Developed by Bloober Team (the studio responsible for Layers of Fear and the Blair Witch game), The Medium is an old-school survival horror title inspired by the likes of Silent Hill and Resident Evil. It was released as a timed console exclusive for the Xbox Series X back in January and received mostly positive reviews at the time, with critics praising its unsettling atmosphere, ambitious storytelling and haunting musical score.
After a long wait, PlayStation 5 owners will now finally be able to check out the game for themselves with a few additional features to boot, courtesy of the DualSense controller’s haptic feedback.
While these new players will discover that The Medium is not particularly difficult (stealth encounters are heavily scripted and most puzzle solutions present themselves quite early), they may hit a few stumbling blocks. One section that can prove especially troublesome is the “Red House” basement, in which you must figure out the code for a locked door.
Newsweek has prepared the following guide to help you solve this puzzle.
How to Find the Four-Digit Code in The Medium
When you first enter the basement, you will notice a gap in the wall to the far right. Squeezing through here will take you into a secret crevice, with a metal door that leads into an underground bunker. To get past this, you will need to enter the correct four-digit code on a nearby keypad.
While the basement itself has several rooms, all the clues that you need to crack this riddle can be found in the storage room opposite the gap in the wall. Here, there are two important items you need to find.
The first is the gift box for a pocket watch that was given to the owner of the “Red House” as a 10-year anniversary present. This is in the chained locker right next to the entrance. Use your bolt cutters to break the chain and then gain access.
On a small shelving unit right next to the locker you will also find a scrap of paper (a jeweler’s receipt) that references the specific date the pocket watch was purchased. While there are multiple ways to interpret how this note will factor into the door code (it could be a combination of the day and month for example, or even the four-digit order number), what you actually need to look for is the year.
By inspecting the document, you will discover that the watch was purchased in 1976 but, if you put those numbers into the keypad, it will not open the door. This is because there is an extra step to the puzzle that requires you to subtract 10 from that year (given that the pocket watch box is inscribed with a 10th-anniversary message) to arrive at 1966.
When you input 1966 into the keypad, the door will then open, and you will finally be able to progress into the underground bunker.
The Medium is out now on Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, PC and PS5. It is also featured as part of the Xbox Game Pass service.
