The Medium
CW: talking about a game that is partially about sexual abuse
The Medium starts off OK. Like schlocky TV, sure, but the fixed camera angles and narrow architecture heighten the cursed Niwa resort as a space the player can’t comfortably navigate and a place our heroine, the spirit-talking Marianne, doesn’t belong. The game’s central gimmick, a split-screen view that has you navigate the realms of the living and dead simultaneously, is an effective way of expressing how Marianne exists in multiple worlds but isn’t really living in either. Themes through play. Good.
Then it introduces a character who sexually abused a young girl. His name is Richard; her’s is Lily. When confronted about his sins, Richard says he had no control over himself, that it was the result of something dark inside of him. Through video game medium magic, you then go into Richard’s psyche. The prompt: free Richard of his demons. You walk through his mind. You learn his Polish father died in World War II, his stepfather was a violent abuser himself, and the girl he loved was killed young. You see Richard ache and cry. He was, by all accounts, a good boy. Then you confront his demon, a distinct externalization of his evil, and defeat it.
Take a moment to consider this. For about an hour, The Medium has a playable section that empathizes with a pedophile. You get vengeance, but the game gives you the full-court press on all the ways he was victimized in his youth, how tragedy thrust him into darkness. It literally portrays the source of his crimes as something separate from himself. Bullshit.
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Let’s take the charitable view. After all, this whole bit exists in Richard’s mind, right? Of course he’s going to paint himself as a victim. OK. This is a video game. You play a video game. It is something active, not passive. Making the player walk through a pedophile’s self-excusing psyche is exploitative. You have to hear it his way, to see where he’s coming from, to get through. At best, the game is trying to vaguely mirror an abuser’s form of emotional manipulation. This is the optimistic reading.
Out of all the stories in the world, this is not one that needs telling. I don’t need to know what a child molester’s deal was.
It’d be one thing if The Medium treated the material appropriately. But later, the game uses this presumed rape of a young girl as a point of character development for Marianne’s father. (Read that again.) It veers into a clichéd sub-story about a shadowy government agency hunting down people with medium powers. Of course, all the major players are revealed to be related to each other. It spends its last third turning all its subtext into text, then it ends on an aimless cliffhanger that only seems to suggest that people can’t truly overcome their trauma if it’s great enough.
I don’t buy it. The sorrow of an oppressive, post-WW2 Polish state hangs over The Medium, but the end result is a callous, miserable trudge through cynicism. And since the game barely evolves past its initial psuedo-walking simulator ideas, all of this misery is kept in the foreground.
“It all starts with a dead girl,” Marianne says repeatedly over the course of the game. In a medium that has long preferred its girls dead in one form or another, The Medium uniquely revels in, and promptly mishandles, women’s suffering, whether it means to or not.
1/10
Note: This review was originally published on my blog, Jeff Reviews Games.
