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You know, Konami, I don’t even care about Silent Hill anymore. You make all the Pachinko machines and arcade shooters and Pyramid Head shaped suppository kits you like. I once loved Silent Hill, but you know what, attaching us to franchisees is how they get to you. That’s why Disney can sell ghostly Zyklon-B buses by sticking C3PO on the front. I don’t want a new Silent Hill, I want interesting new horror games that take advantage of the influence of Silent Hill. I like bands influenced by Nirvana, but I wouldn’t like it if they nail Kurt Cobain’s body to the front of the drum kit. Well you’re in luck, Yahtzee, I’m running an old game where I watch giant sea turtles because here’s The Medium, a new original survival horror game inspired not only by Silent Hill, but with music from Akira Yamaoka herself. Yep, all that shit Silent Hills had music from Akira Yamaoka. Just like the Dead by Daylight expansion, and Shadows of the Damned, and … World of Tanks ?! Akira Yamaoka apparently struggles to say no to people. And why are you trying to cover the developer logo? Erm. ‘Cause it’s by Bloober Team. Ugh. Damn walking simulator dealers. I wish they simulated walking to a fucking whiteboard and coming up with new ideas for once.
Oh, but this isn’t just another first-person walking simulator – it uses a fixed third-person camera in direct reference to classic survival horror! Hm, consider me on board for now, Bloober Team, but the moment you let me return through a door that inexplicably leads to another place, I let you play my new one, get kicked in the butt simulator. You see, that camera thing tells me something important: that somebody gets it. Someone understands that the third person’s fixed camera contributes to the atmospheric feeling of detachment from which survival horror benefits. It feels more like you are being watched from the shadows by unknown parties and less like you are nestled all the time against the nice warm buttocks of the protagonist. Some people might say that The Medium hardly needs it as the atmosphere of detachment is created enough by the personalities of all the characters, but that would be some terribly cruel people. Anyway, The Medium is about a twenty-something girl who wears clothes of sizes somewhere between small and large and also has the ability to perceive the spirit world and talk to the recently deceased people.
She is called to an abandoned resort and the site of a famous massacre to uncover the sinister truth behind it and its mysterious origins, and get some material for her urban exploration YouTube channel. This may sound strange, but it took me a while to figure out that this fixed camera survival horror game with a gloomy vibe about exploring both a dilapidated real world and an identically laid out scary underworld that looks like it’s mostly ham was created was believed to be Silent Hill inspired. Talk about missing the Other World for the crucified bodies on spikes. I guess I just didn’t pick up the same vibe. It reminded me more of Dark Seed, that old point-and-click adventure game about exploring a parallel dark world designed by HR Giger as the main character struggles to overcome the horror of their mustache. Silent Hill feels organic and visceral and wet, The Medium felt more dead and dusty and as dry as a newlywed Baptist who doesn’t believe in foreplay. Some sort of combat element may have helped. I’m not saying that because Silent Hill had fights, Silent Hill fights were like the stick in the popsicle, serving a purpose, but not the part you want to chew on – it really seemed like The Medium would have a combat element , but then it didn’t.
All the pieces were in place. We find that ghosts can hurt us, and that we go to a place with more ghosts than the bargain bin in the Call of Duty store, and that the protagonist can load her arm with ghost juice to launch an explosion attack. and a shield, so I was like, great, ghost laser tag, let’s Luigi’s Mansion this bitch. But then we don’t understand that. Your blast attack is mainly used to clean up debris as if it were a goddamn astral leaf blower and the closest thing to combat is the strange forced stealth battle dodge sequence against a returning monster that kills you in one hit, which is about as engaging as such things there ever, that is, just as much as farting at a distant cousin’s wedding. And then, at the end of each act, the main character – whom I seem to remember a name apparently but is one of the many things about The Medium that I find hard to hold in my memory – confronts a great elaborate monster spirit form of the one. those issues recently and it really seems like a boss fight setup, and then the name just beats them out in the same cutscene with no effort. See, I’m not asking for an exchange of ectoplasm bullets while our flaky protagonist dodges as Sonic the Hedgehog.
But the artists seem to have put a lot of work into the monster designs and I’m sure it would be more rewarding if we had the chance to explore all of their jiggly flaps looking for the flaws. About the monsters, I mean, not the artists. Fighting isn’t just a distraction to keep the nervous kids busy while mom and dad caress their chins at the random document recordings – it adds context and engagement to a horror game. Using a machete to chop aside the undergrowth in your path is what separates jungle exploration from a nature walk. The running theme of my time at The Medium is that I always felt like I skated past it more than I got immersed. The gameplay didn’t grab me. It’s the usual survival horror inventory puzzles – explore the environment, find the door blocked by rabid polecat, explore a bit more, find a can of rabid polecat repellent etc – but the level design constantly pushes us towards progress and I never feel like had that I was the one coming up with the solutions. Example: There’s a little bit of what the returning monster is stomping around and we have to dodge it until we find a way to reboot a generator, at which point the main character’s lady said, “Aha, now I can turn around for the monster! “and I was like,” You can? It’s really not clear how. Are you going to hook up a karaoke machine and challenge it to a Something Stupid-off? “
I was also not captivated by the story. Although that may be retroactive due to the ending. When your plane crashes in the mountains, it’s hard to have fond memories of the airline’s hot towel service. Token Warning: Just call me a douchebags auto shop because a ton of spoilers are coming in. In short, the main character – Marianne? I think it was Marianne – finds the person who caused everything, and that person asks her to shoot them to stop the monster. And Marianne decides that she has really become attached to this person in the nine seconds they have had to talk and proposes to shoot herself, which would also stop the monster due to an awkward logic that I was not entirely convinced about. The argument escalates a bit, then gets cut back to black, gunshot, role credits. So she shot herself or not, guess it depends on the viability of the sequel. The Medium has a good visual design and a good atmosphere, but I didn’t think about that during my suddenly much more free afternoon. I wondered why violent ballistic death jumped to the top of Marianne’s list of suggested solutions so quickly. Just felt really out of the blue. Failure of characterization I suppose. The end of the suicide made sense in Spec Ops The Line and Silent Hill 2, and my last school reunion.
