The Medium story trailer shows two worlds and one lanky monster

A new story trailer for The Medium teases out some of the dark secrets you'll find in the next game from the developers of Layers of Fear and Observer.

The IGN-exclusive trailer is titled "It Came From the Rage", and once you get past the Bloober Team logo it seems to show one uninterrupted scene from the game. We see protagonist Marianne occupying both our world and the realm of the spirits (you can tell because she only has that cool white hair in the spirit world), and we get a better feel for her relationship with Sadness. Sadness is not doing great, but she's still remarkably hearty for someone with a torn off arm, an exposed ribcage, and a broken porcelain mask for a face.

Sadness reveals that The Maw, the villainous nightmare creature played by Troy Baker, "came from shame, from helplessness, from rage." I'm not sure whether those emotions should be capitalized because they're referring to other spirits that Sadness knows, or if she's referring to The Maw's origins in a more abstract sense. In any case, we do know that The Maw ate all of Sadness' friends, and it still has enough appetite after all of that to chase you through the dilapidated halls of the Niwa Hotel. But there's bound to be even more to it than this trailer lets on.

"We are creating horror games not only to scare the shit out of people, but to deliver a specific story and to tackle specific subjects," lead game designer Wojciech Piejko told us back in June. "With The Medium, we wanted to create a story about different points of view."

The Medium is set to arrive on Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and PC in December of this year.

See what else is coming to Microsoft's next generation with our guide to upcoming Xbox Series X games.