Reviews
[Review] Being All at Sea With Friends Makes ‘Man of Medan’ a Highly Entertaining Horror Adventure
The most magical and entertaining thing about Man of Medan is what a single missed button press can do to any given situation. If Until Dawn pulled you in with its ‘anyone can die by my hand’ approach to narrative adventure, Man of Medan is not only going scratch that itch, it’s going to rub your belly and feed you strawberries too.
Take a sequence early in the game, where our protagonists are trying to escape from their captors. You need to break a window in time with the rumble of thunder so one of them can sneak out and steal a motorboat. Succeed and the bad guys are blissfully unaware of your skulking, fail and the remaining members of the group must try to fight off the alerted guards while you clamber towards the boat before anyone spots you. From that one change in the narrative, what happens next can be very different. In several runs through the game, this section ended in differing ways each time. Someone was shot, someone escaped, someone tried to be a hero and got the whole group back in hot water. Each time that one button press being hit or missed led to kind of change, and it’s fascinating to discover what sequence leads where.
Supermassive Games’ latest horror movie simulator marks the first entry in an eight-game anthology called The Dark Pictures. Each will blend some typical horror sub-genres together and give the player a kind of directorial control over the protagonists. With opening effort Man of Medan, we get a fusion of home invasion and ghost ship as a young quintet out on a dive at a previously undiscovered location come up first against pirates, then the titular ship, a WWII vessel lost since the war. Oh and being a lost boat in a horror game, something sinister lurks on board, and it’s there for you to offer up the poor souls you control.
Each character has base traits, which are essentially cue cards for how you should play them. Is a character deemed reckless? Then it would make sense they’d ignore a warning in order to get past an obstacle. Arrogant? Then saying the dangerous thing would be logical as it is deadly. You can play against these traits, and even give the characters little arcs of sorts where they learn to be more decisive, ruthless, etc. Embracing this side of Man of Medan really gets the most out of it. Especially when you throw in the newly-minted multiplayer modes.
While it would have been just fine to have eight small slices of Until Dawn-style horror game (and to a degree you still do have that), the multiplayer really changes the formula up, and adds another layer to the death-avoidance. Knowing your own real-life pals are able to affect your chances of survival in Man of Medan seems like such an obvious addition in hindsight, and with four other friends in local pass-the-pad mode, Movie Night, Man of Medan feels so right, so entertaining. It hides some of the shortcomings well in much the same way the choose your own adventure spookiness did for Until Dawn.
From a technical standpoint, Man of Medan’s shortcoming is, without doubt, the framerate, which casually drops now and again, usually when you’re not in direct control. It’s not exactly a terrible blight, but it does detract from the rather lovely visuals, and dilutes the odd bit of tension. Luckily this is not a particularly fast-paced game, so it’s not the problem it could have been. We have been assured that a Day One patch should fix this to some degree, so happily it’s been noticed and worked on, and hopefully helps out going forward.
Controlling the characters can feel a little clunky, especially when turning a sharp corner. They’ve been really well-animated, but that, unfortunately, means they take a lot longer to turn and walk away from an obstacle. It’s mildly frustrating, but it also kind of fits in the same way tank controls did for classic survival horror. The Q.T.E. button presses remain a perfect match for this kind of game, mostly because ‘failure’ isn’t necessarily game-ending and can actually produce interesting results. A big improvement on the previous model is the ‘staying still’ scenes. Whereas Until Dawn made you hold the controller still so your character doesn’t goof up and reveal their hiding spot, Man of Medan just asks you to tap a button to match an onscreen representation of a heartbeat. It’s a much better system, and more consistent with the button prompts found elsewhere in the game.
So, what about the story? It’s a crucial part of ensuring the other parts work after all. Get that wrong and it matters far less how good the multiplayer is, how great the game looks, or how devilishly devious the choices are. It’s certainly an interesting blend of horror. It’s based loosely on a real-life story about a lost ship, and dangles some intriguing possibilities into its mystery. The gang has to not only contend with the many freaky horrors of the titular ship, but also a very human threat. The second half of the game takes the ‘home invasion on a boat’ angle from the first half, and thrusts the entire cast into this ghost ship environment, effectively sewing the two story threads together. For the most part it works quite well, with the ship’s reality-altering power only making the gang’s captors more dangerous as things get increasingly crazy. There’s some wild imagery on display later in the game, including a pretty impressive-looking beast.
The ending comes a bit too soon for my liking, no matter how it turns out, and some of these ending options feel rather anticlimactic because things don’t ramp up to the finale enough beforehand. There are still some excellent ones though, and playing with others puts back the uncertainty that repeated playthroughs on your own takes away. You might know what to do in a scene in order to survive, but does your partner? The game may suggest a way to play as a character through their traits, but another human isn’t necessarily going to read them the same way you do. The only downside of playing online with someone is you notice the weirdly long pauses in a conversation more when it’s not you in control. A minor quibble really.
