The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan (2019)

This game was developed by the same studio that brought us Until Dawn and follows along the same path: it's basically an interactive teenage horror flick. While Until Dawn was published by Sony and probably had a bigger budget, Man of Medan was published by the decidedly smaller studio Bandai Namco, so getting into this game with the expectation of another Until Dawn will only lead to disappointment.
Man of Medan takes approx. 6 hours to finish, so it's not a full-length title and comes at a lower price. This much for the budget - the bigger problem is the execution though.

The story is not exactly gripping and I wasn't able to connect to any of the very stereotypical characters. Okay, sure, it's a teenage horror flick, that's where the characters come as stereotypical as they can get, but these were rather unlikable. The story starts on a small fishing boat and does take its sweet time to pick up the pace.
After a while we get a change of scenery (I won't spoil anything) and then there's a lot of exploring to do which isn't very exciting to be honest. The game does rely on jump scares a lot but does little to move the story forward: all we get to do is read little snippets of news articles and logbook entries, so we have to discover the story ourselves, it's simply not told. Not exactly the kind of storytelling I enjoy.

The gameplay is mostly moving around or initiating an action spiced with some very annoying quicktime events here and there. Those were improved in the following Dark Pictures Anthology titles, but in this one they're the worst. So prepare for some major annoyances.

Overall this was an okay title, but nowhere near the quality of Until Dawn. I've played it with a friend and we sold the hardcopy right after one playthrough, a second go didn't even cross our minds. We felt moderately entertained for approx. 6 hours, but nothing stood out.

3.5**

okay so I've become a self-confessed scaredy cat in my later years. For some reason when I was in my early teens I was unfazed by horror games, but now in my early twenties they give me heart palpitations. I'm a big fan of horror media in general, but something about BEING IN CONTROL of the protagonist adds a layer of stress I cannot handle !

So, I figured Man of Medan would be a good happy medium between horror movie and horror game, and I think I enjoyed it? I was mostly just stressed tf out that my favourite characters might die. I never mustered up the courage to play Until Dawn past about 30 minutes, but here I am, fully intact after one run of Man of Medan.

Pros:

• The direction/cinematography is good (as in: camera angles, lighting, shot compositions, all of the FILMY stuff)
• I actually liked the characters, I was only really concerned with saving Fliss and Brad though. Conrad died via impalement when running from the woman/Fliss, and I only wish I had killed him sooner
• I like the plot and while the twist is pretty obvious from the prologue, it draws on a long lineage of horror movies as a sociological response to the horrors of war
• The Secrets/Collectables flesh out the story in a nice way
• The Curator's Cut mode and the varying ways the story can play out add a nice touch of replayability, even if I personally will not be running back to explore them

Cons:

• The stay calm mini-game is just crackedt, I think I only managed it successfully twice
• QTEs need to be more clearly marked to show when they're a single press and when they're a button mash
• The weird tank-esque controls, kind of gave RE/Silent Hill? But, I hate them. And I kept getting stuck on the environment/ not being able to interact with stuff and walking back and forth in front of it to try and angle myself correctly
• Dialogue choices can be super stilted sometimes, also sometimes the choice you pick barely resembles what the character goes on to say
• A few moments of pop-in, nothing catastrophic
• Too long - it takes a WHILE before you even reach the Ghost Ship, and once you do the environments are all pretty repetitive
• The Twist/how it affects gameplay. so sometimes the illusions might be real and are capable of killing you, other times they are literally conjured from thin air and other times they are your companions. This makes it pretty impossible to navigate the game without looking at outside sources to determine which freaking hallucinations you should deal with. For instance, Brad-Olsen is Olsen(?) and can kill you, but the evil lady is Fliss and won't kill you so don't fight her, meanwhile those dead soldiers that were piling on to you as Fliss? litrally just ur imagination babes. There's NO continuity, and I can understand this adds more tension but it just drove me bananaanananas

Anyway, I'm definitely going to play the rest of this series but there are a lot of kinks here to be ironed out

