The Medium is an Xbox exclusive horror game that Australia doesn’t want to sell for reasons not yet explained
From time to time, video game developers present a title that is eye-catching or looks different from the rest of the industry. Since the industry is built around keeping profits and avoiding risk, games can often look identical to each other. This is why Assassin’s Creed, The Division, and Wildlands seem like identical copies year after year. However, sometimes a studio-like Bloober Team shows up and decides to do something creative. That’s what they did with The Medium, a game so terrifying that it has been banned in Australia.
This last sentence is an exaggeration, of course. Kotaku Australia (our favorite medium in Oceania) has reported that the Australian country has refused to give the game a rating. Your Classification Board has given you a Refused Classification rating. The reason? The most striking thing is that nobody knows why they decided to do this. It is not the first time that this nation rejects the arrival of a video game for being very violent or bloody. Mortal Kombat 9 was not allowed in the country until years later. Their classification system is famously strict, not to say dogmatically.
The Medium is a horror game in the style of Silent Hill, even hiring the same composer. Its developers, the Bloober Team studio, have highlighted that SH is their main inspiration when developing this title.
Considering that the Anglo-Saxon countries are those in which Xbox is more successful, be assured that the Bloober Team and Microsoft are evaluating what they have to do to solve this problem. The question is: can they fix it before the launch of the console? There is only one week to go until Xbox Series X is available globally.
