The Medium Impressions - Xbox X's first exclusive....turd

[CriticalGaming]

I finished the game

Maybe I shouldn't write this now as that ending has royally pissed me off (and not in a good way). What an absolute fucking cop-out bullshit of an ending...

Anyway, the game is good if you can get into the story. The gameplay is OK to bad. So it's kind of like a Telltale Game where if the story doesn't sink it's claws into you, it's going to be awful.

But man...fuck that ending

Spoiler

For a game where story is so important, having it end on a fucking bullshit cliffhanger takes some fucking balls. At the end of the game, Marianne finds out that Lillianne (Sadness) is also a Medium and her sister. Lillianne is the one that released The Demon because she wanted to save herself and Marianne from a fire. At the end, Lillianne says that she needs Maryanne to kill her because while she is alive, The Demon can't be stopped and she doesn't have the strength to do it herself. The game ends with The Demon confronting Maryanne on the pier you see in the beginning of the game (Lillianne was sending those visions to Maryanne because she wanted to be killed) and Maryanne doesn't want to kill her newly reunited with sister. As The Demon approaches, Maryanne realizes The Demon needs her to truly escape because he needs a stronger Medium to work through so she puts the gun to her own head to get him to back off. The screen fades to black, a gunshot is heard, and then roll credits.

Fuck off Medium. This absolute cop-out of an ending has left such a sour taste in my mouth that I've gone from recommending it to people with the warning above about gameplay and story to just deleting you and forgetting your existence. Have the guts to finish your story because it's the only thing you had going for you

Had you asked me pre-ending, I'd have said it was worth a playthrough if you want a creepy game with an interesting story and premise and can handle some OK to bad gameplay. Now not so much.

Im sorry my friend. Maybe next game will be better.

 

[tippy2k2]

Im sorry my friend. Maybe next game will be better.

Eh, you play good games and you play bad games. I gambled on The Medium knowing the risks and...while I did enjoy it well enough, it really should have and could have been better.

Like many a games before it and many a games that will come after it, it basically got the benefit of being first. If there was more on the Series X for me to try, The Medium probably would have just been skipped but it benefitted from timing (and being free on Game Pass, had it not been on GP, I almost certainly would have waited to buy it until it was $20 or so).

I'll just do what I figured I'd do with the Series X; keeping playing the Xbox One games on it since it's backwards compatible (and sell my Xbox One and all these games for it to make up a good chunk of my $500 back) and wait for a true Series X Champion to come ride me off into the sunset.

 

[CriticalGaming]

Eh, you play good games and you play bad games. I gambled on The Medium knowing the risks and...while I did enjoy it well enough, it really should have and could have been better.

Like many a games before it and many a games that will come after it, it basically got the benefit of being first. If there was more on the Series X for me to try, The Medium probably would have just been skipped but it benefitted from timing (and being free on Game Pass, had it not been on GP, I almost certainly would have waited to buy it until it was $20 or so).

I'll just do what I figured I'd do with the Series X; keeping playing the Xbox One games on it since it's backwards compatible (and sell my Xbox One and all these games for it to make up a good chunk of my $500 back) and wait for a true Series X Champion to come ride me off into the sunset.

My PC has kept me from even looking at a Series X as any exclusive for Xbox will be on PC day 1 as well. Which im not sure was the best move for Microsoft to sell machines, but it is up in the air still.

I just found it funny that the first big Xbox game of the new generation is The Medium and it isnt going to stand out by the end of the year or even be a hit in the end.

I just wonder what Microsoft's plan is. Because it doesnt seem like they want to make killer titles the way Sony seems to.

 

[tippy2k2]

My PC has kept me from even looking at a Series X as any exclusive for Xbox will be on PC day 1 as well. Which im not sure was the best move for Microsoft to sell machines, but it is up in the air still.

I just found it funny that the first big Xbox game of the new generation is The Medium and it isnt going to stand out by the end of the year or even be a hit in the end.

I just wonder what Microsoft's plan is. Because it doesnt seem like they want to make killer titles the way Sony seems to.

Honestly, I think Microsoft's plan is what they did with The Xbox One.

Basically an extension of their PC setup. The Xbox Series X is their version of a prebuilt PC. Game Pass also looks like a huge part of their plans as they try to make it The Netflix of gaming. So I think they themselves are less focused on gaming and more focused on making their Xbox more like the PC and get PC game makers on board with porting over to them and joining Game Pass.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

Honestly, I think Microsoft's plan is what they did with The Xbox One.

Basically an extension of their PC setup. The Xbox Series X is their version of a prebuilt PC. Game Pass also looks like a huge part of their plans as they try to make it The Netflix of gaming. So I think they themselves are less focused on gaming and more focused on making their Xbox more like the PC and get PC game makers on board with porting over to them and joining Game Pass.

The Xbox was always supposed to be a PC for the living room; at least in terms of media capabilities. So in a way they’re doing that in a broader sense, but not with the gusto of Sony’s first party development efforts in terms of games and pushing hardware innovations like with the DualSense.

 

[Drathnoxis]

I finished watching SGF playthrough the game and I'm very underwhelmed. It was just boring for the most part. I never got very invested in the story or why the main character was doing the things she was doing. The chronology didn't seem to make much sense to me either and I could never figure out if the massacre happened years ago or only yesterday. Also the way ghosts work didn't make much sense at all. And then we got to the Thomas section and suddenly I was interested. He has some sort of antagonistic relationship with his ghost self, and we get some banter between them and then we get to go explore some Richard and find out what makes him tick and it's like horror themed Psychonauts. It was actually pretty interesting, even if Richard was tangental to the plot at best. Why couldn't the whole game be about Thomas? And then it ended and we were back to Marianne - "I'm going to pretend my bolt cutters are either a secret agent or a porn star" - exploring ruins and monologuing.

Overall the game was just middling. It wasn't bad enough to be funny and it wasn't good enough to be good. And like Tippy said before the ending is just terrible and inconclusive. I didn't care enough about the game for it to bother me, though.

There's also a Napoleon Dynamite reference.