Marianne hesitates and, considering Thomas' words, threatens to kill herself instead, as without her as a medium, the Maw will remain trapped in Niwa forever. She hands Marianne a gun and pleads with her to kill her, as the Maw cannot be banished as long as she is alive, and hence why Sadness, her spirit, refused to be sent off to peace. Lilianne explains that the dream Marianne has been seeing is not a memory of the past, but a vision of the future. There, she encounters Lilianne, who is alive and well. Still troubled over Lilianne's fate, Marianne leaves the bunker and heads for the lake that she saw in her dreams. As the Maw approaches, Thomas' spirit half assures Marianne that she is the only one that can end this and sends her off, preparing to sacrifice himself to delay the Maw. While Thomas' spirit half is confident that Thomas would never have killed Lilianne, he has no idea of Thomas' current whereabouts. Eventually the Maw broke out of the bunker and caused the Niwa Massacre. However, this did not stop Lilianne's powers from going out of control and after she was raped by Richard, she created the Maw as the manifestation of her tormented soul. He explains to Marianne that Lilianne had trouble controlling her own powers, so Thomas kept her confined in the bunker. Marianne discovers a fallout bunker hidden beneath the ruins of her family home where she encounters Thomas' spirit half. Marianne realizes she is Thomas' daughter she had fallen into a coma from the fire and Thomas had left her at the hospital while he remained with Lilianne at Niwa. An agent of Służba Bezpieczeństwa named Henry discovered Thomas, subdued him, and forced him to watch as he set fire to Thomas' home with his children inside, causing Thomas to attack and murder him. He had fled back to Poland and hid at Niwa, eventually starting a family. Marianne pieces enough clues to learn that Thomas was also a medium and due to this was experimented on by Nazis and Soviets who found out that his powers could be used to sever people's minds from their bodies. Through her visions, Marianne finds out that Sadness is probably a spirit of Thomas' daughter Lily, who was molested by Thomas' older and trusted friend Richard. Marianne repeatedly offers to send Sadness to her peace, but she refuses. In the spirit world, she encounters Sadness, a spirit of a young girl that warns her of the Maw, a hostile and malevolent spirit that has managed to partially exist in the real world and was responsible for the Niwa Massacre by occupying human hosts and using their bodies to murder others, and is now hunting down Marianne to sate its hunger and escape Niwa. Niwa had been shuttered by the government after the Niwa Massacre years earlier, where a large number of people were murdered, and the survivors fled the area.Įxploring Niwa, Marianne finds the place has strong ties to the spirit realm, and evidence that Thomas, the resort's manager, and his daughter Lilianne were at the epicentre of the Niwa Massacre. However, Thomas is only willing to talk if Marianne meets him at the Niwa Workers' Resort, an abandoned communist-era vacation resort in the Polish wilderness. Thomas offers to explain the origin of Marianne's powers, as well as the meaning of the dream. While grieving over the death of her foster father, Marianne receives a mysterious phone call from a man named Thomas, who knows of her abilities. Marianne, a spirit medium that helps troubled souls seek final respite, has a recurring dream of a man shooting a young girl by a lake. The Medium is set in post-Communism Poland in 1999. Her psychic abilities may also be used against hostile forces and are recharged by interacting with energy spots called spirit wells. Being able to inhabit both worlds aids puzzle solving. The Medium is a psychological horror game played in third-person as Marianne, a medium who can travel into the spirit realm. Processor: Pentium 4 1.A puzzle is solved between realities, unveiling a spirit well. Online Modes: Competitive, Cooperative, Team Oriented More than that, though, is the fact that it's also one of the most atmospheric and creepy games ever made, as well as one of the most intense shooters that you'll play this year.ĮSRB Descriptors: Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language is a shooter that captures the sensation of being in wild and desperate firefights like no other game before it, and it's an incredible, kinetic, almost exhausting experience from start to finish. Enter F.E.A.R., the highly anticipated action game from Vivendi Universal Games and developer Monolith. It's an intense and violent act, not to mention loud. Yet while shooters have been around for more than a decade, very few of them have actually captured the visceral experience of firing a gun. Even the genre's name alludes to this fact. When you get down to it, the gun is the heart and soul of a first-person shooter.