The Haunted Hoard: The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan (PS4)
While developer Supermassive Games has been working in the industry since 2008, it was the enormous success of their 2015 breakaway hit Until Dawn that would really put them on the map. It’s little surprise they’d want to follow up on the successful design of their first massive hit, so they decided to establish something they’re calling The Dark Pictures Anthology, a rather ambitious plan for eight games that continue to build off of Until Dawn’s premise of a horror game where the choices you make for the characters can end up having lethal consequences. This series could very well be their chance to hone their interactive story game formula to a sheen, and with the first release in it, Man of Medan, there is definitely a greater effort put into exploring the mechanics of such a design. However, this experimentation seems to come with both improvements on Until Dawn’s formula and new pitfalls of their evolving embrace of the concept.
The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan begins with a character called The Curator asking the player to join him in helping a tale unfold. Similar to the psychologist from Until Dawn, he will appear between the game’s chapters to recap things and comment on developments so far, even offering somewhat cryptic hints if you choose to ask for them. However, he is rather negligible in his impact it seems, but this also means his appearances don’t detract from the narrative that the player will be interacting with. Following an introduction to the game that sets up the start of the horror mystery at the game’s heart, the plot begins to focus on a set of five young people out on a ship for a diving expedition. Similar to a horror movie, many of these characters can be summarized in broad strokes. Alex is a physically fit jock whose younger brother Brad is a history geek, and Alex’s girlfriend Julia is a cheery social butterfly who brings along her funny flirtatious brother Conrad. Conrad’s got his eyes on the captain of their small vessel, a woman named Fliss who is more serious than the others and superstitious, her outside status leading to potential drama since she lacks a preexisting connection to the other four. Despite being easily packed into some broad descriptors, the characters do have deeper personality traits that make their interactions more believable. Alex may be the most confrontational at times, but he’s not afraid to show his softer side, and as you get to know Fliss, she starts to show more of her kind side, although you do have some degree of control over how much these traits manifest.
When characters are having a conversation with each other, you are able to choose their responses with a small compass menu. In smaller moments like casual chats this can determine which of their personality traits shine strongest like characters becoming more forceful or timid depending on if you try to be confrontational or active. Silence is even an option if you don’t wish to pursue your dialogue options, with inaction sometimes the best way to avoid going down less favorable routes. Relationships between characters can be strengthened or strained as well such as the obvious ones between Alex and Julia as well as familial bonds like Julia with Conrad. These don’t have enormous ramifications compared to how other choices are weaved into the gameplay as it goes on, but it can still spice up smaller moments all the same. The diving trip goes awry when a trio of pirates attempts to raid their ship, but a storm drags the small vessel towards the eerie abandoned vessel that gives the game its name. Believing they may have found a larger score, the pirates drag the five protagonists aboard the ghost ship, the hostages now having to try and find a way to escape their captors and escape a ship that quickly begins to take a toll on their sanity.
The Man of Medan, based in part on the legend of the S.S. Ourang Medan, is already an unsettling vessel once you first climb aboard, the rusted old ghost ship filled with the corpses of the old crew. As the main cast begins to explore it to try and find a way to safety though, their perception of reality begins to warp, the line between reality and insanity blurring as it becomes harder and harder to make out what really exists. Characters begin to see things others do not, but while you can’t always trust your eyes, there are still real dangers aboard the ship, every character able to die at different points in the adventure. In fact, The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan is a lot more flexible than its predecessor when it comes to the outcome of your adventure. Early on characters can already be removed from the story entirely by making certain decisions. There are a multitude of endings in Man of Medan based on who makes it to the end, with some featuring interesting reincorporation of early choices and others clearly the result of snowballing misfortune. However, it does seem like having such a degree of flexibility hurt Man of Medan in parts. Not every ending, even ones where you do relatively well in keeping your core characters alive, feels all that satisfying and climactic. There is essentially one path that wraps up with an appropriately large climax whereas many can feel like things wrapped up in a hurry, and in a game that’s 4 to 5 hours long, it’s a bit strange that more time wasn’t put into making sure the finales wrapped up everything in either an appropriate bow for good performance or a suitably morbid one for frequent failure.
This is definitely a bit of a shame not just because the endings can be a little underwhelming, but because everything up until then does an excellent job of building up the suspense and mystery around the adventure. As your perspective switches between the main characters, you’ll explore the Man of Medan to figure out what happened on the ship, all the while trying to escape the horrors you’re experiencing and the pirates who are still after you. The tension afforded by knowing your characters can be lost by a misstep makes forging into new territory terrifying, and when a pirate or strange creature makes an appearance, the stakes are palpable. Button prompts will appear at key moments that determine how you fare in the more action oriented moments, but they aren’t always meant to be pressed. Your unreliable perception is played with constantly, and acting at certain times can lead to you putting your characters into greater danger. Sometimes it’s as simple as determining if you should fight back or how, but other times you might find yourself hiding for life, the player needing to rhythmically press a button to maintain their heartbeat and not alert the pursuer to their presence. What makes things all the more suspenseful are chances to see brief glimpses of potential futures, certain portraits hidden around the place giving you a flash forward that can show both gruesome deaths or potential ways to salvation, so when that moments arrives, the desire to avoid a premature end can build and build as you’re unsure if you’ve avoided an unfortunate demise.
