Layers of Fear dev channels Beksinksi in new macabre masterpiece

The masters of horror behind Layers of Fear are at it again. This time Bloober Team brings their penchant for strikingly bizarre visuals and mind-bending horror to the spirit realm.

Today Bloober Team announced their new next-gen game The Medium, a new terrorfest that melds otherworldly Zdiszlaw Beksinski weirdness with a distinctly haunting ghost story feel. In the game you play as Marianne, a medium who can see and sense the afterlife, and you're constantly shifting between the ghost plane and the real world--it gets so bad you can't always tell what's real any more. This duality seems to freely ebb and flow, creating a distinct sense of mental disruption that's part of Bloober's signature style. It also reminds a lot of Alan Wake.

The Medium is set in Bloober's home city of Krakow, Poland, and takes place in the late 1990s. Marianne will have flashbacks and time travel to the Communist-ruled Poland in the 1980s via the spirit realm, creating all sorts of unique opportunities for horror. The score is also being composed by Silent Hill's Akira Yamaoka, so expect enticing audio and music.

"The spirit world is like the dark mirror of our world," said game producer Jacek Zieba. "It's also a hostile world, and only mediums can solve mysteries and survive that kind of encounter."

Zieba also comments on how current-gen hardware just can't achieve the performance they envisioned with The Medium. That's why it's exclusive to next-gen hardware. Armed with the Xbox Series X, Bloober will enable seamless gameplay, steady FPS, and no loading screens in The Medium.

"The horsepower of the hardware, having that kind of foundation for our game, it's awesome because we've spent a lot of years thinking about this game and how we can fulfill our dreams. But we have a problem with the platform. [Current-gen] is too weak to fulfill our vision. But then the Xbox Series X came up and we thought it was perfect for us. It opened a lot of doors for us to be creative and do the game as we wanted."

The Medium will release alongside the Xbox Series X's launch in Holiday 2020, and will also be available on PC. It won't be coming to PS4.