The Medium

Ignisbruno was right about two things in their review: The game is visually stunning and has excellent music. But, the game also has good gameplay elements. It's reminiscent of an old-school style point-n-click adventure game, but with free-ish movement and a fixed-ish camera. You DO have to play more than an hour though, which is NOT nearly enough time to judge the gameplay, as at an hour you haven't even begun to build steam. You won't even have gotten to the part where you need to switch back and forth to access different areas and solve puzzles, or the parts where you need to be stealthy. Yes, things are highlighted, but you can turn the highlights off. You can even toggle the "Insight" or turn on and auto-complete for certain gameplay elements. The split-screen sections aren't just for cutscenes, or to bring your PC to its' knees, they are there to advance the plot and and because you need to manipulate the world in both worlds to get by. What this game, however, isn't: very optimized. My GPU is aging, yes (an RX580 4gb overclocked and watercooled, backed by 32gb DDR4-3000 and a Ryzen 5 3600), but it feels like it should be able to handle the game better than it does. My conclusion on this game is that it's actually pretty good at about 3 hours in, but it definitely takes some time to build up a head of steam and pull you in. Oh and you definitely need to play with a game controller - the keyboard and mouse are just awkward. It would be 5 stars if the game ran better.

Come for the Suspense, stay for the story, get disappointed by that awful ending. Let's face it, this is a walking sim that wants to give you investigation, stealth, special powers, and puzzles for gameplay. It wants to be too much and falls way short. There is no combat, there is no real horror beyond having to run away from an invincible bad guy, and everything is SUPER simplistic in all of the gameplay mechanics. I'm glad I played it on GamePass because if I paid full price I would have felt taken for a horrible ride. The story stands strong and compelling but isn't worth it to have the rug pulled out from under you with THAT weak, lazy not-going-to-show-you-what-actually-happens ending.

Typical Bloober game. Neat horror, minor gameplay elements. Very point and click-ish. Camera work and "dark world" is reminiscent of Silent Hill. Unfortunately, the game is pretty buggy, and the two game windows mechanic is very hardware intensive even for good PCs.

This game starts slow, with a bunch of cut scenes and a lot of time to get the hang of how controls work. In this time not much is happening gameplay wise, as others say in the first hour or so you just run around and pick up objects. The interesting split screen concept becomes an gameplay mechanic after you got into the Niwa Hotel, before its just used in cutscenes. And i think its quite an innovative use of it. I also enjoy the story, it starts out slow but takes up some oace later on, I am hooked solving this mystery and exploring the material and spirit world at the same time. And be aware, there is something in this hotel that you should definatly hide from! So far this game is without stupid jump scares and I love this kind of subtle horror. And hey the music oh god the music is sooo good. Visually this game is stunning besides the character model which feels a lit less polished than the rest of the stunning scenery and the controls are better with an controler. The character comments too much on everything, however thats all negative I can say. Facit: If you like third person, fixed camera angle, subtle horror games, with an mystery story pick it up.