#3 - The Medium
So uh... This game. There's a lot here. I haven't been this genuinely mixed an opinion in a VERY long time.
The Good:
Everything visual with this game is... Amazing. The art direction is some of the best I've ever seen, and it's graphically quite impressive as a result. Backgrounds are super detailed, every room is meticulously designed and decorated. Both the real world and spirit world are darkly beautiful in their own way. The gameplay mechanics are really interesting too - its use of split-screen is clever without being gimmicky, the core gameplay is *mostly* good (we'll come back to this), there's a lot to love here. Also, the main antagonist has some
amazing voicework, design and animation. It steals the show here. The sound design is great, the use of colour is downright artful... There's A LOT of creative energy here.
The Bad:
Right, so, great as the antagonist is, every interaction with it is frustrating. The game forces you to trial and error these sections, but the long load times to reset make it a frustrating experience that only serves to slow the game down and remove any tension. Additionally, aside from the main baddie, the voice acting is... Mostly not great. Occasionally, downright bad. And much of the dialogue from the main character is just irritating, especially when she's talking to herself. The story here is kinda ho-hum too. It's good, but it leans way too hard into predictable cliches.
- Spoiler: show
- Guys can we please stop using rape and child abuse as the explanation for a female character's trauma? Please? It's kind of a low-hanging fruit and disrespectful to real survivors IMHO.
And the ending?
- Spoiler: show
- It's literally gunshot, fade to black. The most cliche college film student way to end a narrative. Freaking YIKES.
But what irritates me most here is the decision to have English-only, American-accented audio. It's a game set in Poland. The characters are Polish. It goes to great lengths to slide Polish history into the lore. The mocap does not match the VO, leading me to believe it was done in Poland. But everyone's American? Why? All of Bloober Team's games are like this, and I really don't get it. They clearly love Poland and basing games there, so why not provide the audio option? Especially when charging full price for an 8-hour game? It's just weird to me. Like is it a publisher demand? Focus testing? Who knows.
The Conclusion
Overall though... I liked this one. I think there's enough original here to justify playing through at least once, and there's clearly a lot of love and good ideas behind it. I didn't like this one as much as
Observer, but I liked it far, far more than
Blair Witch and
Layers of Fear, both of which were... Really quite crap if I'm being honest. I wanna see what this studio keeps putting out in future, but if they're going to continue to dive into Polish settings, we're gonna need Polish audio. All three of The Witcher games had it, and those had way more VO. Let's fix that guys.
&iso2021
love it
