Developer Bloober Team has revealed an extended look at its upcoming game The Medium, showcasing the psychological horror experience and its environments in 14 minutes of gameplay on the Xbox Series X. The Medium’s story is told across a journey that allows players to explore both the world of the living and the realm of the afterlife.
The main draw here is that players will be able to venture into both worlds simultaneously using a split-screen dual reality gameplay system. The Medium also has its own fair share of danger as players will have to deal with The Maw, a malevolent entity that can travel between realities but manifests as a blind and invisible foe in the living world who stalks the protagonist Marianne.
In GameSpot’s preview of The Medium, critic Alessandro Fillari noted how Bloober Team has built on the atmospheric horror of its previous games to create a tale that is both terrifying and surprisingly emotional.
“As one of the first big Xbox exclusives of 2021, it can help set the tone for the platform, especially since it’s shaping up to be a clever take on the horror experience, and we’ll see how far Bloober Team can take its concept for dual storytelling when it launches later this month.”
The Medium is due for release on January 28 on Xbox Series X/S, and PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store. For more detail on the game before it launches, don’t forget to check out our The Medium preorder guide.
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2020 has come to a close, but we’re not yet finished celebrating last year’s games. The New York Game Awards has announced the nominees for this year’s awards show, which marks the event’s 10th anniversary.
Former Nintendo boss Reggie Fils-Aime is the host of the New York Game Awards, which will be held as a virtual-only event due to the health crisis. The show takes place on January 26.
The nominees for the top prize, the Big Apple award for Best Game of the Year, include Animal Crossing: New Horizons, The Last of Us Part II, Final Fantasy VII Remake, Doom Eternal, Yakuza: Like a Dragon, and Hades.
For the indie game category, the nominees include Ori and the Will of the Wisps, The Longing: Patience, Hades, Fall Guys, Spiritfarer, and Umurangi Generation. The best writing category nominees are The Last of Us Part II, If Found, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Hades, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Cyberpunk 2077, and Treachery in Beatdown City.
In addition to the game awards, the event will honor four “industry greats” with the Andrew Yoon Legend Award to celebrate their contributions to gaming and the impact they’ve had on the industry. Some of the previous recipients of this award have included Fils-Aime, Jade Raymond, Richard Garriott, Todd Howard, and Ralph Baer. The award is named for Andrew Yoon, the former editor of Joystiq and Shacknews, who passed away in 2015.
New for this year’s awards show is the Shea Stadium Award for Best Esports Event. The nominees this year include the Street Fighter League, Overwatch League, League of Legends Worlds, IEM Katowice, and the Mortal Kombat 11 Final Kombat event.
You can see a full rundown of the nominees for the New York Game Awards below.
New York Game Awards Nominees
Big Apple Award for Best Game of the Year
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
The Last of Us Part II
Final Fantasy VII: Remake
Doom Eternal
Yakuza: Like A Dragon
Hades
Central Park Children’s Zoo Award for Best Kids Game
Dreams
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Moving Out
Good Job!
Drake Hollow
Sackboy: A Big Adventure
Astro’s Playroom
A-Train Award for Best Mobile Game
Roundguard
Necrobarista
Creaks
Little Orpheus
Good Sudoku
Genshin Impact
Wide Ocean Big Jacket
Coney Island Dreamland Award for Best AR/VR Game
Half-Life: Alyx
Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners
Dreams
Paper Beast
Star Wars Squadrons
Off Broadway Award for Best Indie Game
Ori and the Will of the Wisps
The Longing: Patience
Hades
Fall Guys
Spiritfarer
Umurangi Generation
Tin Pan Alley Award for Best Music in a Game
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Final Fantasy VII: Remake
The Last of Us Part II
Teenage Blob
Hades
Spider-Man: Miles Morales
Fuser
Ghost of Tsushima
Statue of Liberty Award for Best World
Ghost of Tsushima
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
Final Fantasy VII: Remake
Microsoft Flight Simulator
Hades
Umarangi Generation
Demon’s Souls
Cyberpunk 2077 (for PC)
Herman Melville Award for Best Writing
The Last of Us Part II
If Found
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
Hades
Spider-Man: Miles Morales
Cyberpunk 2077 (for PC)
Treachery in Beatdown City
Great White Way Award for Best Acting in a Game
Laura Bailey as Abby in The Last of Us Part II
Ashley Johnson as Ellie in The Last of Us Part II
Briana White as Aerith in Final Fantasy VII: Remake
August Aiden as Tyler Ronan in Tell Me Why
Logan Cunningham as Lord Hades / Poseidon / Achilles / Charon / The Storyteller / Asterius in Hades
Nadji Jeter as Miles Morales in Spider-Man: Miles Morales
Keanu Reeves as Johnny Silverhand in Cyberpunk 2077
Freedom Tower Award for Best Remake
Final Fantasy VII: Remake
Resident Evil 3
Mr. Driller: DrillLand
Black Mesa
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2
Demon’s Souls
Captain Award for Best Esports Team
DAMWOM Gaming
San Francisco Shock
Red Bull OG
Dallas Empire
TSM
Shea Stadium Award for Best Esports Event
Street Fighter League
Overwatch League
League of Legends Worlds
IEM Katowice
Mortal Kombat 11 Final Kombat
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Avatar: The Last Airbender was a show that defined an era of animation and defined what could be accomplished within that world. Throughout its three seasons it originally aired on Nickelodeon, Avatar would win numerous awards–including Emmys and a Peabody and even have a sequel, Legend of Korra.