Even if you’re a horror fan, MoM is a game I probably wouldn’t recommend you try outside a subscription service. Being a massive fan of self-contained horror/mystery episodes even in different mediums (I absolutely loved shows like The Twilight Zone, Outer Limits or Tales From the Crypt), I was looking forward to trying both this and the subsequent episodes. However, the first instalment of the The Dark Pictures Anthology series wasn’t what I was expecting. There is definitely potential in this format, and some of the things were nicely done - I namely enjoyed some of the mini-mechanics, the decision-making aspect and the overall mysterious tone of the narrative. The problem is that not much else holds it together. Plagued by a constant multitude of jump scares, clunky controls and unlikeable and somewhat cliched characters (I’ll exclude the Curator from this as I appreciated his presentation and charisma), this game ultimately fails to deliver what it set out to achieve, which was to offer a consistently engaging story capable of making you care about the people you’re trying to save. As I began to play it, I quickly came to the realisation that I wouldn’t particularly mind if any of the characters died, and that ended up removing the narrative grip almost entirely, thus also removing the way in which MoM attempts to anchor your commitment. To make matters worse, way too many timed events move the experience away from one rooted in your own decision making and towards a standard gaming session that excessively relies on how quickly you can smash a button.

Overall, I’d say this is a 4/10 game. If you can try it for free, go for it. Perhaps the positives mentioned here will outweigh the negatives, or maybe you don’t even see what I criticised here as being too bad, in which case you might end up enjoying the experience. But to me personally, Man of Medan offered very little of what I was looking for, to the point of greatly diminishing my interest in trying out the other stories.

I'm fairly certain I was on a path to a "perfect" game, until the garbage, glitchy QTE system screwed me over twice in the last 15 minutes.

#1 Gripe: The "press this button" prompt looks exactly like the "mash this button" prompt. As a result, I missed 100% of the "mash this button" QTEs. Every single one. That was usually fine, because those prompts were mostly used to open doors, and you could redo those QTEs without penalty. However, because I missed a single "mash this button" QTE right at the very end of the game, a character died, I lost a key item, and I got a decidedly "bad" ending.

Just prior to that, I was spinning the thumbstick around on the dialog wheel, deciding which response to pick, and the game decided to prematurely chose what I definitely didn't want to choose. Boom! Another dead character.

Also, many times throughout the game, Man of Medan would penalize me for missing button-press QTEs that I was 100% certain that I did not miss -- which makes me wonder if there was a such thing as hitting buttons too early that the game never made clear.

The writing is a little weak. You know exactly what's happening way before the characters in the game do at about the midway point, due to a couple very heavy-handed item clues placed right next to each other.

All of the mocap and voice acting is good enough, but the characters often don't seem to react appropriately to major events when they happen. It seems odd that 10 seconds after his fiancee dies, whatshisface is cracking jokes about how this situation would be a whole lot easier if he had a stuntman to do everything for him. And then a few minutes after that, he's all "I wish I was with her when she died." Dude, you were two feet away!

I actually thought the pacing of this (short) game was a little better than Until Dawn - a game that tended to drag a bit at points. However, I felt like all of my outcomes in Until Dawn were deserved. In Man of Medan, I feel like the glitchy game sabotaged my decisions far too often.

To me, this is a three star game, knocked down to two stars by a ridiculously bad final impression.

I played it for free on gamepass PC so I will tell you what I believe the game is worth at the end.

The game has an annoying bug that exists all throughout the game, at least on PC where I played. Your mouse will disappear IN CHOICE SECTIONS, so you can't make a choice. Sometimes it fixes by alt tabbing in and out or pausing and unpausing. Really annoying, but that was the only bug I encountered.

The game looks good, although the facial animations for the characters can be a bit janky. It has a good story, it plays just like Until Dawn if you've played it. You take turns playing different characters and choices you make can make them wind up dead or alive at the end of the game. During your survival you collect clues and secrets that help the characters understand their situation. There's also the 4th wall thing with a guy that talks to you how the game is going, that's always interesting to me with these kind of games.

However, the game is WAY too short. It is much shorter than Until Dawn, around 3 hours only. I think what they thought would justify this is the special "curator's cut" that exists in this game. Basically playing the game but with the perspective of other characters. This was interesting sometimes, but there were surprisingly many similar sections with the same characters so it felt like doing the same thing again.

