Episode 119 - Orange Flavored Apple - The Medium

Remember, you can’t save every podcast. Welcome to our first
episode for this year’s Halloween! We’re going to be talking about
The Medium, a horror adventure game with the hook that you are able
to control your character in two different versions of the game
world simultaneously; both the real world and the spirit world are
accessible due to your status as a “medium.” What this translates
to mechanically is that you move around the two versions of the
world and need to solve various puzzles in order to get around. It
has a little bit more depth than that, with sections having you in
only one world or the other, or swapping between the two, but it
does mostly consist of traversal obstacles and simple lock-and-key
style puzzles. It tends to get by on its visuals, which are
genuinely interesting, using color grading and surreal landscapes
to really separate the two versions of the game’s world. We’re
going to be talking about variety versus depth of mechanics, the
importance of considering the non-literal interpretation of your
narrative, and we try to figure out how to blink your ears. Thank
you for joining us again this week, and this year for another
spooky Halloween. This developer, Bloober Team, sort of gained
their popularity with “Layers of Fear” and has been steadily
growing in budget in their later releases. We haven’t exactly kept
up with them, so it was a bit surprising to see a game with more of
a mechanical focus than the games we were aware of previously. How
did this game sit with you? Let us know in the comments or over on
our Discord. And stay tuned, as we still have another game (and a
couple more Pocket episodes) on horror games this month, and next
time we’re talking about Outlast, one of the classic horror titles
with a deliberate found footage aesthetic.