THE DARK PICTURES - MAN OF MEDAN [2019] STEAM PC REVIEW

🎮   GOOD   🎮

The positive:

💗 Some choices have unforgiving consequences

💗 The visual art creates a great atmosphere

💗 A fun rainy day group activity

💗 Interesting alternate paths exploration

💗 Silly but effective ghostship story

The negative:

👎 Supermassive thinks black bars are cool

👎 A fundamentally flawed plot, premise, and weak dialog with execution problems.

👎 Overly reliant on jump scares, used too early becomes weak and predictable.

👎 Safe during the restrained linear exploration, the only danger is during QTE.

Man of Medan was released in 2019 as the first episode of The Dark Pictures Anthology and the direct follow-up of 2015 acclaimed Until Dawn. Supermassive Games has fulfilled its mission of perfecting the formula of heavily constrained gameplay and very low interaction with the world, by placing the focus on the impact of making dialog choices, and how you react to quick time events (QTE). This takes away interactivity but provides unprecedented agency. is a true evolution of the interactive movie genre, and horror fans owe it to themselves to climb aboard.  It’s a proper debut to the anthology series. It has the spooks, fun cast, and unforgiving consequences like we experienced in Until Dawn.

INFAMOUS BLACK BARS

Why? 💔 Why black bars on a videogame? Wasn't it enough to see a behemoth like The order 1886 have a colossal failure mainly because of those infamous black bars, why keep trying? I'm about to become an activist against those damned black bars. So, to be able to experience Man of Medan on Full Screen I used an app called "border remover" which is simple to use and really works! But I hate supermassive games for putting me on a search for the tool and endangering my computer with software that usually works in mysterious ways. 

WORTHY SUCCESSOR

Man of Medan is not what fans of until dawn were expecting, but it might be a good and fun horror game if you know what you are getting into. You have to assume that the plot is fundamentally flawed and incoherent. There are many execution problems. There is a distinct lack of urgency in some portions of the story, the characters are not likable and the dialog is weak.  The game abuses the use of jump scares, showering you right from the start with cliche-based scares, and in using it too early it becomes weak and predictable. There's also the fact that you always feel Safe during the restrained linear exploration, by playing the game just for a while you already know the only real danger lies during QTEs. If you get them wrong your characters might get trapped, injured, or worse. 

Just like Until Dawn, this successor is a choice-heavy, button-smashing experience with linear-level design and a very low level of interaction during exploration. Choosing dialogue options and hitting quick-time events in the right way are the only moments that the player has agency. Man of Medan is like a good Scooby-Doo episode. Our young protagonists (Julia, Alex, Brad, Conrad) and their skipper (Fliss) set out to explore the sea, do some diving and why not, explore a World War II underwater plane wreck. From there, things start to quickly spiral out of control. 

Supermassive is making a big deal about the game’s multiplayer aspect, which allows friends to play full co-op. But for the scope of this review, I'm only focusing on the single-player component. While my solo story ended with a completely different cast and lasting consequences, I loved doing a 2nd run on the Curators Cut and re-experiencing the events from a different perspective, experimenting with choices and consequences.

CONCLUSION

Despite its shortcomings, Man of Medan is still a fun experience. As a show of the potential for the Dark Pictures Anthology, the game is largely a success, but as a first episode, it leaves much to be desired. It’s a flawed but promising start for what’s to come.