8 Most Underrated Video Games Of 2021 (So Far)

Bloober Team are proving to be a pretty divisive studio as of late. Excelling primarily in first-person horror games, genre fans have either religiously played every new release, or written off their efforts as cheesy tall tales that constantly fall short of the mark.

It's undeniable that the team has become more confident with each project though, and The Medium is easily their most creative work yet.

This time around the developer has swapped out its regular first-person perspective for a third-person 90s survival horror throwback. In The Medium you take control of Marianne, a medium gifted with the ability to travel between the human world and the world of the supernatural. This power of hopping between planes of existence factors into the gameplay too, as you solve puzzles simultaneously across different versions of the same levels.

It's definitely experimental, but for the most part it results in pretty tight and imaginative puzzles. Even better, controlling two characters at the same time via split-screen is surprisingly intuitive. Like A Way Out a few years ago, it's cool to see a developer take something as simple as a split screen framing and forefront it, using the conventions of video games in brand new ways.

Is it perfect? Of course not. The stealth sequences kind of suck, the ending is certainly something and it doesn't quite sustain its momentum for the long haul, but as an early next-gen Xbox showcase, it's more than worth trying.