Many fans of the Titanfall 2, as the core gimmick in their critically praised "Effect and Cause" time travel level.
Game developers at the Bloober Team haven't been shy about their love of the Silent Hill games, a series of survival horror titles about lonely souls confronting the distorted manifestations of their inner demons in a literal ghost town. They've hired Stranger Things).
Unsurprisingly, the plot of The Medium revolves around a psychic protagonist who can perceive and navigate the material and spirit world at the same time. Players must uncover clues and solve puzzles in both these worlds in order to progress through the game's desolate town setting, evade the dark monsters that infest it, and uncover the darker secrets at its heart. On the surface, The Medium couldn't be more different than Titanfall 2, a science-fiction FPS about the battlefield bond between Pilot Jack Cooper and his sentient mech partner BT-7274. Beneath the hood, though, these games have more in common than you'd think.
The Medium And Titanfall 2's "Effect and Cause" Level Design
In Titanfall 2's "Effect and Cause" level, Cooper and BT stumble across an abandoned research facility, demolished by a disaster and overrun with alien wildlife. Venturing into the facility, Cooper finds a dead comrade with a gauntlet-mounted time travel device, letting players hop between the present ruins of the facility and its pristine past to by level obstacles and evade hostile enemies. The Medium's game display, in contrast, uses a dual-screen interface, where the player steers the main character and their white-haired astral projection through a material world and spirit world with similar architecture and vastly different threats.
Both The Medium and Titanfall 2's "Effect and Cause" level are technically complex game experiences, made possible by developers who need to render two different game maps at the same time without any loss of frame-rate. In the Titanfall 2 level, Respawn developers were faced with the extra challenge of needing to perfectly superimpose the two game levels together so that players could "time travel" without landing in the wrong spot. From the looks of things, the Bloober Team developers byed this challenge by having players of The Medium control two separate characters at the same time, eliminating the need to make the dual levels perfectly overlap.
The Medium And Titanfall 2's "Effect and Cause" Both Contrast Cleanliness With Decay
The horror and tension in The Medium (as with Silent Hill and Stranger Things) is generated by its two game worlds, similar in shape but different in gruesome detail. The material word that the game protagonist explores is abandoned and run-down, but generally clean and and sterile, while the spirit world is rotten and organic, overrun with what appears to be mold, fungus and insect hives. The "Effect and Cause" level in Titanfall 2 contrasts its "parallel worlds" in a similar but distinct way. The science facility in the past is pristine, with futuristic architecture, high-tech equipment, heavily armed soldiers, and peaceful janitor robots. The science facility of the present, however, is shattered and burning, infested with self-destructing robots, and reclaimed by both vegetation and wild alien creatures.
In the end, The Medium and Titanfall 2 use contrasting visuals in their "parallel worlds" for the same purpose: to give each world a distinct look players can tell apart, while also creating an atmosphere of tension borne from the motif of wildlife overrunning the works of humans.