Picking up items and reading notes is a little awkward due to how the controls work, but they help to build up the mystery of the ghost ship as well, and even when you think you’ve figured things out, the game can start throwing in monkey wrenches that ask you to reinterpret how you were approaching your situation so far. There are so many excellent moments where the stakes come together wonderfully with the horror elements, and while you can expect some pop scares, the moments where danger is looking you in the face or lurking just around the corner searching for you are much more effective. Trying to ensure these moments can have grave consequences gives them that feeling of terror, but the fact the endings are so weak comparatively means they dropped the ball with much of the build-up. Most endings are still serviceable enough that they don’t taint the entire experience, but there is another little oddity with the plot that makes it a bit harder to weigh if strong build-up is acceptable despite endings that are mostly just decent.
The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan features a multiplayer mode where different players can be assigned to different characters. This can be done in a Movie Night mode where players swap off who’s actively playing, and this mode can add an additional layer of unease as you can’t be entirely sure what options the other person will pick, your fate shared with a fellow player in the same way the five protagonists are reliant on each other to survive. However, whether you go alone or do Movie Night mode, there are some odd moments where a plot event seems to happen without you bearing witness to it. One example early on involves Alex and Julia diving into a WWI plane wreck but the player sees that up on the boat, Fliss and Conrad are causing an enormous fire with the ship’s grill. There’s no real explanation of what is going on up there in this story path, but the multiple perspectives can also be played with other players online. While this can still lead to the feeling of greater dread as you can’t be sure if the others will survive now that they’re out of your hands, there are also dedicated moments that others player will not see at all and thus story details might not make it to all parties involved. There is one major advantage to this mode of play though, that being the warped perceptions the Man of Medan causes can lead to players experiencing horrors in different ways and reacting based on what their character is specifically experiencing, but the solo experience shouldn’t have gaps in the plot to make this online multiplayer mode niftier.
Supermassive Games did at least learn some lessons since Until Dawn though, and after beating the game, you can start again from any chapter of the story and build a new narrative from there, allowing you to undo potential mistakes. Similarly, while there are timed button presses with consequences, more often it seems to be about picking whether or not to press the button rather than suffering an awful result for missing a button cue. You can definitely still have the plot’s outcome changed from a button press error, but the context for it usually makes enough sense that you can see how failure lead to the punishment. The branching plot, essentially, does most of its work well, it just can’t quite stick the landings the player would hope for.
THE VERDICT: The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan tries to take Until Dawn’s choice-based horror narrative a step further with a plot that’s willing to go in more directions and dish out more frequent dire consequences, but this expanded flexibility comes with some fumbles. The build-up is excellent, tense, and full of moments that ask you if you should trust your perception at the risk of potentially losing your life for being wrong, but no matter how the course of events go, the endings seem to be a bit rushed or lacking oomph. For something that otherwise nails its interactive story elements and horror atmosphere it’s a shame that the finales end up squandering so much of that tension and dynamic plot evolution, but if you can accept a weak ending then it might not hurt the experience too badly. Splitting the narrative across players and other little quirks don’t help it much either, but there’s definitely more to enjoy in Man of Medan than there is to be disappointed by.
And so, I give The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan for PlayStation 4…
A GOOD verdict. This rating will really swing depending on how individual players react to the ending they receive, and the fact that most endings have very little to offer other than quick wrap-ups definitely makes Man of Medan feel like it squandered how well it established its tone and stakes. Supermassive Games wants to make a new game in The Dark Pictures Anthology every six months and it is very likely they rushed this to its conclusion to keep that deadline, but if the endings had been given the proper TLC they deserve, there could have been proper payoff to excellent build-up and tension. There are so many moments in the game where you find yourself in a terrifying scenario, the idea that death awaits you if you make the wrong choice upping how much you might agonize over making the right decisions. The leads aren’t too deep despite their extra layers, but they are all likeable enough that losing them would hurt, and so the game can quite easily build a scary situation without having to lean too hard on cheap scares. Adding in that layer of untrustworthy perception only makes those high stakes moments even more thrilling as getting away with your life really can make you sigh in relief.
A bit more time should have been devoted to Man of Medan not only to ensure that the split narrative can be experienced without retreading the same adventure twice, but to ensure all the work that went into making this a thrilling horror drama could have a proper climax or payoff. The Dark Pictures Anthology is a bit too ambitious and the development team a bit too eager it seems, and Man of Medan ends up a little unsteady because of its status as just the start of an anthology of interactive horror tales. Its narrative still makes great use of the same ingredients that made Until Dawn suspenseful and the mystery at the game’s heart is still intriguing, but the plot doesn’t quite hit its mark at the end, making it unfortunately a little harder to appreciate this otherwise quality experience as a result.