The Medium is an interesting game for sure – one we’ve covered in the past on both Xbox Series consoles and PCs, but I must admit, going into this one, I didn’t expect the PlayStation 5 port to see so many changes from the existing console versions. Just about every multi-platform project we’ve seen so far on the new wave of consoles has seen effective feature parity between Series X and PS5 because, after all, they are very similar machines at the architectural level. However, with The Medium, Bloober Studio appears to have rebalanced the game to produce something very similar but also quite different to the original Series X release.
We’ll get to the tweaked visuals shortly, but beyond the graphical revamp, there are DualSense controller features added too – rain, wind and other atmospheric effects are mapped to haptics, while some dialogue and effects are routed through the controller speaker. There’s also gyro aiming when investigating objects. It’s nice to see these features added, but only the haptics appealed to me really.
Initially, we were hoping to cover The Medium on PS5 closer to its launch, but upon receiving review code, we were told that ray tracing was not present and would be added in a patch – so we opted to wait to see the game running at its best. What we’ve found is that Bloober has opted to tweak settings substantially. We can still find parallels with the PC version, but the overall take away is that the studio has traded fidelity in ray tracing effects to increase performance and resolution. Interestingly, Series X still has the same features it did at launch – though the game has been patched since, and is generally in better shape than it was at launch.
So what’s the difference? The first thing I noticed is a darker overall image on PS5. This isn’t down to any changes in brightness, contrast or gamma, but rather because it looks like the developer has turned off the ray traced ambient occlusion on Xbox Series X in favour of a faster screen-space alternative, adding in halo artefacts and darkening the scene. Technically, this is a downgrade. Ray traced reflections are indeed present though, but their quality has been reduced compared to the original Series X release: compared to PC set to full resolution, the Microsoft console’s reflections run at half-resolution and this is reduced again in turn on PS5 to quarter resolution.