Let’s be honest, we’re all searching for a bit of luck, a touch of positive energy to tilt the scales in our favor. The number 888 has captivated cultures, particularly within Chinese tradition, symbolizing triple fortune, prosperity, and infinite flow. It’s more than superstition; it’s a psychological anchor, a beacon we set in our minds to attract abundance. But what happens when we explore the concept of “fortune” and “positive energy” through a lens that is decidedly less auspicious? My recent dive into the psychological horror game The Medium by Bloober Team, and the fascinating dissonance around its inspiration, offered a stark, compelling contrast to the serene promise of 888. It made me realize that understanding fortune often requires staring directly into its opposite—misfortune, chaos, and collective trauma—and that the most potent positive energy sometimes springs from navigating through acknowledged darkness.
Bloober Team swore to me several times across multiple interviews that the game isn't at all inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic. As a reviewer and someone who lived through those same years, I found that claim really strained credulity, especially in the opening hours. The game’s world is littered with loose notes, environmental details, and dialog that directly reference social distancing protocols, sudden lockdowns, and even the crackpot conspiracy theories that swirled around vaccines. The studio’s explanation, offered during a Summer Game Fest conversation, was that any allusions were subconscious at best. I remember thinking, “I don’t see how that’s possible.” The parallels were too precise, too visceral. Yet, this very tension—between the developers’ stated intent and the player’s lived experience—became the game’s most intriguing layer. It transformed a supernatural mystery into a deeply personal reflection. Our real-world timeline, thankfully, didn’t lead to the mutated, multi-headed tentacled monsters that stalk the game’s surreal spirit world, the Maw. But witnessing this Polish team grapple with a pandemic narrative, framing it within the oppressive backdrop of their nation’s Soviet-era history, was profoundly interesting. It explored a chilling “what if”: how a different ideological system might have twisted a global crisis into an even more horrific outcome. That exploration, for me, generated a different kind of “positive energy”—not the gentle kind promised by 888, but the galvanizing, clarifying energy of confronting fear and history.
This is where the metaphor truly connects. The pursuit of lucky 888 isn’t about denying the existence of the “Maw”—the dark, chaotic, and traumatic parts of our collective and personal histories. It’s about integrating that understanding. The game’s protagonist, Marianne, is a medium who can exist in both the real and spirit worlds simultaneously. Her power, and her path forward, relies on perceiving and interacting with both realms. Ignoring one leads to peril. Similarly, an authentic attraction of positive energy isn’t a practice of blind optimism. It’s the resilience built by acknowledging hardships, like a global pandemic that affected, by some estimates, over 90% of the world’s population in some tangible way, and then consciously choosing to seek alignment and flow. The “fortune” in 888 isn’t a magical external grant; it’s the internal stability and perspective that allows you to recognize and seize opportunity, even—or especially—after a period of darkness. The game’s setting, a decaying Soviet-era resort, is the antithesis of a prosperous, flowing environment. It’s blocked, stagnant, and haunted. Cleansing it requires facing the trauma head-on.
From a practical, SEO-informed standpoint, people searching for “lucky 888” or “positive energy guides” are often in a state of seeking. They want actionable steps. So here’s my take, informed more by narrative analysis than pure metaphysics: conduct a personal audit of your “spirit world.” What are the unresolved notes, the lingering anxieties, the small traumas you’ve distanced yourself from? The pandemic alone left a suite of them for nearly everyone—grief, isolation, financial stress. Before you can effectively channel the prosperous vibration of 888, you need to sit with that reality, much as Marianne must sit with the memories of the dead. This isn’t morbid; it’s foundational. The positive energy then comes from the act of integration and the deliberate redirection of focus. It’s the decision to build, create, and connect after a period of enforced separation and fear. It’s finding the flow again after a lockdown.
In the end, The Medium, perhaps despite its creators’ conscious intentions, became for me a powerful allegory for post-pandemic recovery. The lucky charm, the mantra, the number 888—these are tools for the conscious mind, symbols to help us focus our intent on growth and abundance after a collective storm. They hold power because we assign them power, creating a psychological framework for optimism. But that framework is strongest when built on the solid ground of acknowledged reality, not as an escape from it. The Polish developers, through their cultural memory of Soviet control and their lived experience of a modern pandemic, crafted a story that inadvertently highlighted this truth. True fortune isn’t the absence of monsters; it’s the strength developed in learning to face them, to understand their origin, and to walk forward anyway, seeking the light of a triple-digit promise in the subsequent calm. That’s the real secret, I think—not just unlocking luck, but understanding that its value is measured against the shadows you’ve known.