This week, some of the original cast members are coming together for a live stream to talk about the show, its influence on a generation of animators, and the “special place in animation history even 15 years later.”
Dante Basco, who provided the voice of Prince Zuko, announced on his Instagram that Zachary Elsen (Aang), Grey Griffin (Azula), Jack De Sena (Sokka), Jennie Kwan (Suki), Olivia Hack (Ty Lee), Cricket Leigh (Mai), and Michaela Murphy (Toph) have all been announced as participants, with “more to be revealed.”
It’s interesting to note that Mae Whitman (Katara) has not been announced, so it’s uncertain if she’ll show up for this, but for fans of the show paying $10 for the broadcast seems like a great deal. Fans can purchase tickets here at StageIt.
The show has been off the air for more than a decade, and while the Netflix adaptation has been put on on ice much like Aang himself, fans can still catch the original show as well as Korra on the streaming service right now.
The PlayStation 5 represents a pretty bold design choice, with a curved space-age design and white fins along the sides. Fans have naturally assumed that an all-black model would be coming, matching the look of the last few PlayStation consoles, but Sony hasn’t introduced one so far. A third-party is offering custom systems this week that do just that, but they’re extremely limited in supply.
The store SUP3R5 is selling black consoles inspired by the design of the PS2. That means the white parts of the console and DualSense controller have been converted to black, and it sports retro coloring with the old PlayStation logo and the colors on the face buttons. The custom consoles are set to go on sale this Friday, January 8, at 3 PM ET. They’re expected to ship in the late spring.
It looks pretty slick, but you’ll have to snag one quickly. The store has only produced 304 of the custom consoles, which will make them considerably harder to come by than even a standard retail PS5–which is already notoriously difficult to find. The console package includes a black DualSense controller, but custom controllers are also available to purchase separately with about 500 available. Sony has teased further DualSense controller color options will come, at some point.
If you’re lucky enough to snag one, you’ll also be paying extra for the aesthetic satisfaction. The consoles are priced at $650 and $750 for the All-Digital and standard edition, respectively, a sharp increase from the $400 and $500 regular cost. The a la carte DualSense controllers are similarly pricey, at $100 up from $70.
And as always with custom hardware, there is the possibility that any of these modifications could void the warranty or lead to other unexpected issues, so buyer beware.
If you just want a regular old vanilla PS5, keep an eye on our PS5 restock guide. We’re regularly updating as retailers add more supply, but it tends to go fast.
After a successful crowdfunding campaign, years of development, and multiple delays, Double Fine’s Psychonauts 2 is finally slated for release this year.
Double Fine boss Tim Schafer recently gave an update on the project, stressing that the game is indeed on track to launch in 2021. All the levels are in the game and no more features are being added, so the team is now working on getting the game polished and ready to release.
Schafer went on to say that Double Fine is refusing to crunch on Psychonauts 2 as it enters its final stage of development. The period of crunch on the first Psychonauts was brutal, Schafer said, and with that in mind, the studio is unwilling to do that again.
Reflecting on the crunch for 2005’s Psychonauts, Schafer said, “You’re just so focused on making the game good, and getting it done, and then you look up and it’s a sea of dead bodies all around you. And you’re like, ‘What have I done?'”
