Dear Escapist friends,
like many people I hold the Silent Hill series, or the better parts thereof, in high regard. And like many people who do I've made peace with the fact that it most likely died with Hideo Kojima's and Guillermo Del Toro's brilliantly executed short vignette P.T., originally intended as teaser for for a full length game that got cancelled very shortly after P.T.s release in the aftermath of Kojima's messy divorce with his long time publisher Konami. If there is anything to be said though, it's that the video game industry abhors a vaccuum and various developers have tried to pick up the mantle of Silent Hill's unique blend of psychological and occultist horror. Two examples thereof came out very recently, and I've played both of them in the last two weeks so let's compare and contrast them.
Up first is
Protagonist of Medium is young adult Marianne, a psychic orphan girl in 90s Poland who can interact and communicate with the spirit world. Which is, very explicitly, not the afterlife, rather a transitional realm for spirits who can't move on. Marianne grew up with her recently deceased foster father, an undertaker, and gets a call from a mysterious man named Thomas telling her to come to an abandoned People's Republic era ressort. As far as horror premises go, Medium does paint by numbers. Of course Thomas is initially nowhere to be seen at the Niwa Hotel, of course Marianne has to explore the forsaken structure and solve various puzzles, many of them playing off of the games "two realities" mechanics to uncover its secrets and, of course, learn more about her own past. The plot of Medium doesn't really resemble either approach to the Silent Hill series, neither SH1 and SH3 exploration of lovecraftian occultism, nor SH2 and SH: SMs freudian character studies. It's story, about the adventures of a psychic in a haunted hotel, invoke a lesser 90s horror movie more than anything else and the game is constantly about two plot beats away from turning into a superhero origin story. The gameplay, fixed camera angles aside, resembles that of a modern linear third person action adventure (Think Plague Tale) more than it does the 90s and early 00s horror classic its visual presentation is trying to invoke. Instead of compact Silent Hill or Resident Evil style dungeons to be explored, the level design of Medium is mostly linear and doesn't allow for much in the way of exploration. It doesn't have the characteristic clunky combat system of early Survival Horror games (Not that I was missing it, to be fair), confrontations with hostile creatures consist of simplistic stealth sequences and simplistic chase scenes.
Medium's defining feature, in presentation at least, is its split reality premise. See, you got the regular reality of 90s Poland, which is arguably already horrific enough, and the spirit realm, a nightmarish otherworld visually based on the painting of Polish artist Zdzisław Beksiński, bleak, sepia toned impressions of death and decay. Ocassionally, the game utilizes a split screen mechanic to depict Marianne moving through both of these worlds at once. This sounds like it could be used for some creative puzzles, but it rarely ever is.
One can hardly accuse The Medium of looking bad or lacking in atmosphere, though I'd also have to lie if I told you that I found it very scary. There was one pretty well executed jumpscare, early on, but, you know, it's one of those game that very clearly indicate whether there is any actual danger present and or whether you're save to explore. The few encounters with hostile demons that Marianne has are fairly short, scripted sequences that just kinda come and go. The Pyramid Head/Nemesis character of The Medium is a demon named The Maw, voiced by Troy Baker doing his hammiest Tim Curry impression, whose design is about as generic as you can get for a demon and who seems awfully whiny for a creature I'm meant to be scared by.
The core of Medium's gameplay is probably puzzle solving and it's... well, it isn't the worst I've ever seen but it mainly consists of your typical "insert Object A into Slot B" puzzles. You know, go to a place, find out some item is missing, look around to find the item, use the item in that place and then move on. Marianne has the ability to astral project, in other words, send her self in the spirit realm to places her self in the real world can't reach to, usually, retrieve some thing or another, sometimes you can switch between regular world and Otherworld using mirrors, Silent Hill Origins style but even then that only adds a few more steps to a very simple puzzle structure.