If they fixed the bug and made it same length as Until Dawn it would be really good. Right now it sits at a 7/10 for me, and I'd probably say it's worth $15

I can’t put it in any kind words, Supermassive Games dropped the ball with Man of Medan. This game should have been a phenomenal successor to their critical sleeper hit, Until Dawn. On paper, everything sounds great. Man of Medan takes the same formula as Until Dawn with a more condensed narrative experience and an option for local and online co-op. In reality, almost nothing about the game from a narrative, graphical and even voice acting and motion capture perspective works as expected.

Man of Medan is the first of three stories under the Dark Pictures Anthology. The plot of Man of Medan revolves around a group of wealthy adventurous young adults who discover a downed WWII plane. Inside the plane they find a note indicating that the plane was flying toward a location containing “Manchurian Gold”. Unfortunately, they get kidnapped by a group of pirates who find the note and force our adventurers to help find the Manchurian Gold. Turns out the Manchurian Gold is located on an abandoned military freighter and it soon becomes apparent to everybody that there is something dreadfully wrong about this ship.

The narrative starts falling apart once our group of friends reach the haunted ship. It’s hard to relate to any of the characters because the game doesn’t offer enough time to learn about them before all the spooky stuff happens. All we know before they reach the ship is that the relationship between Alex and Julia may be falling apart, Alex is a jerk to his younger geeky brother Brad, Conrad is a goofy playboy who hits on Fliss and Fliss doesn’t like anyone on board and only agreed on this adventure for the money. Once our heroes reach the haunted ship, they are separated into groups of two or are by themselves. The lack of substantial interaction between the characters makes it hard to care whether or not they make it out alive.

Another issue with the narrative is there are numerous jumps in logic in the name of horror. In the prologue, you discover that the freighter was from the 1940s and something happened to it that killed everyone on board. So how are the lights and radio on the ship still running after all these years? Why are there still rats and live flesh found on board? For a military freighter, there are numerous knives to be found but what happened to all the guns?

I also encountered two odd sequences that made no sense. One scenario involved Fliss and Brad who are forced to walk down a narrow hallway by a pirate behind them. When I walked down the room and the camera changed angles, Brad was clearly behind the pirate as if he swapped positions with the pirate. In the next room, Brad reappears in front of the pirate. For the second scenario, Julia and Alex are together. The chapter ends with them reaching a dead end and seeing a deep pool of water as their only means of escape. In the next chapter, we witness a water locked door being broken down with Julia coming out of it. Alex is nowhere to be found and the next time we see him is him sitting on the ship’s deck waiting for our other companions.

Technically this game is inconsistent on the PS4. Most scenes are beautifully rendered, with realistic looking models and textures. However there is noticeable texture pop-in especially when a new scene is loaded. There are times where Brad’s eyeglasses would sometimes look like shades as if his glasses had reverse “Transition lenses” and water on Alex’s and Brad’s skin would look too shiny and alien-like. Sometimes opening the menu would cause the whole scene to freeze and take up to 3 seconds to load. The game also crashed for me once while transitioning from one room to another.

I usually don’t nitpick voice acting and motion capture in games but I have to, because there is a stark difference in quality of performances between Until Dawn and Man of Medan. Normally if Man of Medan was developed by any other company I would say the voice acting and motion capture are serviceable. Unfortunately I can’t, because Until Dawn set the bar very high. The only bright spot in the acting department is Conrad, played by Shawn Ashmore. Everyone else would occasionally give lifeless performances, deliver lines with awkward tone and intonation or make odd jerky movements when speaking. I don’t know the budget and development cycle of Man of Medan, but it felt like they only had 1 take for all of their voice and mocap scenes.