For Psychonauts 2, Schafer said it is very tempting right now to crunch on the game to get it out the door, but he won’t do that. “If you can’t move the money, and you can’t move the schedule, and you can’t move the quality of the game, you can just move the quality of everyone’s life down a lot by making them come in and work at a lot,” Schafer said.
Microsoft acquired Double Fine during Psychonauts 2’s development. Despite that, the game continue will still release on all previously announced platforms, including ones that rival Microsoft’s. People on Xbox and PC, however, are getting special treatment because they can get the game at no extra cost through Game Pass.
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Cyberpunk 2077 has set a number of impressive sales feats since it launched last year, such as selling 13 million copies at launch and breaking records on Steam for the most concurrent users ever in a single-player game. Cyberpunk 2077 also has several other achievements that CD Projekt Red likely doesn’t want to celebrate, such as Sony and Microsoft offering full refunds to customers due to multiple performance issues within the game, with Sony even going so far as to pull the game from the PlayStation Store.
Better optimized on PC than on console, Cyberpunk 2077 has had a more positive reception on that platform but has failed to maintain its playerbase since launch. Cyberpunk 2077 has lost 79% of its players since launch according to GitHyp’s data, with its current peak being over 200,000 players in comparison to its December peak of over a million players.
By contrast, it took CD Projekt Red’s previous game, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, three months to lose that percentage. However, The Witcher 3 started from a much lower peak of around 92,000 at launch in 2015.
Cyberpunk 2077 has a long road ahead of it before it’s as universally loved as CDPR’s Witcher series. Staff haven’t held back from questioning the founders and upper management about crunch and the game’s marketing and a class-action lawsuit alleging that the studio hid the poor quality of the game on last-gen consoles is underway.
In more positive Cyberpunk 2077 news, you’re now able to play the game in third-person view on PC with a few handy mods.
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Microsoft has revealed the first new batch of Xbox Game Pass titles being added to the catalog this month, and there are some great games coming.
New additions for January 2021 include the fighting game Injustice 2 (January 7), along with Giant Sparrow’s acclaimed What Remains of Edith Finch (January 14) for PC. That game is already included with Xbox Game Pass on console.
Also coming to Game Pass in January is the PES 2021 Season Update for console and Android (January 7), which is an updated version of PES 2020 with new rosters. Game Pass subscribers can also look forward to the dungeon-crawler Torchlight III (January 14) and the 1950s-set adventure game The Little Acre (January 7).
Additionally, Microsoft reminded users that they have until January 25 to take advantage of the introductory Game Pass offer where you can get 3 months for only $1.
The Medium reminds me of Alan Wake, if Wake leaned a bit harder into its horror side. Bloober Team’s upcoming Xbox Series X and S exclusive – that’s right, it’s not coming to Xbox One when it gets released on January 28, which I’ll explain shortly – thoroughly impressed me in a 20-minute demo that skipped around to a few different areas. It’s moody, it’s cinematic, and like any good horror game, it’s got a creepy little girl that sends shivers down your spine. And it’s literally two games running at the same time.
The two worlds thing is why The Medium is a next-gen Xbox exclusive: it’s running two game worlds at once – protagonist Marianne’s real world and the sinister spirit world that she can see and do unique things in. The screen literally splits horizontally at times while you navigate both worlds at the same time, and the lead designer told me that, quite simply, running two worlds simultaneously just doesn’t work on current-gen from a technical perspective.
The result is a unique gameplay experience, and one that’s guaranteed to have some variety in it. My demo began a chunk of the way into the campaign, in which Marianne enters the abandoned and decrepit old Hotel Niwa looking for a man named Thomas for reasons I didn’t have context for in this demo. She examines an open suitcase on the ground. Inside is a men’s dress shoe, and when examining it she hears screams – voices from the past, Bloober Team said. But that’s just a warmup.
Later, a kid’s ball bounces down the stairs behind you, and that’s when you meet Sadness, the aforementioned creepy little girl. She’s missing an arm and has a mask on her face, and the spirit world has clearly not been kind to her. She just wants to play, but Marianne asks her to help find Thomas first. That requires a trip upstairs, which Sadness can do in the spirit world, but Marianne can’t in the real world due to the steps being gone.
