You receive a phone call from him, and see him in visions, but face-to-face encounters are only with freshly released Spirit Thomas. Marianne, and the player, actually never meet real-world Thomas in The Medium. Spirit Thomas only returns decades later once Marianne has dispelled Henry’s beastly soul. Thomas plunges back into his paranormal research, desperate to reunite with his powerful spiritual mirror in order to save Lily. At the time, Spirit Thomas is the only one who can help Lily overcome her demon, and he’s gone. Thomas’s long-held wish to be rid of his spirit self comes true, but with a Monkey’s Paw caveat. Except, the encounter with Henry is a trap that locks spirit Thomas away in the darkness of Henry’s warped inner universe for decades. In relatively quick succession, Thomas calls on Spirit Thomas to punish Richard, and then defeat sociopathic Soviet agent Henry, when the latter starts snooping around Niwa. Before that, the boy had his world destroyed by Nazi occupiers, who killed his parents and also planned to use “his potential.” Years previously, Spirit Thomas helped Thomas escape imprisonment and experimentation by the Soviets with their top secret Gemini project. Real Thomas is like an addict, though, guiltily reliant on his “soulmate” when dark deeds must be done. The flashbacks Marianne experiences reveal that real-life Thomas tried to disassociate himself from his shadow self in an attempt to “be alone and feel normal.” This was accomplished through occult research, and the creation of a special salt-lined room beneath Thomas’s home, which kept the spirit realm out. He delights in dishing out vengeance on corrupted souls.
Spirit Thomas is a darker, pitiless figure powered by anger. Unlike well-adjusted Marianne, whose spirit version is an exact mirror of herself in reality (barring a hair colour change), real-world Thomas and Spirit Thomas have very different personalities. Richard, Henry and Lily are extreme examples of this break, spawning nightmarish monsters, but Thomas has clearly been affected as well.
Endure enough physical and psychological torment and it can fragment your soul, creating separate sentient entities in the spirit world. The Medium leaves a lot implied, but it does include an explicit statement about the effect of trauma on the human spirit. Thomas specialises in ridding people of their demons, and he does that through his spirit self, who can enter the minds of others. As significant, Thomas is a powerful medium as well, and he has a different spiritual power set to the young woman he drew to Niwa in the first place. We know Thomas is the architect and former manager of Niwa, with an important familial connection to Marianne. We can assume the gloved figure is Thomas, the game’s other playable character. Finally, we see what the figure is striding away from: the giant glowing tear that marks the anguished aura of Niwa, and God knows what beyond.
Boots appear in the shot, a gloved hand retrieves the timepiece, and then the unidentified figure continues on their way.
#The medium the maw cracked#
The camera tracks over the cracked earth, before stopping on a ticking pocket watch. What does it mean – for The Medium’s story, and the possibility of a sequel?Īfter the final credits roll on The Medium, we return to the apocalyptic spirit world. Or, rather, its cryptic post-credits sequence. Very little is explicitly stated in The Medium, leaving the player to form their own interpretation based on the extent of their virtual detective work.
#The medium the maw plus#
Marianne does this by collecting letter fragments, postcards and journal entries, plus tapping into memory-loaded objects with a strong connection to the spirit realm. In this case, as psychic Marianne, you uncover the painful secrets of the long-abandoned Niwa resort, and its inhabitants. In fact, The Medium’s underlying theme, in the developers’ own words is “how your perspective changes your perception.” This theme permeates every aspect of the game, and that includes narrative design.įor the most part, like many exploratory games, the player must piece together the story of the game’s setting and key characters. Regardless of your opinion of the game ( here’s ours), you’ll likely have found that The Medium doesn’t believe in giving easy answers, right up to its closing seconds. By now, some of you will have played through The Medium, the new psychological horror game from Bloober Team.
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