The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan (PS4, 2019)

Supermassive Games have carved out a fun niche in the interactive drama genre. Dontnod’s Life is Strange games have emotional social commentary, Telltale’s The Walking Dead sustained high tension and long-term character development and Quantic Dreams’ games are a load of self-important bollocks. By contrast, Supermassive’s titles are perfectly content to be silly B-movie fun.

This playful tone was evident in the excellent Until Dawn, where you’re responsible for the lives of a group of attractive and annoying teenagers over the course of a very perilous night. By the time the credits rolled they could either be weary survivors or have ended up slashed, crushed and dismembered in all kinds of imaginative ways.

Man of Medan takes what everyone liked about Until Dawn and condenses it down into a social experience. This is the first in Supermassive’s ‘Dark Pictures Anthology’, planned as eight self-contained interactive stories tackling various horror genres. In this terrifying tale we find five stock characters stranded aboard a spooky abandoned ship – a tough woman, a cocky rich kid, a bubbly blonde, a nerd and an alpha male. Who will make it through the night?

A key aspect to making Man of Medan work a social experience is its length. Until Dawn took about eight hours to finish whereas Man of Medan clocks in at about three. The shorter story means it’s possible (and encouraged) that you play through it in a single sitting, which makes the awesome new multiplayer modes possible (and also encourages multiple plays to see other branches of the narrative).

I didn’t bother playing Man of Medan in singleplayer, as the ‘Movie Night’ mode sounded way more fun. Played with 1-5 players, you take control of individual characters and pass the controller between scenes. It’s really fun, especially once you’re a few drinks deep and everyone’s cackling as a clumsily-thumbed player screws up a QTE and accidentally impales their character on a big spike.

I ended up playing it twice with two groups of friends. The first time was a tiny bit disappointing as we soon figured out what was going on on the ship and managed to get one of the happier endings where every character made it off the boat. That’s fine, but dammit… I crave mayhem.

Fortunately buckets of blood were amply provided in my second playthrough with two other players. Some very poor decision-making resulting in one player being responsible for four out of five characters dying in hilariously cruel and gory fashion. It was impressive just how different this story was from the first time – with entire new sequences and environments that weren’t present the first time around.

Man of Medan‘s has some pretty cheesy writing and acting, but those are able to be written off as fitting into the straight-to-video horror feel. There are a couple of genuine rough edges: the prologue goes on way too long, it takes too long to get to the ship, there’s a lot of very slow ambling through samey corridors and the controls and animation are very loose. Most annoying is that there’s a character who can very easily never make it to the ghost ship – if you’re playing as them and make certain calls you’re stuck watching other people have fun for two hours.

But on the whole ‘Movie Night’ was just as fun as I hoped it’d be. The next ‘Dark Pictures Anthology’ game, Little Hope, is coming out at the end of October – I’m going to pick it up on release and make it the centrepiece of a spooky Halloween party. Here’s hoping Supermassive can buff out the few flaws in Man of Medan as I really love this as a multiplayer experience.