While I wouldn’t call the next bit a puzzle sequence, per se, it is a situation that needs solving. You need to power up the elevator, and that means triggering an out of body experience so that you can solely occupy the spirit world. You can only do that for a short amount of time before your body literally disintegrates, however, but once you’ve absorbed some spirit energy, you can come back to your body, blast that energy into the fuse box, and continue upwards.
In another section of the hotel, you’re trapped on the other side of a mirror, and you need a key; something related to a cat. That leads to the faceless lost soul who cannot rest. His name is Bernard, and you’ll need to say his name and restore his face to allow him to leave his purgatory. Naturally, his face is in a room swarming with moths, but another spirit energy charge can burn the bugs and clear the path. Face restored, soul at rest, and that reveals the cat toy needed to escape this mirror realm.
Finally, I saw an encounter with an invisible, seemingly winged monster that seemed to feed on your fear. This was the most Alan Wake-like moment I witnessed, thanks to the flashlight on Marianne’s chest that blinks faster as the creature gets closer. You’ll have to hold your breath and hide from the beast, both as you try to escape an indoor confrontation and later as it blocks your way in an outdoor area.
If the rest of the game is anything like my demo, The Medium will be oozing with tension and atmosphere, and hopefully a bit more challenging puzzle-solving. To that end, the developers say you’ll spend about a third of the campaign each in the real world, the spirit world, and the split-screen dual-world scenario. And remember that the Xbox Series also has Scorn lined up as a 2021 exclusive horror game, so here’s hoping The Medium gets the Xbox’s year off to a spooky start.
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Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s Executive Editor of Previews. Follow him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan, catch him on Unlocked, and drop-ship him Taylor Ham sandwiches from New Jersey whenever possible.
Developer Bloober Team has been steadily honing its craft for compelling psychological horror games since the release of 2016’s Layers of Fear. The studio followed up this release with the remarkable cyberpunk horror game Observer in 2017, and then both Layers of Fear 2 and a survival horror game set in the Blair Witch franchise in 2019. While these games were cut from a similar cloth of first-person atmospheric horror, Bloober Team’s next game, The Medium, is a more cinematic turn for the developer–one that has been in the works since 2013. Releasing on PC and Xbox Series X|S as a console exclusive on January 28, The Medium is a story-driven horror experience that tells its narrative across twin parallel realities that come together in a bizarre yet still alluring fashion.
We recently had the chance to get an early look at The Medium ahead of its release and spoke with producer Jacek Zieba and lead game designer Wojciech Piejko about Bloober Team’s long-gestating project. In The Medium, you play as Marianne, a psychic who has a powerful connection to the spirit world that acts as a dark mirror to our own. After learning about a tragic murder at a now-abandoned hotel, she travels to the derelict site to uncover dark secrets that reveal the truth of what happened and how her own supernatural powers are involved in the overarching mystery.
Moving away from the first-person perspective of Layers of Fear and Blair Witch, The Medium is a third-person game that uses a combination of fixed camera angles akin to survival horror classics. The game also incorporates split-screen gameplay mechanics to show off Marianne’s exploration of the real world and the spirit realm. While exploring, Marianne can use her powers to interact with normal objects to uncover past connections with the long-deceased. While it looks to be a major departure from what Bloober Team has worked on, The Medium still retains that same sense of isolation and tense horror, focusing on a lone protagonist using their wits and quick-thinking to solve puzzles and overcome foes.
From my first impressions of the game in action, The Medium shares a remarkably similar vibe to Konami’s Silent Hill series, particularly in its handling of atmospheric horror within mundane locations. The game’s musical score is even co-composed by Akira Yamaoka, who was a composer for most of the music in the Silent Hill series. This is actually all intentional, as it turns out. According to the developers, the Silent Hills series was a significant source of inspiration for The Medium’s creators, and according to them, the game is a tribute to the franchise.
“The Silent Hill series, particularly the second game, is our inspiration. Not just for The Medium, but for our company and how we create horror games. With The Medium, we see it as a love letter to the series and to Silent Hill 2,” said producer Jacek Zieba.
Lead game designer Wojciech Piejko chimed in to elaborate further. “We are fans of the Japanese horror games like Resident Evil, Fatal Frame, Silent Hill, and Forbidden Sirens. In my opinion, those are the best ones. To continue on with what Jacek said, we admire the Silent Hill series for how it doesn’t quite judge you for your choices in the game, and that’s something we try to present in our games. Like in Silent Hill 2, the game never judges you or explains clearly whether you made bad or good choices. That approach really resonates with us, and we applied that to the design of our games at Bloober. Layers of Fear, Observer, they are built with the same idea.”
