The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan

After becoming famous in 2015 for presenting the exclusive game Until Dawn for PlayStation 4, the development team at Supermassive Games returns with The Dark Pictures Anthology with a new cinematic horror game, this time aimed at the usual platforms and offering an experience that will present several separate horror stories, the first of which is Man of Medan, which we recently tried out, and it’s time to share our impression of it with you. .

The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan – A Mysterious Horror Experience

The game’s story follows a group of comrades who rent a boat to go on a diving trip with the goal of exploring the wreckage of a lost plane. They get coordinates for a ship that they believe contains gold, but which they are confronted with. They get into trouble when they encounter a group of pirates who force them at gunpoint to go to this ship, and the situation continues. It gets progressively worse as they see a lot of monsters and strange things on board the ship, and a story that starts slowly over the first hour and then events begin to progress regularly.

An Unoriginal Story with Predictable Events

Man of Medan tries to present a mysterious story that becomes clearer over time and surprises you by revealing some facts, but the story fails to achieve this. Many of its elements are largely used in various horror works, and that would not be surprising if you were able to predict the various events of the story very early on, since it is not frightening and relies on… you using cheap methods or so-called jump -Scares to surprise to uncover the circumstances of the events that took place, you will look for evidence scattered around the ship, but even if you fail to collect this evidence, the story will definitely tell you the truth about what is going on, which makes the evidence lose its meaning, unless you want to discover all the evidence to achieve a certain achievement and nothing more.

Shallow Characters and Technical Issues

The characters you play as are of the usual variety in horror films. Some are smart and strong, others less intelligent and there are some annoying ones that you hope die as quickly as possible, but most of them mainly lack depth as the dialogue between them is very weak and lacks realism lacking, with a lot of sarcastic and superficial dialogue that is out of place. From time to time you will meet the Curator of Stories, who is the character who talks to you about your choices between the basic parts of the experience, and perhaps the Curator is the only character who has any depth.

From a graphical point of view, the game looks good and its graphical beauty is evident in the details of the exact environment in the ship, which is of course full of doors, pipes and corpses, but the same cannot be said for the characters you play with. During the gaming experience, I encountered an annoying problem with the different technical level of the characters’ details, which appear polygonal in a way. On many occasions it is very annoying, and then the details become beautiful and precise. The gaming experience also often suffers from annoying slowdowns and screen stagnation during cinematics, and these issues need to be addressed with future updates. On the audio level, the game offers excellent music and effects, which is perhaps one of the few things. What initially feels like a horror experience.

A Limited Gameplay Experience

The game’s controls are limited to moving and viewing the images and evidence around you, and most of the gaming experience is represented through dialogue between characters, with three options always available, including the option to remain silent, in addition to two more options, and the rest of the experience is represented by a group of quick events, or QTEs, that require you to quickly press a specific button. What sets the experience apart are the different scenarios through which you can progress, but not because they affect the course of the story. Most scenes and details that can be discovered about the story are not affected by these options. The advantage of the scenarios is the variety of death options for different characters. A character can lose his life or cause another character to be killed because… One of the options during a dialogue or because you didn’t press the corresponding button during quick events.

Group Play Modes

Maintaining the lives of your entire crew is a bit difficult and requires you to make the right decisions quickly. You can replay all or part of the experience to find out which path you can take to save one of the characters. The game returns to portray the relationship system between characters, similar to Unitl Dawn, where your decisions during dialogues affect the character. Improve or worsen the relationship between one character and another. There is also a system of traits, but unlike the relationship between characters, the trait system does not reflect experience in any significant way, such as. B. the development of the trait of courage or deception in one of the characters. After repeating the experiment several times, we could not see a clear effect of this feature. .

Entertaining Multiplayer Experiences

The game offers two modes for group play. The first of these is Movie Night Mode, where you sit with five of your friends and live the experience by selecting a character for each player, where you start playing with your character and then hand the controller to one of your friends when it is his turn to play with the character he has chosen. Try to add some kind of suspense and suspense to the experience by having multiple spectators, but this attempt is unsuccessful and this mode already does not represent a real addition to the experience unless you want to spoil the experience for your companions and cause the deaths of their characters.

The second option is the shared story, and this is where Man of Medan becomes an entertaining experience. In this phase, you play with another player, so you go through a certain part of the story while the other player goes through another part that takes place at a parallel point in time, so that each player’s decisions have an impact on the events that take place. The other player will live through it, for example by causing the death of one of the characters or affecting his relationship with another character. Here you may want to go through the experience several times with a friend to try to manipulate the course of events as much as possible by influencing the relationship between one character and another or choosing a different way to deal with the situation .

A Worthwhile Experience with Room for Improvement

This way, if you’re interested in collecting evidence, you can access some short documentaries accessible from the main menu that have less to do with the game and more to do with the history of horror stories in general. Man of Medan offers around 3 to 5 hours of gameplay based on your desire to collect evidence, and it is possible to relive it multiple times during shared story mode, or to save a character you were previously unable to save, or maybe the opposite. It may not have presented the best story, but the different progressions add value to the experience, and perhaps the developers at Supermassive Games will succeed in presenting a story. Things get more exciting in the following episodes of The Dark Pictures Anthology.