Man of Medan’s cast fit standard horror tropes to begin with (including a horndog rich boy, played with enthusiasm by Shawn Ashmore), yet as the story progresses, you may well feel differently about them as events show a new side to their personalities, which is another great thing carried over from Supermassive’s previous work. The human antagonists are a tad one-dimensional (they sure do like to tell you to shut the fuck up a lot), even if they aren’t the sole focus. They fill a job required by the story, but little else.
I’m quite fond of the host of The Dark Pictures anthology. The Curator pops up between chapters to discuss your choices so far and offer hints if you want them. His ever-so-slightly condescending tone as he congratulates/chides you for your efforts so far make him an entertaining host. As the only consistent character from game to game, it’s great to have such a strong link between this and future entries.
Sure, Man of Medan has a few rough edges, but it’s a confident first step in a new series of games. It keeps the core of what made people love Until Dawn and breathes fresh life into it by adding more depth to the branching narrative system, and including an excellent multiplayer side. A little more polish and a bit more bite to the game’s finale would be nice, but this is still a hugely entertaining slice of interactive horror that brings the thrilling uncertainty of other people’s decisions to the murder party.
Man of Medan review code for PS4 provided by the publisher.
Man of Medan is out August 30 on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
Writer/Director Tilman Singer continues his streak of experimental high-concept horror with his sophomore effort, Cuckoo. The filmmaker boldly marches to the beat of his own drum, examining heady themes of grief, reproduction, and gendered expectations through inventive, playful horror. That Cuckoo plays it fast and loose with details and plotting means that this body horror entry will likely polarize, but lovers of weird cinema will find a lot of charm in Singer’s latest.
After a peculiar cold open that won’t make sense until much later in the film, Cuckoo introduces seventeen-year-old Gretchen (Hunter Schafer). The moody teen wears her disdain plainly as she’s dragged by her father, Luis (Marton Csókás), stepmother Beth (Jessica Henwick), and her mute 7-year-old stepsister Alma (Mila Lieu) to the Bavarian Alps resort where Alma was conceived. Gretchen’s deep in the throes of grief over the loss of her mother, whose memory she clings to by calling their old phone and leaving messages.
She feels unwanted by her dad’s new family, and the creepy German resort owner, Mr. König (Dan Stevens), makes her feel even more uncomfortable despite giving her a job at the resort front desk. Gretchen is so unsettled by Mr. König that she ignores his desperate pleas to be home before dark, leading to bizarre encounters with a stalking, shrieking woman.
Singer is less interested in plotting than atmosphere, horror freak-outs, and his protagonist’s volatile emotional state. More specifically, how Gretchen’s internal journey parallels what’s happening at the resort. Schafer’s Gretchen initially comes across as the typical angsty teen, but it soon becomes apparent that she’s masking terrible pain made worse by feeling like an outsider. Gretchen wants nothing more than to return home to the US, but Singer throws every possible obstacle her way to prevent that, including a massive amount of bodily trauma that forces the teen into survival mode with handicapped odds. The worse the stalking and weird aural encounters get, the more isolated Gretchen becomes, as everyone around her assumes she’s acting out.
It’s the performances that carry Cuckoo. Singer focuses on what’s important to his themes and overarching story and discards anything that he deems superfluous in a way that will drive plot-focused audiences to frustration. Supporting players get forgotten and left behind frequently when shit hits the metaphorical fan. Certain plot beats get ignored entirely for the sake of forward momentum. Thanks to a poignant, committed turn from Hunter Schafer, who deftly navigates Singer’s quirky sense of humor while nailing the emotional intensity in the same breath, Cuckoo becomes far more accessible despite its weird narrative shorthand.
Then there’s the villainous Mr. König. Dan Stevens is always at his most fascinating when sinking his teeth into peculiar character roles, and he has ample room to flex his quirky character actor muscles with Mr. König. He’s the perfect disarming foil at first until the shackles come off, and he gets to let loose in thrilling ways. Of course, Mr. König may be the film’s ultimate monster, but Cuckoo has an actual bizarre creature, and the film’s title holds the key. Don’t expect Singer to unveil any firm details about it until late in the runtime, though, opting instead to let viewers discover the zaniness when he’s ready to unleash it. But what I will tease is that vaginal discharge gets employed to ominous, skin-crawling effect here.
There’s inventive worldbuilding on display that sets this high-concept horror movie apart and a few intense horror cat-and-mouse scenes that deliver palpable tension. But Singer approaches it with a playful sense of humor that only further nudges Cuckoo into the realm of weird cinema. It’s so refreshingly unconventional and unpredictable in every way, right down to its raucous, entertainingly silly finale, that it’s hard to care about all of the plot that gets discarded along the way. It certainly helps that Cuckoo belongs to Schafer and Stevens, too.
Cuckoo screened at SXSW and will release in theaters on August 9, 2024.
Editor’s Note: This SXSW review was originally published on March 15, 2024.
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