See, I strongly believe a game with weak gameplay can be redeemed by strong presentation and strong writing. As a matter of fact, the Silent Hill series serves as one of the best examples for that. The Medium has decent enough presentation for sure, I don't think that, even at its best, it can hold a candle to the creature and environmental designs of something like Silent Hill 2 or 3, but the contrast between the dilapidated ruins of very distinctly socialist architecture and the surreal Beksinskian spirit world if, if nothing else, pretty neat. When it comes to the actual content it fails to come up with anything especially impressive. Annemarie is a likeable enough character, albeit one that seems to talk a lot more like a modern day American milennial than a 90s European Gen-Xer. But her Journey through the Niwa ressort and the grounds surrounding it never really blew my mind. There's a lot to be found out, aber her history, about the buildings history, about relatives believed to be dead turning up alive, about relatives believed to be alive turning up dead, about people communing with the spirit world and dooming themselves over it, government coverups, abusive parental figures... Medium sure goes out of its way to cram in a lot of major and minor plot points, but I'm hard pressed to think of a single one that isn't a cliché of some sort.
Medium does make an attempt to capture some of the Silent Hill games more psychological elements. There are a number of brief intermissions where you get to take control of a different psychic, who has the ability to enter the mind of people he touches, which leads to a pair of excursions into the inner worlds of two minor villains. Eventually, I suppose this is a spoiler, it does turn out that the demons that had been attacking Marianna are manifestations of the lingering mental trauma of various people who had lived on the hotel grounds. It does treat these characters with a decent amount of empathy but most of them, most egregeously a ruthless government agent, are by themselves pretty clichè characters and the overly literal way their inner lifes are explored doesn't exactly help.
As a game, The Medium is okay. It's a not especially scary horror game with simple puzzles, simple action setpieces, pretty good visual direction and a serviceable if uninventive ghost story at the center of it. An inofficial sucessor to Silent Hill, though, it isn't, Akira Yamaoka's moody score nonwithstanding. It's just too predictable, to literal, too lacking in the clever abstractions and ambiguities that used to elevate the writing and presentation of the Silent Hill series. My stay at the Niwa was not an unpleasant, but a pretty forgettable one. Let's move on to the other game.
like many people I hold the Silent Hill series, or the better parts thereof, in high regard. And like many people who do I've made peace with the fact that it most likely died with Hideo Kojima's and Guillermo Del Toro's brilliantly executed short vignette P.T., originally intended as teaser for for a full length game that got cancelled very shortly after P.T.s release in the aftermath of Kojima's messy divorce with his long time publisher Konami. If there is anything to be said though, it's that the video game industry abhors a vaccuum and various developers have tried to pick up the mantle of Silent Hill's unique blend of psychological and occultist horror. Two examples thereof came out very recently, and I've played both of them in the last two weeks so let's compare and contrast them.
Up first is
The Medium
The Medium is the most recent work of Polish developer Bloober Team, mainly known for first person horror games like Layers of Fear, itself in a sense a Gothic Horror themed expansion on P.T., Observer or the officially licensed Blair Witch game. The Medium is a third person game that couldn't be more orthodox in its presentation, invoking the cinematic fixed camera angles of Playstation 2 era Survival Horror. Medium does little to hide its reverence for the Silent Hill series, the score is composed by the always excellent Akira Yamaoka, composer for the series up to and including 2009's Shattered Memories, vocal tracks were recorded by Mary Elizabeth McGlynn, for whom the same applies, there is fog, a lake, decrepit buildings and the idea of two different realities layered on top of each other.
