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.