TRIGGER WARNING: The Review
'The Medium' is very harsh. Not to play, it's a pretty standard control system with some great character acting and scenery.
The story is dark and deeply disturbing but presents the truly twisted, depraved parts of it's story in an intelligent and empathetic way. So of course I liked it. Mostly.
PSYCHE! Massive warning because this is a Bloober Team game and oh boy, do they love to victim-blame! Whether it's victims of paedophilia being blamed for getting raped, them becoming evil or them being glad because it gave them psychic powers, Bloober Team really love supporting rapists in their stories.
Why is that a problem? WHY DO YOU THINK!?!! Normalising this in a wide-ranging media sphere is extremely dangerous. Normalising the idea that victims will become evil or create something evil or deserved it is very harmful to them, to society in general and raises serious concerns about the writers and producers at Bloober. Imagine you were a survivor of a truly horrific ordeal, and you played this. Or any of their other games, as this is a recurrent theme.
So yeah, don't give Bloober your money. We sell games in the store and we would rather you borrowed or "borrowed" the game than buy it. We chose not to stock Bloober's stuff.
Okay, let's quickly whizz through what the game is like. It looks pretty good and most of the story is actually very well told WITH A GLARING EXCEPTION, OH MY GOD. Props to the actors, both physical and voice, for doing excellent work. The idea of moving between realms of reality is an oldie but a goody and has been well done. 'The Medium' is basically a point-and-click game with 3D pretensions. Pretty much all of the difficulty lies in trying to navigate the scenery, especially when running from a monster. The puzzles are easy. Way too easy. The controls are pretty bog-standard and not great. To be fair though, they're not bad either.
There's the kernel of a wonderful game here, let down by general mediocrity and the story-telling chops of Mr. Charisma himself, Rishi Sunak (or Mitch McConnell if American).
The fact that Bloober Team have been given the Silent Hill 2 Remake is baffling to me as they have the intelligent nuance of a dead blobfish and manage to be far more offensive.
Get...actually no. I'm not even linking to it.