I’m not sure if it’s just me getting older or the actual pandemic that suddenly arrived after this game was released, shattering (perhaps permanently) our collective ability to accurately perceive the passage of time, but I really can’t believe The Dark Side Anthology” came out five years ago. Man of Medan still feels like a new game to me, so realizing that today is the fifth anniversary of its release is a sobering fact.
Of course, there are now four Dark Pictures Anthology games you can play – five more, in fact, if you own a VR headset – and we recently got a look at the long-awaited next core of the series at Gamescom ONL work. It would be quite unreasonable to expect Man of Medan to appear anywhere as the first entry in the series less about five years old At leastin that case.
The Dark Pictures Anthology is an alternative horror death series launched by Supermassive Games. It’s clearly a spiritual successor to their hit game Until Dawn, and every major game to date has taken a take on the recurring basic concept of “five people trapped in a horror trope and must fight to survive.” Subtly different approaches. So far, we’ve seen wealthy vacationers held hostage on a ghost ship in Man of Medan; a college field trip trapped in a ghost town in Little Hope; and an army in House of Ashes A long-buried ancient temple is stumbled upon; in The Devil Within Me, a documentary camera crew is threatened on a serial killer’s private island.
Opinions are divided on which games work and which don’t, which is perhaps to be expected since different groups of horror fans see their favorite sub-genre each time. But every subsequent title is more or less based on feedback from the previous games, so it’s no surprise that new titles tend to be slightly better received on average. But now that it’s Man of Medan’s birthday, let it bloom, because I’ll explain why it’s still the best game in The Dark Pictures Anthology – in fact, it might be Supermassive’s best yet Horror game.
Let’s put the obvious criticisms aside for a second: yes, Man of Medan’s storyline was quite controversial when the game first came out, and not without reason. I won’t spoil it here in case readers haven’t played it yet, but I will admit that even though I was a little disappointed, it wasn’t enough to turn me off from the rest of the game. In fact, forgiveness is in the statistics, and I’ve completed MoM six or seven more times since then, even knowing where it was going.
Man of Medan does contain some narrative wobbles, and the same criticism that applies to the rest of the series—the protagonist’s fully animated facial animation can sometimes be scary in the wrong way—applies to MoM as well. But there’s one thing “Man of Medan” does so well that I think, at least in that sense, it’s even better than “Until Dawn.”
The whole point of Supermassive’s horror output is that any character can die, anyone can be the sole survivor, and any combination of victim/survivor with the main cast is possible. So, technically each of these games has dozens if not hundreds of potential endings, and you can’t really argue in terms of replayability.
But most of the time, after a few playthroughs, you’ll see through the Matrix a little and realize that at least a few characters have plot armor that ensures they’re actually safe until near the end of the game. One of the worst culprits is actually House of Ashes, the most critically acclaimed Dark Pictures game to date. It’s the most satisfying first time game from a story perspective, and the exact reason for that is repetition. Replays get old quickly: more than half of the main cast is, in fact, completely unkillable until the final two chapters.
Of course, this makes some sense narratively, ensuring your core themes are properly emphasized before your main characters fall into the dust, but this is where Man of Medan comes into play. MoM’s marketing proudly boasts over 60 potential character deaths, with Supermassive’s output allowing for a degree of flexibility not seen elsewhere. While it’s not entirely true that anyone can die at any time, there are enough situations that can play out in a variety of different ways that it’s entirely possible to reach the ending with any combination of characters who have taken some very different paths to get there There, it depends on who they were with, when and if everyone survived. And the story doesn’t suffer because of it, because the web of relationships the game builds between the five protagonists is such that any duo (or trio, or quartet, if indeed the whole team hasn’t gotten this far yet) Both can carry out the final confrontation in an effective manner.
Given that branching narratives are the foundation of Supermassive’s established legacy in horror games to date, I firmly believe that Man of Medan should be considered the title that best embodies the origins of The Dark Pictures Anthology. This is probably the easiest in terms of gameplay, and your interpretation of whether a character is annoying or not may vary (I actually think they have the best DPA cast yet, but that’s another story for another day argument); and of course there’s that ending to deal with. But what if you really want a horror adventure game that you can play over and over again and see completely different scenes and scenarios based on your different choices? Five years later, Man of Medan still dominates.