Bloober Team shows 14 minutes of The Medium gameplay

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Numbers first: 14 minutes of gameplay, two worlds on screen at the same time and a date set for January 28, 2021. On January 6, Poland’s Bloober Team, of Layers of Fear and Observer, published a long video of The Medium, its new psychological horror game, exclusive to Xbox Series X|S among consoles and also coming to PC.

The game follows Marianne, a medium who helps tormented souls find rest and can move between the real world and the spirit world. The story is set in post-communist Poland in 1999. Marianne gets a call from a man named Thomas, who says he knows about her powers and promises to explain where they come from and what a recurring dream means. To get answers, she has to go to the Niwa, a communist-era workers’ resort abandoned after a massacre.

Translating the jargon: the split screen

The central feature is the “dual reality”. In some sections, the screen splits and shows Marianne in both planes at once, each with its own setting, and moving between them helps solve puzzles. In practice, that means rendering two simultaneous perspectives, and that was exactly the problem that shelved the project: the idea dates from 2012, when Bloober planned the game for Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii U, but the hardware of the time couldn’t handle it. Development only restarted when Microsoft showed studios the capabilities of the Xbox Series X|S. A ready-made joke: a game about seeing two worlds had to wait a whole generation to see the second one.

The spirit world was inspired by the surrealist work of Polish painter Zdzisław Beksiński. On the soundtrack, Akira Yamaoka, composer of Silent Hill, shared the work with Arkadiusz Reikowski, and the voice cast included Troy Baker.

What came next

The Medium had been scheduled for December 10, 2020 and was delayed because of the pandemic. It came out on January 28, 2021 for Xbox Series X|S and PC, received reviews ranging from “generally favorable” to “mixed”, depending on the platform, on Metacritic, and later arrived on PS5 on September 3, 2021, on Switch in July 2023 and on macOS in August 2023.