In the production, players play the role of Marianna, the woman who is the title medium. The protagonist, who can move smoothly beyond the real and spiritual world, ends up in an abandoned NIWA holiday resort to deal with the mysterious death of a girl. In terms of history, content and gameplay, we have exactly the same title here as a few months earlier on the Xbox and PC. It is still an old-style psychological horror game (reminiscent of the Silent Hill series, among others), but with impressive graphics, two-world mechanics and a great soundtrack by Arkadiusz Reikowski and Akira Yamaoka. What is new is the support for the DualSense controller mentioned in the introduction, which includes ... basically all its capabilities.
The Medium is a horror film that focuses primarily on the atmosphere and there are basically no typical scarecrows in the form of monsters jumping straight in the face to the accompaniment of loud sounds. Suffice it to say that even for me, a person who usually avoids horrors, it was not an overly scary experience, although at times it caused goosebumps and a feeling of uncertainty. The pace is unhurried, the climate is dense, and the atmosphere is built primarily by the appropriate play of lights and shadows, great music or sounds heard somewhere in the background. And here comes the great complement to it, the haptic vibrations, which become more intense as more is happening on the screen - simple but so effective! Immersion is also increased by adaptive triggers that offer a noticeable resistance when using Marianna's supernatural abilities. And while in dynamic, competitive shooters they can get in the way, in a relaxed, non-fast-paced production like The Medium, it makes much more sense and it just works very well!
Developers have also added support for a light on the controller, which is "connected" to the lights inside the game and the loudspeaker. The latter is used to play the first sounds and I must admit that when I heard the screams accompanying the playing of one "echo" for the first time, I was ... quite surprised by this.
The list of novelties is complemented by the use of DualSense's movement capabilities when examining certain objects from the first person perspective. Although this solution seems quite intuitive, I did not like it - apparently the years of using analog games in such games have done their job and just a few hours with The Medium is not enough to get used to the solution proposed by the developers.
We will not see any changes (at least clear enough to be seen with the naked eye) in the graphic design. The game looks great, especially in the non-material world, inspired by the works of Zdzisław Beksiński, although the real one makes a very good impression. Everything is still running at 30 frames per second. This may disappoint some, but at least we won't see any noticeable dips in liquidity here. Loading times are short, to which the new generation of consoles has already got us used to.
The Medium on PlayStation 5 is, on the one hand, basically the same game as on the Xbox and PC, on the other hand, the DualSense controller has been used here in such a way that the experience benefits a lot. Probably not enough to reach for this title again, but if you haven't played so far, it's worth considering catching up on the Sony platform!
