On both sides of the divide the environments are exceptionally well realised, but it’s the spirit world that is particularly eerie to explore, with unearthly tendrils sprouting from the floors, outstretched hands clawing at you like stalactites from the ceiling, and your general surroundings resembling a nightmarish landscape the likes of which isn’t normally seen anywhere outside of a heavy metal album cover.
It’s an incredibly striking contrast on one side of the screen the flesh and bone Marianne will be moving along a dimly lit hotel corridor, on the other, her silver-haired spiritual form will be stalking through a hollowed-out hallway to Hell. At predetermined points along the main story path the screen will split to reveal the spirit world side by side with the material world, and you’ll suddenly be controlling two versions of Marianne at the same time. Of course, almost every room in The Medium is a dark room, and they only get darker. But elsewhere there are some satisfyingly hands-on methods you need to employ, and I particularly enjoyed the simple pleasure of arranging trays of photography chemicals and dunking the paper in the right sequence of solutions in order to develop a photo correctly in a dark room. Much of the clue gathering is admittedly fairly straightforward in a mechanical sense, using Marianne’s insight ability on discarded objects found in the world to reveal information about the fate of their owners, for example, or to highlight the ghostly footsteps that point the way forward.
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