I appreciated some of the complexity of Maryanne's spirit-world travels, especially some of the rules that deal with how the material and spirit worlds are tied together. Sometimes the split screen is horizontal, and other times it's vertical, but every time it happens, the experience opens up. Maryanne doesn't trigger this at will - the game decides when it's time to dive in. The game attains this through its use of split-screen, which has been around since the stone age of gaming, but perhaps not quite to this level of diverse effectiveness. But it also turns Maryanne into a mystical dual-world detective who spends most of her time finding clues, solving puzzles, and learning more about herself and others. The game's most intriguing feature is how it handles Maryanne's forays into the spirit world, which for the record, generally looks like a scary, desolate, creepy and outright gross place to be. The Niwa resort is where you're exposed to almost everything The Medium has to offer in terms of its take on the spirit world, the rules it asks you (and Maryanne) to abide by, and what kind of real monsters she has to encounter. It's at this point where I'm going to try avoiding talking too much about the story to avoid spoilers. So, yes … a spirit medium is heading to a place where a lot of people were killed, likely in horrible fashion, to meet a stranger. It's a strange existence for Maryanne, and it gets turned around when someone with desperation in his voice calls her at the funeral home and tells her that he knows "what" and "who" she is, and begs for her to meet him at the abandoned Niwa Workers Resort, a large communism-era hotel where an incident known as the Niwa Massacre occurred. Maryanne has learned more about her abilities over the years, and we find that one of her specialties is meeting souls in the spirit world and ushering them into the next stage of the afterlife. There aren't many moments of levity in this game, but one of them is finding a keepsake letter at the funeral home to Jack from an annoyed school principal, detailing how young Maryanne upset a fellow schoolmate by trying to share a "message" from the classmate's dead grandmother.
There's readable lore and occasional dialogue sequences to help flesh out the details, but the gist is that Maryanne's had this ability since she was very young, which made her a bit of a social outcast.
As the title suggests, she's a spirit medium, someone who has a mental or ethereal connection to the spirit world. This opening setting is also where we get a peek into Maryanne's backstory. I've been in a funeral home or two in my life, and even in this opening funeral home setting, the visuals allowed me to almost smell the morgue downstairs and feel the peaceful but somber stillness of the air you only get in a place like that. This presentation offers a few advantages, the biggest being that it seems to allow for impeccable visual clarity and detail in Maryanne's surroundings. Items and points of possible interaction and interest can be seen as dots that become button icons as Maryanne gets closer to them - doors can be opened, levers pushed, notes and pictures can be glanced at and read, and so on. The camera occasionally follows you down hallways and long paths. As you move to different areas, you get a new camera angle that's shot wide enough to give you visual room to explore. In a retro flourish, The Medium visually feels like old-school Resident Evil, with detailed backgrounds presented at a relatively fixed camera angle, leaving the player to move around and explore the area. This is where the player first gets familiar with the presentation, mechanics and rhythm of storytelling. The first time you're actually able to control Maryanne, it's to help her prepare Jack's body for his own memorial services.
This is Maryanne's recurring dream, and it remains tied to her as she grieves the death of her foster father Jack, a funeral home director who took her in when she was a child with a murky past.
In the words of protagonist Maryanne, "It all starts with a dead girl." The dream involves a girl running away from someone, only to reach a lake and to be shot dead. The story starts with a bad dream and death. There's some dark s**t in this game, and most of this experience is you stepping in it and dealing with what comes next. That's what happens with Bloober Team's The Medium, an imperfect, horrifying but engrossing tale about the ripple effect that occurs when one person - or people - have been tormented well beyond any comprehensible limits. If you spend enough time traveling through the dark corners of humanity, you're going to trip and stumble over a few things before you find some kind of resolution.
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