Bloober Team’s third-person horror adventure The Medium is now available on PC and Xbox Series X|S, and if you’ve missed out the review on the title you can read it here. But after pre-loading the game and jumping in, I took a look at the settings for the game for accessibility purposes, and here’s what’s available in Bloober Teams Dual Reality-focused game.
Upon the first launch, the game invites you to customise your options, allowing you to take control of subtitles and other graphical options such as resolution and ray tracing. There’s also a screen that details photosensitive epilepsy warnings as well as a trigger warning, but it doesn’t actually detail what triggers.
The subtitles themselves have been done nicely, allowing you to choose from 5 different size profiles, apply a background, include the speaker name, and whether you want the text thin or bold. Speaker colours are also available toggle on. You can also see a preview of the subtitles, which is fantastic. There appear to be no options for colour blind options.
You can make changes to elements of gameplay, such as whether you want the HUD on, tooltips, camera shake, and even how strong you want the controller vibration to be. There’s also an option to autocomplete events, which basically completes tasks such as discovering Echoes or using bolt cutters. An Insight function is toggleable as well which basically lets you focus and see the outlines of objects of interest that may be hidden away.
You can remap gamepad inputs and also keyboard and mouse inputs as well. There are a few options you can change from toggle to hold inputs: Insight and hold breath. But that’s it really.
As for a quick stint through gameplay, there are no visual indications for sound, instead, The Medium seems to use its world to coax your vision to a point of interest — shadows moving, doors, etc. Nearby ringing phones and nearby danger isn’t represented so if you can’t hear any cues you’re going to be standing around for a while.
There are also moments in which inputs aren’t specified for actions. For the beginning of the game, (to keep things spoiler-free) you open a “door” and pull out a “table” but there’s no input for informing you of how to let go. These are few, but still irritating when they occur.
The camera is also “fixed” in the sense each point of the room activates a different angle that is out of your control. Sometimes the camera moves on its own to follow you. which may feel jarring for some angles used. Additionally, the Dual Reality system uses a split-screen effect which can require concentrating on 2 versions of the same thing while trying to achieve tasks.
The Medium is available on PC and Xbox Series X|S now. If you’re wondering about PC specs, those were revealed last week, but if you’re curious about the story, that’s explained in a trailer from last year.
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