Ahead of its haunted hotel trip later this month, The Medium developers Bloober Team has release 14 minutes of new gameplay footage from their spirited upcoming spooker.
It all starts off predictably enough. The titular medium, Marianne, wanders an abandoned hotel—examining objects for clues, listen to the disembodied screams of a spooky shoe. Standard stuff. But after a minute of exploration, we get to the real neat trick up The Medium's sleeve.
Marianne is able to bridge the gap between reality and the spirit world, which in practice means a swish split-screen perspective—we see her chatting to an 'armless ghost in the murky ghost realm, while a peek back into reality shows how daft she looks talking to herself in an empty lobby.
Each world comes with its own problems. An intact stairwell in one plane may be crumbling wreckage in the other, forcing Marianne to take detours she wouldn't have to if she'd simply stuck to one realm or the other.
The rest of the trailer revels in some wonderfully grisly horror imagery, using the Resident Evil-style fixed camera to frame its monsters and set pieces behind dark corners. Bloober Team has always been decent at horror imagery, but its deployment of jump scares in Layers Of Fear got real old, real fast.
I'm hopeful for The Medium. Our first jaunt into the spirit realm is fairly spook-free, and the game promises both more thoughtful puzzling and action-packed sequences with an arsenal of psychic powers. Following its delay last month, The Medium is now coming to Steam on January 28th.
Unless you happen to live in Australia, that is. Sorry.
