray tracing does work nicely, DLSS does its thing as well I suppose, but the frame rate just isn't consistent through out the game, even on RTX 4070 Ti Super. Thinking this is a Nvidia sponsored game, I would expect much better performance form an Nvidia RTX 40 series card. That being said, I would still recommend this game to anyone who likes adventure horror games with some light puzzles and action scene here and there.

I'm a big fan of adventure games, and in the adventure game genre, this is what you would consider a blockbuster, so I had to play it. The graphics are top notch. There may be some optimisation issues here and there, but it's an adventure game, so not much of a big deal, I locked my framerates in game to 30fps, which was a perfectly adequate gaming experience for this type of game (i7 10th gen, RTX 3060 laptop). The gameplay was average for this type of game, but it was very simple, probably too simple really, I don't like games to be hard, I prefer medium, but this really was a breeze to play. Only one puzzle had me stumped and that's because I forgot to use the 'sixth sense' type feature. *MINOR SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE* The other part I didn't like gameplay wise was the existence of 'The Maw'. I relaise they may have wanted to add a bit of a threat, but when I play adventure games I want puzzles rather than sneaking around. There weren't too many appearances of him though thankfully. The story was also average, but I didn't get into it much. I got the various mens names mixed up as they were all pretty generic, and at some points didn't completely know (or care) what was going on or who was who. Story was probably a bit below average for me, but I could see that some people would like it. I like more character interactions in adventure games. *END OF SPOILERS* So overall, I'd say it's a good looking, but below average adventure game. However I like to support developers of these types of games as I do enjoy them, and developers like this are keeping them alive in the mainstream and giving them the 'blockbuster' treatment that adventure games deserve.

Some concerns I initially had was that the entire game would be split-screen where both worlds are rendered at the same time. The main concern was that it would be hard to look at, performance would tank, and it would make running from the monster unnecessarily difficult. However, most of the time you're either in one world or the other and the only times both are rendered at once is for some puzzle sections where there's no monster. The dual world level design is actually really well designed and it definitely feels like you have to interact with both worlds to solve puzzles. The story is actually really unnerving at times where it made me feel unsettled even when there wasn't a monster, which not many games have done for me. Although keep in mind it does cover themes of abuse so it might be triggering. I was actually surprised at how well optimized this game is. I was playing this on a GTX 1060 3GB and to be honest I was worried that I bought a game that my PC couldn't run. For the most part I was able to run the game very smoothly at 1440p with medium to high graphics, which was a lot higher than I thought I could run it at. The performance definitely did tank at times during the split-screen segments but it wasn't that bad since the split-screen parts were just puzzles. What also surprised me was that there was one chase segment in the gameplay where the world kept switching every few seconds and I didn't run into any framerate issues and only some very mild texture popping. So if you have a better graphics card than what I have then performance probably isn't going to be an issue. Overall this game had a great story, great dual world mechanic, and ran much better than I thought it would with the specs I was using. It's not the best, but I enjoyed it a lot and would definitely recommend it!