I can’t vouch for this personally, but it seems that the online multiplayer coop mode is the best way to enjoy the game. In this mode, you and your friend can make decisions in parallel and can create a permutation of choices not possible playing in single player. There are also scenes exclusive to online co-op that allows one player to follow the perspective of a character you normally wouldn’t control in single player. (For us lonely people out there, there is a free DLC named the Curator’s Cut that allows you to experience these co-op scenes in single player). I’m not sure about Movie Night mode though. Movie Night mode is essentially the same as single player but you pass the controller around with your friends or significant other. Unfortunately I can only picture this going horribly wrong especially with non-gamers, as there are some difficult QTE sequences near the end of the game.

Man of Medan is really hard for me to recommend to anyone. I can see the glimmers of a good game in its’ online co-op mode. Unfortunately, it simply doesn’t come anywhere close to Supermassive Game’s previous hit, Until Dawn. The narrative is extremely weak with several jumps in logic. The game is technically inconsistent to an extent it becomes distracting. And the voice and mocap performances are noticeably poor. If you had to experience this game, best play the online co-op mode with a friend.

I came into this with high expectations, excited by this new horror anthology series and whilst It wasn't a complete mess, it did leave me feeling underwhelmed and nervous for where this series is heading. It's a game that has it's moments but ultimately it struggles with it's pacing and bland characters, except for the curator, he can stay.

50 bucks for a game that's only 4 hours long, has no character progression and no real storyline?? I need a refund. Compared to their previous game, Until Dawn, this game is trash. Nothing exciting, no interesting environments to explore, not at all scary and a plot 'twist' that you can see coming from the first ten minutes of the game.

Pros:

• decent soundtrack

Cons:

• poor voice acting
• rubbish graphics (compared to Until Dawn)
• frustrating controls
• stiff and clunky walking animations
• you really don't end up caring about the characters at all
• way too short
• boring storyline
• choices don't feel significant whatsoever unlike in Until Dawn
• annoying quick time events that like to pop up without warning and no context

Don't get this, even if it's on a sale.

I gave this a single playthrough last night. It was fine. Definitely not in the same league as Until Dawn, but entertaining enough if you keep your expectations low.

I didn't encounter any of the technical issues I had heard about. Some of the scene transitions weren't exactly fluid, but nothing overly disruptive.

Plot, characters and writing are all pretty middle of the road. Performances as well. The visuals are nice, but the boat's narrow corridors are understandably repetitive and no fun to navigate. The collectables I found weren't very interesting (especially after finishing Control), though help to flesh out a story that is disappointing overal. I am being purposefully vague to avoid spoilers, but I kept waiting for another twist that never came, it instead ending in the least interesting way imaginable.

I am pretty sure I played an ideal path. All my characters survived because I am a decision making genius! It probably would have upped the stakes if I had a let a couple of them perish. When I replay it I will make a conscious decision to let the shit hit the fan.

I liked the Curator though, and will happily play the next installment as I enjoy these types of games.

                As someone who really loved Until Dawn(played it three times with friends, passing the controller).  I was REALLY looking forward to SuperMassive’s first multiplatform release of this same kind.  What could be better?  Well, turns out ALOT! 

                There are so many little things wrong with Man of Medan that it is hard to imagine them adding up to so much.  But it does.  First and foremost, Man of Medan is a buggy mess.  After experiencing some launching bugs on Day 2, I experienced a ton of unoptimized cuts in the game, seemingly in random places.  The game loves to take you out of the action with loading screens.  Lots of them, each time you load up the game for the first time you play that day; get ready for a nice long one before you even start.  Then during EVERY SINGLE scene transition get ready for a few quick ones just to make sure you NEVER REALLY get into the action.  But don’t worry, just in case loading screens don’t bother you too much; even in 4K, there will be black bars on the top and the bottom of the screen ALL THE TIME, even on the start menu.  There is no option to remove these.  A stylistic choice or are they hiding some short comings with the tech that couldn’t be resolved.  Either way, it is incredibly annoying.  If this was all, I probably would be fine with it.  But there were also multiple audio desyncs both in my first playthrough and in the DLC(Curators Cut).  There were also multiple occasions where textures in cinematics just popped in where they hadn’t been before.  In one late scene in the game, two characters had no collision and I was standing inside my girlfriends butt.  If this was an large open world game, or one in which there was fast action then none of this would bother me.  But when you are basically playing a movie where there is minimal interaction, it seems pretty unacceptable.