Protagonist of Medium is young adult Marianne, a psychic orphan girl in 90s Poland who can interact and communicate with the spirit world. Which is, very explicitly, not the afterlife, rather a transitional realm for spirits who can't move on. Marianne grew up with her recently deceased foster father, an undertaker, and gets a call from a mysterious man named Thomas telling her to come to an abandoned People's Republic era ressort. As far as horror premises go, Medium does paint by numbers. Of course Thomas is initially nowhere to be seen at the Niwa Hotel, of course Marianne has to explore the forsaken structure and solve various puzzles, many of them playing off of the games "two realities" mechanics to uncover its secrets and, of course, learn more about her own past. The plot of Medium doesn't really resemble either approach to the Silent Hill series, neither SH1 and SH3 exploration of lovecraftian occultism, nor SH2 and SH: SMs freudian character studies. It's story, about the adventures of a psychic in a haunted hotel, invoke a lesser 90s horror movie more than anything else and the game is constantly about two plot beats away from turning into a superhero origin story. The gameplay, fixed camera angles aside, resembles that of a modern linear third person action adventure (Think Plague Tale) more than it does the 90s and early 00s horror classic its visual presentation is trying to invoke. Instead of compact Silent Hill or Resident Evil style dungeons to be explored, the level design of Medium is mostly linear and doesn't allow for much in the way of exploration. It doesn't have the characteristic clunky combat system of early Survival Horror games (Not that I was missing it, to be fair), confrontations with hostile creatures consist of simplistic stealth sequences and simplistic chase scenes.
Medium's defining feature, in presentation at least, is its split reality premise. See, you got the regular reality of 90s Poland, which is arguably already horrific enough, and the spirit realm, a nightmarish otherworld visually based on the painting of Polish artist Zdzisław Beksiński, bleak, sepia toned impressions of death and decay. Ocassionally, the game utilizes a split screen mechanic to depict Marianne moving through both of these worlds at once. This sounds like it could be used for some creative puzzles, but it rarely ever is.
The core of Medium's gameplay is probably puzzle solving and it's... well, it isn't the worst I've ever seen but it mainly consists of your typical "insert Object A into Slot B" puzzles. You know, go to a place, find out some item is missing, look around to find the item, use the item in that place and then move on. Marianne has the ability to astral project, in other words, send her self in the spirit realm to places her self in the real world can't reach to, usually, retrieve some thing or another, sometimes you can switch between regular world and Otherworld using mirrors, Silent Hill Origins style but even then that only adds a few more steps to a very simple puzzle structure.
See, I strongly believe a game with weak gameplay can be redeemed by strong presentation and strong writing. As a matter of fact, the Silent Hill series serves as one of the best examples for that. The Medium has decent enough presentation for sure, I don't think that, even at its best, it can hold a candle to the creature and environmental designs of something like Silent Hill 2 or 3, but the contrast between the dilapidated ruins of very distinctly socialist architecture and the surreal Beksinskian spirit world if, if nothing else, pretty neat. When it comes to the actual content it fails to come up with anything especially impressive. Annemarie is a likeable enough character, albeit one that seems to talk a lot more like a modern day American milennial than a 90s European Gen-Xer. But her Journey through the Niwa ressort and the grounds surrounding it never really blew my mind. There's a lot to be found out, aber her history, about the buildings history, about relatives believed to be dead turning up alive, about relatives believed to be alive turning up dead, about people communing with the spirit world and dooming themselves over it, government coverups, abusive parental figures... Medium sure goes out of its way to cram in a lot of major and minor plot points, but I'm hard pressed to think of a single one that isn't a cliché of some sort.
Medium does make an attempt to capture some of the Silent Hill games more psychological elements. There are a number of brief intermissions where you get to take control of a different psychic, who has the ability to enter the mind of people he touches, which leads to a pair of excursions into the inner worlds of two minor villains. Eventually, I suppose this is a spoiler, it does turn out that the demons that had been attacking Marianna are manifestations of the lingering mental trauma of various people who had lived on the hotel grounds. It does treat these characters with a decent amount of empathy but most of them, most egregeously a ruthless government agent, are by themselves pretty clichè characters and the overly literal way their inner lifes are explored doesn't exactly help.
As a game, The Medium is okay. It's a not especially scary horror game with simple puzzles, simple action setpieces, pretty good visual direction and a serviceable if uninventive ghost story at the center of it. An inofficial sucessor to Silent Hill, though, it isn't, Akira Yamaoka's moody score nonwithstanding. It's just too predictable, to literal, too lacking in the clever abstractions and ambiguities that used to elevate the writing and presentation of the Silent Hill series. My stay at the Niwa was not an unpleasant, but a pretty forgettable one. Let's move on to the other game.
