Until Dawn was a hit when it released in 2015. Developer Supermassive Games delivered a fun and creepy ode to slasher movies that had great characters, a fun story, and incredibly meaningful choices for you to make all throughout. It’s definitely one of my favorite choice based narrative games. Naturally my expectations were pretty high for their true follow up, Man of Medan. While the game is good, it falls short of greatness in a number of ways.
The first game in their Dark Pictures Anthology series, Man of Medan follows a group of five people who are ocean divers. They end up being trapped on a ghost ship and do what they can to survive and make it off the boat back to safety. It’s a classic B-movie plot similar to the plot of Until Dawn. In stark contrast to that game though, the game takes everything far more seriously and realistically. There isn’t much goofiness going on here in this game.
Games like Man of Medan live and die by their story. If the story isn’t good enough and the writing isn’t up to snuff, then nothing else is really going to matter. Man of Medan has a good story that has some pacing issues and some not that great writing. The game has a prologue that acts as a tutorial and sets the stage for the rest of the game, but it takes way too long to get through. It easily could’ve and should’ve been a short five minute cutscene that you watch to get you into the main story much faster. Instead it’s a sequence that takes about 15-20 minutes to get through before you’ve made it to the opening credits.
Once you get into the main story things start off fine as you get introduced to the characters. Things continue to move slowly as the game takes its time getting the group from their diving yacht to the ghost ship where the scary stuff really happens, which is to its detriment. The creepy supernatural things that happen on the boat are far more interesting than everything that came before, and some of the scares that happen there are pretty good too. I get that Supermassive wanted to ease you into things first and get you acquainted with the characters, but it would’ve been great if we were able to get to the scares faster or if we had more scares take place on the yacht.
Even though there are pacing issues, the actual story itself is good. I was intrigued as to what would happen next and was curious about what was really going on with the ship. The mysteries of the ship were constantly pulling me in and making me want to get to the next scene to see what else it had in store for me.
This being a choice based game, the story is one that you help shape with the decisions that you make. In Until Dawn you could cause a character to die through both your dialogue choices and your actions. Here though, it felt like the more important decisions were the ones based around your actions and not your dialogue. I constantly felt like these decisions had weight to them and worried about the consequences of my choices from start to finish. There were many times where I had to pause the game to take a moment to think before making a life or death decision. Do I confront the ghost that’s in front of me or do I jump down into the unknown? When it came to the dialogue choices though, it didn’t have as much weight to it for me in regards to survivability which is disappointing since I was constantly second guessing myself and what I said to everyone in Until Dawn.
There were instances though where it seemed like my choices were completely negated in subsequent scenes. In one scene, I was faced with the choice of whether or not to bring along a rebreather with me. I chose not to, but in the following scene the rebreather was right there next to me. In another scene, one of my characters died with someone else right next to them as a witness. When I finished the game, the character who witnessed the death talked about how he wished he was there when they died and how he might’ve been able to prevent it if he was there. Well you were there buddy, so why are we acting like you weren’t? This completely threw me out of the experience and annoyed me a bit. Maybe it’s a bug or maybe it’s a case where there’s only one version of the cutscene that was made. Regardless, I wasn’t feeling that at all.
Part of the problem with the story is also the writing and voice acting. The characters sometimes say things that are completely stupid and laughable. Early on in the game, one of the characters named Alex is suspicious of someone else’s loyalties. What he says about this is, and I quote, “They’re in cahoots!” Who the hell says cahoots? Who in this day and age uses that word in a completely serious manner? It’s utterly ridiculous and made me pause the game to laugh at just how absurd it was. Lines like this aren’t helped by the fact that not everyone does the best job with their voice acting. It’s good enough to get the job done, but it could be better in some areas as well.
When it comes to the scares, most of them are your standard jump scares that you would get from a horror movie. If you’re expecting psychological horror or something like that you’re in the wrong place. Some of the jump scares got me and there were times where I didn’t want to go into a room or open a door, but it was never because I was too afraid to advance. It was always because I didn’t want to do something that would cause my characters to die. The game really isn’t that scary and is more of a thriller than anything.
The actual gameplay is similar to Until Dawn. You walk around through areas and can examine items that are laid about to uncover more information about what’s going on. Similar to that game’s totems, there are pictures in this game that you can look at that give you premonitions about future events that you can either avoid or cause to happen. It’s a feature that I really like and actively seek out when I’m exploring the environments. You choose your dialogue in conversations and partake in QTE’s during action sequences. The QTE’s aren’t anything too crazy, but some pop up unexpectedly and failing them is the easiest way to get yourself killed.
This game’s most exciting feature is the ability to play the game with a friend in co-op. When playing like this, you play as one character while your friend plays as another one. You guys may be in the same scenario or in totally different ones that are happening at the same time. It causes you to miss out on some events that happen in the story, but the uncertainty of knowing what your friend is doing adds an interesting wrinkle to the story. It’s clear that the game was built with this in mind as there were many instances where I could see just how the co-op would work and how much more dynamic it would make everything. I imagine that playing this way would actually make the game more fun than playing yourself.
There’s also a movie night mode that allows a group of five people in the same room to each play as one of the characters in the story. Everyone is assigned to one character, so when it’s that character’s turn you hand the controller over to their respective player. While I never played with either of these modes, the ideas are cool enough that I can’t help but praise them.
Once you beat the game, there isn’t too much reason to go back and do it all again aside from wanting to see how things can play out if you made different decisions. The game is short so it wouldn’t take long to go through it all, but the story isn’t so strong that it makes me want to replay everything and sit through the many cutscenes the game has. You unlock the option to play specific scenes if you want to redo or start from a certain part as opposed to starting from the beginning again.
Upon completion you also unlock the Curator’s Cut, a different version of the story where you play as different characters than you originally did in each scene. This version gives you a different perspective on familiar events and also allows you to get new information that you didn’t come across before. Unfortunately this is currently only available to those who preordered the game, with everyone else getting access to it later this year. Why it wasn’t included in the game for everyone at launch is beyond me because it would add a lot of replay value to the game now. I doubt that anyone who doesn’t have the mode now is going to be enticed to come back to the game later this year when all the big end of year releases are coming out and begging for peoples attention.
Graphically the game looks great. Faces and facial animations are simply amazing. They all look very realistic and had me in awe the entire time. Unfortunately the same can’t be said about the environments. The environments are mostly samey and boring to explore. Since the majority of the game takes place on the ghost ship, you end up walking through a lot of metal hallways that all look alike. There’s no visual difference between any of the spaces, so the game ends up being a bit boring to look at. There were also a number of times where textures would take a bit of time to load in or be very basic, something that would be noticeable when the camera would be close up on objects.
Overall, Man of Medan is a fun way to spend a couple hours. It’s story, while not the best, is interesting and short enough to want to play all the way through. The decisions you make regarding your actions have weight and consequences, but this unfortunately isn’t the same when it comes to your conversation choices. And the writing and voice acting aren’t the best either, but they get the job done. The multiplayer options are intriguing though and are potentially the best ways to play the game. I don’t regret spending the $30 I did on the game, but it’s not a game that you have to go out and play right now. Maybe wait for a price drop on this one and spend a weekend in playing it with a friend to have the most fun possible with the game.
TheComfySpot 