Bloober Team’s The Medium splits the screen in two and asks you to read both halves at once. The Polish studio’s third-person psychological horror game is its most ambitious, and in stretches its most frustrating.
It launched for Windows and Xbox Series X/S on January 28, 2021, then PlayStation 5 on September 3, 2021, Amazon Luna on February 17, 2022, and macOS on August 31, 2023. A Nintendo Switch version followed on July 29, 2023. It is single player.
Trailer, via Bloober Team.
Marianne and the Niwa Workers’ Resort
You play as Marianne, a medium who helps troubled souls find final respite. She is hounded by a recurring dream: a man shooting a young girl by a lake. While grieving the death of her foster father, she gets a phone call from a man named Thomas, who knows about her abilities. He offers to explain where her powers come from and what the dream means — but only if she meets him at the Niwa Workers’ Resort, a vacation spot the government shuttered years earlier.
The resort closed after the Niwa Massacre, in which a large number of people were murdered and survivors fled the area. Thomas was the resort’s manager. His daughter was Lilianne. Both sat at the epicentre of what happened there.
Two Worlds, One Screen
The Medium’s signature trick is dual-reality gameplay, which Bloober Team patented. Marianne lives and interacts across the real world and the spirit world at the same time, and the screen renders both. Puzzles span the divide. Her psychic abilities can be turned against hostile forces, and they recharge when she interacts with energy spots called spirit wells.
That mechanic is the whole argument for the game. It is also where the seams show. Splitting the camera means splitting attention, and the spirit world’s puzzles rarely demand the wider perspective the premise promises. The idea is stronger than most of the rooms built to hold it.
The Maw
In the spirit world, Marianne meets Sadness, the spirit of a young girl who warns her about the Maw. The Maw is a hostile spirit that has managed to partially exist in the real world. It caused the Niwa Massacre by occupying human hosts and using their bodies to murder others. Now it hunts Marianne, hoping to sate its hunger and escape Niwa.
Marianne repeatedly offers to send Sadness to her peace. Sadness refuses. Through visions, Marianne learns that Sadness is Lilianne, who was molested by Thomas’ older and trusted friend Richard. The story reaches further back than the resort: Thomas was a medium too, and Nazis and Soviets experimented on him after discovering his powers could sever people’s minds from their bodies.
That is a lot of history to carry, and the game carries it in fragments. The Maw is the strongest of those fragments — a monster born from an unspeakable tragedy, and a genuine one.
What The Medium Gets Right
- The dual-reality screen. No other horror game in this period asks you to read two rooms at once, and Bloober Team commits to it.
- The setting. Post-communist Poland in 1999 is a specific, underexposed place for horror, and the Niwa Workers’ Resort uses it.
- The Maw. A villain that occupies bodies rather than haunting rooms gives the chase real stakes.
- The score. The Medium ships with an original soundtrack, and it does the work the camera sometimes cannot.
What It Gets Wrong
The game’s answers arrive faster than its questions deserve. Marianne’s search for difficult answers is the spine of the story, and the script keeps handing her conclusions instead of letting her earn them. Sadness is the clearest casualty. Her refusal to be sent to peace is the most interesting decision any character makes in The Medium, and the game treats it as an obstacle rather than a person.
The patented dual-reality mechanic deserves the credit it gets, but a patent is not a design. Too many puzzles use the spirit world as a second key rather than a second way of seeing. The Medium tells you nothing is what it seems and everything has another side. Its best sequences believe that. Its weakest ones just make you walk through the same hallway twice.
The Numbers Behind The Medium
- Release dates: January 28, 2021 (Windows, Xbox Series X/S); September 3, 2021 (PlayStation 5); February 17, 2022 (Amazon Luna); July 29, 2023 (Nintendo Switch); August 31, 2023 (macOS)
- Developer and publisher: Bloober Team
- Platforms: Xbox Series X/S, PC, PlayStation 5, Mac, Amazon Luna, Nintendo Switch
- Genre: psychological horror, adventure
- Perspective: third person
- Modes: single player
- Setting: post-communist Poland, 1999
- Critic aggregate: 7.5/10 across 17 outlets
The Verdict on Bloober Team’s Ambition
The Medium’s 7.5 aggregate across 17 outlets is a fair reading of it. The dual-reality screen and the Niwa Workers’ Resort are the parts worth remembering. The patented mechanic is a real idea, not a marketing line, and the studio built an entire game around it rather than a set piece.
What holds The Medium back is not ambition. It is the writing. The Maw works because it is a monster with a cause — it was born from an unspeakable tragedy and it wants out of Niwa. Sadness works less well because the game keeps explaining her instead of letting her stay a mystery. Marianne’s recurring dream of the man shooting a young girl by a lake is a strong opening image. The explanation the game eventually attaches to it is smaller than the image was.
Buy it for the split screen and the setting. Expect the story to meet you halfway and then stop.
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