The Medium Reviews
The Medium is full of deep and intertwined narrative, moreso than many other games from recent years. If you love The Longest Journey, Silent Hill and The Evil Within for the overall atmosphere and tone, but also prefer something less action-oriented, then The Medium is something you don't want to miss.
Review in Russian | Read full review
As a whole package The Medium is very much a story of compromise. For all its successes in visual storytelling and interesting setting, it’s collared by poor pacing and dated game design. Still, it’s well worth a look for history buffs and those fascinated by the unknown. So what lies beyond? It’s still up for debate. In the present, The Medium offers an intriguing possibility to puzzle on.
Marianne might be able to jump between two realities, but The Medium is trapped somewhere between being a worthy Silent Hill successor and another mediocre hide and seek horror game.
Bloober Team meshes all of these elements together to draw players further into The Medium's world than the Xbox/PC versions were capable of, elevating an already enjoyable experience to new heights. It stands to reason that the PS5 version of The Medium is the ideal way to experience Marianne's dual-reality adventures, and PlayStation 5 owners that enjoy horror games should definitely check the game out.
The Medium is an admirable horror experience from a developer that has been making a lot of huge strides for itself in the world of horror game development. It's not something that is going to change the world of horror games, but it does enough unique things with the simultaneous dual-world mechanic to stand out. Like many horror games before it, it fails to balance its tension with certain gameplay mechanics that can turn from fear to frustration pretty quickly, but these are spaced out enough that it never ruined the experience wholesale. For any horror fans looking for a Silent Hill-esque game to fill that ominous void, The Medium will at least scratch that itch.
The Medium returns to PS5, and offers an experience similar to what players were able to live in January on their X series. The story is still as gripping, with its concept of parallel worlds evolving at the same time before our eyes, and if the gameplay is ultimately the most simplistic, we take pleasure in exploring these worlds.
Review in French | Read full review
The Medium impresses with its next-gen graphics and unique, split-screenplay that lets you jump between the human and spirit worlds. Unfortunately, the horror game's not particularly scary.
The Medium is uninspired, from puzzles to characters. If you’re looking for an interesting world to explore, it delivers with stunning art direction, but for those looking for a richer experience, The Medium feels skin deep.
Also on PS5 The Medium confirms the strengths and weaknesses of a production at times even genuinely intriguing, but unable to stand out and to sanction that consecration of the Polish studio that many would have expected (even more so with what seemed to be the project of definitive maturity). The experience is basically identical to the one lived seven months ago on Xbox Series X, with a big difference, indeed in practice two. Even without epochal revolutions, on PlayStation 5 the DualSense adds something in terms of interaction compared to the original version, but on the Microsoft console the inclusion of the game within the Game Pass catalog weighs a lot since day one.
Review in Italian | Read full review
The Medium is at its best when you are exploring its remarkable, beautiful worlds, or enjoying the excellent composition and art direction. Unfortunately, the gameplay does not meet that high mark, and often detracts from what is otherwise a stellar aesthetic experience.
Although “The Medium” is billed as a psychological horror game, I found it to be consistently unsettling rather than scary. There is a vengeful monster that Marianne must deal with intermittently, but except for one breathtaking scene where he chases her through different realities — resulting in shifts in perspective that strike like tidal waves — I didn’t think much of him. Nothing robs a creepy game of its power as forcing a player to confront the same monster too many times so, thankfully, the monster encounters are nicely spread out. “The Medium” might not have the most nightmarish adversary but its blanketing, foreboding atmosphere and uncompromising ending amply makes up for it.
The Medium isn’t perfect. Bloober Team’s most ambitious ideas aren’t realized to their full potential, but it’s a step in an exciting new direction. The pacing stumbles in the middle, but that’s where the enticing narrative picks up the slack to drive you through. The dual-reality mechanic goes just about far enough to keep its slowest gameplay moments interesting, and paired with a fantastic narrative and exceptionally eerie atmosphere, it’s an easy recommendation for fans of Bloober Team’s work in the past and the horror genre in general.
The Medium scores especially with story and gripping atmosphere, but does not reach its class in a playful way.
Review in German | Read full review
The Medium is a horror with fascinating potential, but translated into an experience never really ambitious, and indeed paradoxically rather limited, restrained and shallow.
Review in Italian | Read full review
The Medium builds upon a lot of gameplay gimmicks and ideas that aren't always used to their full potential, but when they do work, they work incredibly well. Controlling main character Marianne as she jumps between worlds is both engrossing and exciting in practice, and the game's main location serves its job as a setting for horror masterfully most of the time. This is a game that definitely could have been better-but which is also better than a lot of other horror games that don't take such daring risks.
The Medium is an enjoyable survival horror that's held back by a lacklustre narrative and a signature mechanic that never reaches its full potential. Even with Silent Hill composer Akira Yamaoka's score ringing across the twisted soviet world, Bloober Team's latest project pales in comparison to the legends that came before it.
The Medium is a chilling tone piece that's bogged down by retro influence and a protagonist that can't stop oversharing.
The Medium is a psychological horror game that is set across two worlds, but it doesn't quite live up to the potential of its gameplay features.
Bloober Team does well to keep things taut all the way to the end, but there's a frustrating amount of untapped potential beneath its gameplay gimmicks and art direction.