The Medium – Zero Score

Ah, but this is not another first person walk simulator – it uses a fixed third person camera in direct reference to the survival horror classics! Hm, consider me on board for now, Team Bloober, but the moment you get me back through a door that inexplicably leads to somewhere different, I’m making you play my new kick-ass simulator. For you to see, that camera thing tells me something significant: that someone understands it. Someone realizes that the third-person fixed camera increases the atmospheric sense of detachment from which the horror of survival benefits. It seems more like you are being watched from the shadows by unknown parts and less as if you are nestled against the protagonist’s beautiful warm buttocks all the time. Some people may say that The Medium hardly needs this, since the atmosphere of detachment is adequately created by the personalities of all the characters, but these would be terribly cruel people. Anyway, The Medium is about a girl in her early twenties who wears clothes of a size between small and large and also has the ability to perceive the spiritual world and speak to the dead recently.

She is called to an abandoned vacation spot and the site of a famous massacre to discover the sinister truth behind it and its mysterious origins and obtain some material for her urban exploration channel on Youtube. This may seem strange, but it took me a while to discover that this survival horror game with a fixed camera with a dark atmosphere about exploring a decrepit real world and a scary and identical underworld that seems to be made mostly of ham, was supposedly inspired by Silent Hill. Talk about the Otherworld’s lack for bodies crucified on stakes. I don’t think I was getting the same vibration. It reminded me more of Dark Seed, that old point-and-click adventure game about exploring a dark parallel world designed by HR Giger, as the protagonist struggles to overcome the horror of his mustache. Silent Hill looks organic, visceral and moist, The Medium looked more dead and dusty and dry like a newly married Baptist who doesn’t believe in foreplay. Some sort of combat element may have helped. I don’t say that because Silent Hill had combat, Silent Hill’s combat was like a stick in the popsicle, serving a purpose, but not the part you want to chew on – it really looked like the Midfielder would have a combat element, but then that Did not happen.

All the pieces were in place. We established that ghosts can hurt us and that we are going to a place with more ghosts than the can of bargains in the Call of Duty store, and that the main character can load his arm with spirit juice to fuel an explosive attack and shield, so I thought, great, ghost laser tag, let’s go to Luigi’s Mansion this bitch. But then we don’t understand that. Your blast attack is mainly used to clear clutter out of the way like an astral leaf blower, and the closest thing to combat is the forced sneak evasion sequence against a recurring monster that kills you with one blow, which is as engaging as such things always are, that is, as far as holding a fart at a distant cousin’s wedding. And then, at the end of each act, the main character – which I remember having a name for, but is one of the many things about The Medium that I struggle to keep in my memory – confronts a great form of elaborate monster spirit. whoever is stirring up trouble more recently and really looks like a setup for a boss fight, and so whatever it is, just beat them in the same scene without any hassle. Look, I’m not asking for an ectoplasm candy exchange while our scaly protagonist rolls around like Sonic the Hedgehog.

But the artists seem to have worked a lot on the monster designs and I’m sure it would be worth it if we had the chance to explore all of their flapping flaps looking for weaknesses. About monsters, I mean, not about artists. Combat isn’t just a distraction to keep nervous kids busy while Mom and Dad rub their chins on random document pickers – for a horror game, it adds context and involvement. Having to use a machete to cut undergrowth on your way is what separates jungle exploration from a nature hike. The current theme of my time with O Meio is that I always felt that I was skating at the top rather than being immersed. The gameplay didn’t catch me. It’s the usual survival horror inventory puzzle – explore the environment, find the door blocked by angry weasel, explore some more, find a can of angry weasel repellent, etc. – but the design level constantly drives us towards progress and I never felt like I was coming up with the solutions. Case in point, there is a moment when the recurring monster is stomping and we have to avoid it until we find a way to restart a generator, when the main character said “Aha, now I can turn the tide on the monster! “And I said” Can you? It is not really clear how. Are you going to hook up a karaoke machine and challenge it to something stupid? “

I was also not attracted to the story. Although this can be retroactively because of the ending. If your plane crashes in the mountains, it is difficult to have fond memories of the airline’s hot towel service. Symbolic warning: Just call me an auto repair shop for idiots because there are a ton of spoilers coming. Basically, the main character – Marianne? I think it was Marianne – she finds the person who caused everything, and that person asks her to shoot her to stop the monster. And Marianne decides that she was really attached to that person in the nine seconds they had to talk and proposes, instead, to shoot herself, which would also stop the monster by some strange logic that I was not very convinced of. The discussion increases a little, then cuts to black, shooting, roll credits. So she shot herself or not, I think it will depend on the feasibility of the sequence. Medium has a good visual design and atmosphere, but I wasn’t thinking about it during my suddenly much more free afternoon. I was wondering why violent ballistic death jumped so quickly to the top of Marianne’s list of solutions. I really felt out of nowhere. Characterization failure, I suppose. The final suicide made sense in Spec Ops The Line and Silent Hill 2, and my last school meeting.