The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan

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.