For all my talk of double-A funding and a desire to see original survival horrors (or at least psychological horrors) come back to the forefront, I couldn’t miss The Medium. It is a puzzle and exploration-driven, psychologically-minded game, with ambience by two great composers, Arkadiusz Reikowski and Akira Yamaoka, the latter figure who was so exciting to me, as he composed the legendary music for almost every Silent Hill. So, is it any good?

Well, to put it bluntly, The Medium is one of the best games I’ve played all year.

Its best quality is by far its story. It has a strong and firm emotional core that a lot of games find very difficult to achieve, and each character is compellingly brought to life by a variety of talented actors that Bloober Team managed to employ. The main antagonist is brought to life wonderfully by Troy Baker, and I also particularly loved an intense performance from Marcin Dorocinski. Marianne, the main protagonist, was also able to convincingly carry the story on her shoulders with a great performance from Kelly Burke. The story touches on a number of particularly heavy and mature themes, and while there aren’t so many twists in the tail as you might expect from a Silent Hill title, The Medium carries these themes with sensitivity and some ambiguity. I’m the kind of person who likes a nice touch of ambiguity, for questions to remain lingering after the credits roll. Not every story needs to be neatly tied up in a bow in every single way. Some conclusion is nice, which The Medium offers. But there are a few mysteries that remain unsolved – and leave it open to a sequel – which I loved.

The main problem The Medium has is in its lack of compelling gameplay. The reason that Silent Hill works so well, for instance, is because the survival is on your shoulders. If you’ve read any of my previous entries on horror, you’ll know I really quite dislike instant deaths. You know, where you’re running from something and if they touch you, you instantly die without a chance to defend yourself at all? Unfortunately that’s what happens in this game. It’s generally problematic because it doesn’t feel scary. The Medium has a few different abilities – the ability to charge up spirit energy, the ability to phase in and out of your body, to throw up a shield, and to traverse across several different worlds. But these are all used for puzzle-solving – which is great stuff, of course, but I would have really loved an opportunity to use it in a combat situation. Several awesome looking monsters in this game are dealt with just in cutscenes rather than gameplay, and I found that a bit of a let-down. I understand combat is hard to balance and get right – especially when you’re trying to maintain an emotional story – but I would have loved to have seen some more stuff done with this core “spirit world” gameplay.

What is there is great, don’t get me wrong. Exploring the two realities is one of the most vivid and beautiful experiences in a horror game I’ve ever had. Each reality is detailed beyond belief; I hadn’t done too much looking into the game before I got it, so I was surprised to see just the level of polish and detail that had gone into every facet of the environment. Every room looks great (and in both realities), so that’s something I can’t stress enough. I’m normally not too convinced by shiny graphics, but The Medium uses the technology available to its fullest extent. The gameplay around the exploration is also really good, with a few neat puzzles that make you think about positioning and timing, as well as just a few pretty easy ones. There are a great number of collectables too, but they aren’t random or too out of the way. Each one of them has relevance to the larger picture of the story, should you want that additional context, and it is rewarding to find each one wherever it might be tucked away.

The Medium‘s oppressive atmosphere provides a claustrophobic environment to explore, but also misses out on a few opportunities to frighten that I was actually fully expecting. So the game’s not as scary as it could be, but the story remains this bright spot. It’s a story that one should go into without knowing anything about it, and also one that is assisted ten-fold by the actual playing of it. It’s something that deserves to be played through rather than watched. Because those contextual notes add a whole bunch to the game, and affect your understanding of how everything plays out.

The Medium‘s weaknesses, then, are nothing when you examine how the game works and why it does what it does. While it’s never quite as clever as some other psychological horror titles, it is still effective, emotional and lingering. Like all the best stories, The Medium lingers. Certain story beats deserve to be replayed in one’s mind, because there are facets to them and meanings that remain hidden just beneath the surface. The fact that the game isn’t as clever or as surprising as it could be doesn’t change the reality that the story is still engaging by itself, the environment design is spectacular, the gameplay mechanics that are there are great (and are just begging to be expanded upon) and, well, you’ve got a formula for success.

This is a title that recognizes the legacy of old horror titles, and feels like a first step for Bloober Team on their way to creating a survival horror title of their own that will set the world on fire, truly and completely. I can only hope that they manage to achieve that in future. For now, this is a great game that will stand the test of time, I think.