{"id":2610,"date":"2021-01-27T14:04:27","date_gmt":"2021-01-27T14:04:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thenextweb.com\/?p=1335790"},"modified":"2021-01-27T14:04:27","modified_gmt":"2021-01-27T14:04:27","slug":"the-medium-is-worth-playing-but-only-if-you-already-have-game-pass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/?p=2610","title":{"rendered":"The Medium is worth playing, but only if you already have Game Pass"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

2021 starts off with a little treat for people who enjoy spooky games, as Polish developer Bloober Team is set to release their latest effort, The Medium<\/em>, later this week.<\/p>\n

The Medium<\/em> comes out on the new Xbox consoles and PC. I\u2019ve been playing it for a couple of days and it\u2019s\u2026 ok.<\/p>\n

Bloober Team has been making a name for themselves in the horror genre since they released Layers of Fear<\/em> back in 2016. Before then, the Polish developer made some smaller titles that didn\u2019t garner a lot of attention, but genre fans were pleasantly surprised by the first-person horror game and the studio hasn\u2019t stopped making scary entertainment since.<\/p>\n

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Their latest effort is The Medium<\/em>, a paranormal horror puzzle game made exclusively for the Xbox Series S \/ X and PC. It tells the story of Marianne, a spiritual medium who has the power to travel between this world and spirit realm.<\/p>\n

After a brief introduction, Marianne\u2019s visions lead her to the NIWA Worker\u2019s Resort, an eerie abandoned hotel somewhere in Poland. Of course the eerie abandoned hotel is haunted after a horrible mysterious tragedy, and of course it\u2019s up to Marianne to uncover what really happened.<\/p>\n

The Medium<\/em>\u2019s unique selling point is that you (often) control Marianne\u2019s physical and spiritual form at the same time, through the game\u2019s \u2018patented<\/a>\u2019 \u201cdual-reality gameplay\u201d. In practice this means the screen splits in two and your actions are mirrored in both worlds. You collect and combine objects in the material world to unlock a certain action in the spiritual world, so that you can open a door that lets you progress in both and so on.<\/p>\n

<\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

This gimmick is neat and it looks cool, but it\u2019s never really used in any sort of mind-blowing way. Most puzzles in The Medium<\/em> are extremely straightforward and don\u2019t require a lot of thought.<\/p>\n

The only times I got stuck on these puzzles were when I couldn\u2019t find the object or action the game wanted me to find. The game\u2019s Resident Evil<\/em>-style fixed camera position would sometimes make it hard to figure out what I was looking for, and it has a habit of inexplicably forcing you to interact with every single object in a room before it lets you progress. It never got too frustrating, but I do think that The Medium<\/em> would have benefitted from some more play-testing.<\/p>\n

The game\u2019s story is fine and handled decently. It won\u2019t set the world on fire, but it\u2019s serviceable enough to keep horror aficionados entertained for the roughly 10 hours it takes to complete the game.<\/p>\n

Audio-visually, The Medium<\/em> is fine too. It uses Unreal Engine 4 and looks like most other games made with that engine. I\u2019ve only played the Xbox Series X version where it runs in 4K at 30 frames per second. I don\u2019t have the technology to count pixels so I\u2019ll leave that to the professionals, but it looked a little jaggy and upscaled on my screen. It\u2019s not ugly, but won\u2019t win any awards for best visuals either.<\/p>\n

<\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

The soundtrack is done by the guy<\/a> who did the soundtrack for the Silent Hill<\/em> games, so that\u2019s cool. I didn\u2019t notice it.<\/p>\n

At the moment the game doesn\u2019t support the console\u2019s Quick Resume<\/a> functionality which was frustrating and should be patched.<\/p>\n

At a retail price of $49.99 it\u2019s hard to recommend a full price purchase as it feels a bit budget-y<\/em>, but fortunately that\u2019s not an issue as the game is freely available to Microsoft\u2019s Game Pass subscribers from its release date on January 28th. There\u2019s not a lot else out to play at the moment so I would definitely recommend giving The Medium<\/em> a go if you\u2019re one of the 18 million people<\/a> on Game Pass.<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

2021 starts off with a little treat for people who enjoy spooky games, as Polish developer Bloober Team is set to release their latest effort, The Medium, later this week. The Medium…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2611,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2610"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2610"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2610\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}