The Medium

Endearing character, great story and atmosphere.

Well worth playing for any fan of the Silent Hill series -- which the game is obviously inspired by. Very good overall story and atmosphere, backed by a soundtrack created by none other than Akira & Co. (sadly, Joe Romersa was not on the team). Unfortunately, the game suffers from a couple of not-so-minor flaws: - The biggest issue to me is the fixed camera angles. In trying to bring back the spirit of SH the Bloober team resurrects what everyone always hated (any RS / SH / Dino Crisis fan actually being nostalgic about that aspect of gameplay?! - just a rhetorical question;)) - I'm finding the protagonist's voice acting mediocre. Many other characters in the game are acted much better... (my opinion, not sure if people would agree). - Character movements feel very... outdated. And controls rather clumsy -- again something not to be nostalgic about. - The game is particularly hardware-demanding. Unoptimized, apparently, because my computer can handle better-looking games much more fluently. Overall, it's a game I did enjoy, and am looking forward to replaying it -- mostly for the story.

No aspect of this game lives up to it's inspirations... Bloober's signature slow-but-trippy "horror" gameplay (which I really liked in both Layers games and Blair Witch) is here but made less effective by the move to third person and loss of environmental detail that comes with that kind of change. The story just plods along, told through notes and voice over that forces you to stare at an object while the audio clip plays. Gameplay is incredibly barebones... think a 90s point and click game in 3D. I have a hard time believing Yamaoka had anything more to do with the soundtrack than letting Bloober's in-house composer use his sample library... the music here is just boring. You won't remember a single melody from this game like you do the music from Silent Hill. Voice acting is all over the place, sometimes cringe-worthy and sometimes decent enough. They waste their one big name voice actor by hiding him behind too much distortion. When it comes to the game's big gimmick, the "dual world" split-screen gameplay sounds interesting on paper. Problem is, in practice it boils down to a needlessly flashy drain on resources that adds nothing more than a visual gimmick. Expect the game to drop to half resolution whenever the screen splits. Thankfully it doesn't try to do this all that often... you'll usually be in one world or the other, for better or for worse. Puzzles are never deeper than finding an item and using it in an obvious spot. I was looking forward to this one a lot and I usually have a lot of patience for this kind of game, but in no world is this worth twice the price of Layers of Fear or Blair Witch. I'm writing this review about 4 hours in, and while I'll probably finish it (even though I've heard the ending is awful), I wish I had bought Hitman 3 instead.

I bought the game with the plan of testing some PC hardwares with it, so here's my take on it : On the visuals aspect, pretty impressive graphics, and some of the ray tracing effects like reflections are nice, but mostly it is located on the beginning of the game (on the Material world, not so much in the Spirit World), and I feel it rather lacking impact. The game is mostly dark, so sometimes it's quite hard to see the difference between RT ON and OFF. As for performance, even without RT the game would crush last-gen midrange GPU especially during the dual reality scene, with 1080p Medium setting, a GTX 1060 would drop its framerates to sub 25 FPS, while getting around 35-40 FPS on the single viewport scene. On the ex-flagship RTX 2080 Ti, running the game on 1080p High + RT ON + DLSS Quality, you'll get around 50 FPS range on some of the dual viewport scene - very heavy. There's really weird issue with RT Ultra setting that will drop the framerate to around 10 FPS, not really sure what went wrong. The graphics load is really variable, that you will likely see big swings in framerate across multiple scene - framerate limiter is recommended. I find it acceptable to limit FPS to 30 using Nvidia control panel. When traversing across certain area, there's some noticeable stutter as well, not really sure how to fix that. There's also noticeable texture pop-in and some textures only loaded after a delay of 3-5 seconds, even though I'm using nvme gen3 x4 ssd - so texture loading/streaming will probably need improvement. Finally, as a game, I like the idea of a visually immersive, slow-paced horror game. The action is rather minimal, and the puzzle is quite shallow. That said, I wish some of the old classic game being remastered with upgraded graphics like this.

The (facial) animations look strangely stiff, but otherwise the game has really stunning visuals. Especially the afterlife has a cool style that reminds me of works by Giger or Beksinski. The voice actors also do a good job and the atmosphere of the game is really nice and creepy. But that's it. The game's performance is really not good, even after several patches - although it's fair to say that these have helped quite a bit. In the scenes where the splitscreen feature is used, the frames drop mercilessly into the low 30s even with good hardware. Often they dip below that, causing stuttering. The controls are very janky and sometimes don't react, which makes chase or hide-and-seek scenes particularly annoying. Player feedback in form of visuals or audio cues is sometimes missing or too vague. It's often hard to tell if you're actually holding your breath, where you have to run from the monster or if you have to press a button in certain situations. Had to look up walkthrougs because of this. Mentioned monster scenes are just annoying imo... I hate this hide-and-seek/chase crap and was glad every time I was allowed to explore again in peace. Luckily these mechanics don't happen that often. The basic idea behind the story and the events in the hotel are interesting by themselves, but the characters remain absolutely flat and boring. Marianne seems oddly indifferent in the face of the ongoing events and the whole plot lacks some sort of motivation. I often asked myself "Why the hell are we on this journey?" or "Why are we still here?" The experience felt pointless to me. The puzzles are OK-ish but rather boring too, tbh. The split screen feature has a lot of potential that has unfortunately hardly been used. I'm hitting the character limit so I leave it at that. The Medium isnt a bad game per se, but I can't recommend buying it at full price. Maybe grab it while it's on sale if you like these kind of games. All in all, it sadly was a dissapointment for me.