                 As a PC player, I often see keyboard controls in action games as a place of last resort.  But as the controls in this game basically consist of W, A, S, D movement, quick time controls, and dialogue choices(which work AMAZINGLY WELL with the mouse), I figured I would give them a shot.  BOY WAS I WRONG!  Since there is a fixed camera, the game decides that whatever button you are pushing to move forward is ALWAYS the button you use to move forward.  So if that is W, great, but it can also be A,S, or D; depending on which direction you are pointed in and it changes ALL THE TIME!  I played 2/3rds of the game this way and when I switched to controller, EVERYTHING was better.  It seems like whoever was in charge of keyboard controls never actually played more than a few minutes of the game(unless they felt this system was intuitive and if that is the case, what aliens do they have working for them?)

               While we are on the subject of gameplay and mechanics I have to say that I don’t remember Until Dawn being this stiff and robotic in it’s movement.  I also don’t remember the vast number of times where a quicktime event was obviously designed to be successful only in the hands of someone who had either played the scene before or got really lucky.  Because upon beginning my second playthrough(about 2 hours in).  I was able to do every single quicktime event successfully this time armed with a controller and the knowledge that it was coming up.  Also, the Curators Cut DLC, which is how I’m playing through the game again to get different perspectives on my first playthrough is disappointing.  It picked it’s own choices(some inconvenient at best) for characters I’d previously played.  Also, in some scenes it makes me play almost the entire thing AGAIN from the same character’s point of view only to take some of the major choice decisions away from me.  Either don’t make me see everything twice and keep my playthrough one choices or make me play EVERYTHING possible again; to keep people alive and keep things from messing up.  This is especially noticeable when multiple characters are present in the same scene with different and sometimes much worse choices than you chose to begin with.

                 Many characters in this game have bad modelling.  They don’t look human and I’m not talking about the ghosts.  They animate strangely and the terrible fixed camera and the obsession by someone with control on people’s feet doesn’t help.  Some facial expressions are especially weird and why does Julia have silver teeth?  The voice acting overall is pretty good.  But I have to say the writing is TERRIBLE!  Almost to the point of it being unbelievable.  The dialogue doesn’t really sound like anyone and while these people aren’t necessarily supposed to be likable.  I was often getting the feeling that the person who wrote their dialogue is either VERY OLD or a hermit who rarely speaks to anyone.  It often made me think of someone describing to someone else a conversation that they had only heard about.

                Plot points are revealed through seemingly spontaneous revelation and while there might be some scenes in the game I STILL haven’t seen.  I will say that there is a lot about this story that is not only not clear but totally unbelievable.  There are plenty of insinuations and environmental story elements but the story itself gets so simplistic and bad that when it just ends.  And it does just end.  That you kind of wonder why they bothered putting all those foreshadowing hooks and insinuations in when nothing ever came of them.  I don’t mean things that were obviously based on your choices, I mean ACTUAL plot specific things that don’t seem moveable by your actions.   I say this based on the way the end of the game is framed.  There is obviously lots of room for variation along the way.  But you are basically hitting the end in the same way.  Just with more or fewer people.  Which if I’m not wrong, is basically the way it was with Until Dawn.  In 2016, I thought this was a tech issue.  In 2019, I feel it’s more about the writing.

                Finally, I just want to say that, yes, I am playing through the game a second time and no that doesn’t mean I’m being harsh on the game.

                                            “Well, you going to spend almost 10 hours on something you don’t really like, well that’s your problem.”

                What I will say is that playing with a controller makes the game much easier and more palatable to play.  Also, I want to see what scenes I missed.  I only paid $20 for this game, which might be quite a bit less or more than what you spent at time you are reading this.  I would say that I got as much enjoyment out of this as I would have a BluRay movie or DVD.  So I felt it was worth the money.  My problem with the game stems mostly from expectations.  It is up to you to decide if they were reasonable expectations or not.  But I will say that if you haven’t played Until Dawn and have a PS4.  You should play it instead of this.  Until Dawn is much better.