The Medium

This is what I like, adventure and secrets.

this is a classic case of game designers and artist that have no understanding of cinema and game mechanics. like classic Resident Evil games, this game has fixed camera points. however, unlike classic resident evil games, this game has 360 movement. this is a massive error, because there is a concept of continuous movement. classic Resident Evil works because it uses "up" direction as always moving forward, "down" as backwards", with "left + right" as rotation. thus, moving through several camera shots, if you are pressing "up (forward)" you will continue in the same direction. The Medium uses 360 movement, so this changes and you will be completely confused as to what was your initial direction of movement. this is literally the worst possible play control and makes this a total mess. in addition, this game's supposed cinematic camera does not follow the most basic rules of cinematography when changing camera angles, NEVER cross the center line without reason because this completely confuses direction sense; this is even WORSE in a game because the player has control instead of the director making sure there is continuity. this is the level of knowledge that a first year film student would learn. absolutely amateur level cinematography. this seems like an interesting game with a solid story, but the mechanics are so completely incompetent that i cannot continue playing it. for shame. go back to game design school and film school, and maybe learn something.

This game needs some serious optimization, I have an RTX 2070 Super and had to disable Ray Tracing from the start which made things run smoothly with 4K and all the settings on High for awhile until the game started rendering both worlds, the performance impact was so bad I had to drop it to 1440P and still let DLSS do its scaling to maintain only 30FPS. Resolution below 4K just isn't worth using in my opinion, so much image quality is lost. I don't want to tell people not to buy it because the game is a great concept with a beautiful soundtrack, the atmosphere is stunning but it needs some serious optimization.

I was very pleasantly suprised by the game. The story was interesting from start to finish (I really love mysterious ghost-stories like this), the game looks great (the stylization and atmosphere was amazing), and is not overly long (around 9 hours). I definitely recommend it to anyone who likes a good story and is perhaps interested in seeing a bit of Soviet Poland (that's certainly not common!).

I really like the atmosphere, it's dark, it's tense. The story, as far as I have played, seems to unfold a bit slow, but still promising. The graphics are great. The concept of having two worlds simultaniously is new to me and plays a role in certain puzzles. Good idea, nice gamplay. The sound is great and helps to build the amazing atmosphere. The controls however, are atrocious. On a keyboard it's WASD, but relative to the scene and camera. This makes it sometimes really hard to control the character sensibly. The camera sometimes confusing. On occasion it jumps perspectives, which also causes change of controls. Irritating. Strange controls and camera would not make it a huge problem, but in certain circumstances it decides whether the protagonist lives or dies... in my case a lot in one particular scene (no disclose of details to avoid spoilers). For me, this breaks the immersion completely. This is just not fun or interesting, it get's tedious and frustrating very fast. For atmosphere I would give this game a 5. Unfortunately I need to downgrade it to a 2 for overall execution.