While the devs aren’t shy about sharing their influences, The Medium goes beyond just being a homage. One of the game’s more novel aspects is its approach to presenting both the real and spirit worlds at once. Instead of traveling between one or the other, The Medium shifts to a dual-screen view of both realms, with you being able to control Marianne across the two worlds simultaneously. Essentially, you’re controlling two characters at the same time, exploring environments similar in layout but drastically different in aesthetic and atmosphere. For example, the real world’s interpretation of the hotel is something akin to a haunted house, but it’s a decaying vision of hell in the spirit world.
Stylistically these two realms have many differences. However, they are still connected, and actions in one area can have influences in the other. Marianne takes on a supernatural appearance in the spirit world, and she’ll even interact with characters that can only be seen from that realm. The 24-style technique of the split-screen makes exploration, and even its narrative moments, feel more active, which gives it a unique energy compared to other horror games. During one moment, Marianne’s spirit form is having a conversation with another character about living in an alternate reality, all the while her form in the real world goes through the motions of the discussion with no one. While this sounds odd, it comes off as a very effective and clever way to present its story across two planes of reality.
The game’s dual nature comes into play during the puzzle-solving sections as well, which also introduces Marianne’s other psychic abilities. While both of her forms are tethered and controlled at once, you can split up and focus your attention on one form to progress in the parallel world. Marianne can use astral projection to control her spirit form to explore places inaccessible to her real form, allowing you to progress further in the other world. While it is mostly situational, it does show off how much thought went into the level design, which I appreciated.
One side effect of traveling between worlds is that monsters can sometimes follow her back into the real world. In familiar fashion to Layers of Fear or Blair Witch, Marianne is vulnerable during these encounters with otherworldly monsters, and she’ll need to evade them whenever they make their presence known. These encounters function like stealth challenges rather than combat sequences, and you’ll need to hide behind cover, use distractions, or hold your breath to avoid the gaze of the spirit monsters. I found these sections unnerving, which highlighted just how vulnerable you are during these encounters.
What I found interesting about The Medium is that it focuses more on emotional storytelling rather than the simple scares and grotesque imagery. In many ways, the developers see The Medium as a culmination of the talents fostered over the years. What’s particularly fascinating is that this game has been in the works for some time, and it had a significant change in perspective in the past.
“The first iteration of The Medium was actually within first-person, and being able to rotate the camera with the split-screen effect ended up inducing motion sickness, so we transitioned it over to third-person,” said Piejko. “That ended up being a much more cinematic experience, which we were very happy to see. We had always planned this game to feel like a movie, as we planned the whole game out with storyboards, and it ended up giving us more control in how we can tell the story. Going back to the Observer, we had this great, emotional scene with Dan, but it wasn’t easy to convey that emotion because it was in first-person. But now, we can show off all the emotional range in the game. So yeah, I think it’s a great move for us going forward.”
This latest look I had with The Medium showed off a lot of promise. The absence of a new Silent Hill game in recent years has left a massive void in the horror genre that not many games have managed to fill–The Medium’s particular approach to psychological horror makes for a tense yet still interesting atmosphere, and I’ll be keeping my eye on it. As one of the first big Xbox exclusives of 2021, it can help set the tone for the platform, especially since it’s shaping up to be a clever take on the horror experience, and we’ll see how far Bloober Team can take its concept for dual storytelling when it launches later this month.
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Capcom has announced a new digital event for the Switch game Monster Hunter: Rise, promising “big news and reveals.” The Digital Event, as it’s called, will take place on January 7, starting at 6 AM PT / 9 AM ET.
It will be streamed live on Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. There is no word on exactly what will be shown off or discussed, but keep checking back with GameSpot for the latest.
The announcement of this new Digital Event comes not long after producer Ryozo Tsujimoto and director Yasunori Ichinose released a video message to fans to cap off 2020. They thanked fans for their continued support of the series and told fans to expect more news in January 2021.
Monster Hunter: Rise releases on March 26, exclusively for Nintendo Switch. It was previously confirmed that a demo for Rise would be available in January, so it seems likely that the Digital Event will bring some news about that.
Rise is not the only new Monster Hunter game coming in 2021, as Capcom also plans to release Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin in Summer 2021 for Nintendo Switch. The game will have crossover content with Rise.
