Man of Medan had the potential to be a good time even before Supermassive Games made its surprise reveal of a multiplayer component. After all, Until Dawn is one of the most beloved horror games of the generation, especially for horror fans. Mainly because it embraces tried and trusted genre movie themes and plops you in control of a cast of expendable young actors, allowing you to dictate how they live or die. It even had the kind of cast suited to such fare with a former star of a hit TV show (Hayden Patenierre), a dependable and talented character actor (Peter Stormare) and a young relatively low-key actor who went on to become a big name, and in this case, an Oscar winner, (Rami Malek) among them. Man of Medan features Shawn Ashmore (X-Men, The Ruins) and Pip Torrens (Preacher, The Crown) alongside fresher faces, and on the surface, appears to be a spiritual sequel of sorts to the 2015 title. While there is a similarity, in my time with Man of Medan, I found it to be on a whole other level.
Until Dawn allowed you to direct a slasher/monster movie from start to finish. With Man of Medan, and indeed all future titles in The Dark Pictures Anthology, you can now have your friends roleplay a horror movie with you. This is done in two ways. The first way is via a 2 player online mode. You and your ‘friend’ play one of the available cast members, both doing things for that character’s story and relationship progression. Sometimes you’ll be talking and interacting in a scene together, choosing how the relationship goes between those two characters, but other times, you can be in completely different places and doing different things that could well affect what happens down the line to both you and the other player’s character. And you won’t know what they did to get you in trouble or save your skin.
The only real downside of this mode so far is that when the other player takes a while to make a conversation choice, it’s really noticeable. Waiting a silent eternity for an answer at one point led to a very awkward and rather funny ‘shh’ from one of the characters. You don’t notice it as much when you’re making the decisions of course, but this issue does pull you out of the experience a little.
Until Dawn‘s branching story paths have been massively upgraded for The Dark Pictures Anthology. Smaller choices are there that can affect both small and large scale issues, shaping the opportunities that will or will not come your way later. Supermassive isn’t above throwing a curveball or two in there again either, so what might seem like a nice and sensible choice for your character, could have deliciously grim results for someone else, which plays so well as a multiplayer component.
The preview I played in Hamburg (the things that I can tell you about anyhow) have some good examples of that. Towards the end of our demo, me and my mystery co-op partner (we were put in two separate groups at either end of the press event’s ship setting) find ourselves in quite the dilemma. Pirates have boarded the boat our plucky young diving party has taken out to sea and unfortunately, all but one of our party have been captured by these uninvited guests, and time is short if we’re going to have any chance of escape.
During the current scene, we are both tied and gagged in the ship’s cabin, and as Shawn Ashmore’s Conrad (who is a cocky, arrogant rich boy), I’m given the choice to try and ungag one of my number, which I do, and then do so for another, hoping we can discuss a plan of action before the pirates take one of us. Before a word can be spoken, one of the pirates enters the cabin and clearly, my partner has an opportunity to take them out, but something stops them and my brief attempt at escape ends prematurely. I get taken above deck and have a rather heated discussion with the pirate captain. Conrad and I survive the encounter, but they make sure Conrad remembers not to be a dick about being kidnapped again. Well, for now anyway.
I’m left wondering ‘what if?’ about the chance to overpower our captors, but not for long as having escaped our binds, I, as Conrad, am elected to escape through a window and make my way around the side of the boat to relative safety. The brewing storm is supposed to be the cover for our noisy breakout, but we flub the timing of the window breaking in time with the thunder and though I do get out of the window, the pirates are alerted to the kerfuffle. I leave my partner to deal with whatever situation is about to occur in the cabin and carefully clamber across the outside of the boat, and just as I reacht he back of the boat, where the pirate captain is interrogating one of our party, I spot a knife on a seat. I am given the choice of escape or trying to play hero with the knife.
I pick up the knife, clamber onboard and sneak up behind one of the pirates, holding the knife to his throat. A standoff ensues. I won’t go into much more detail, but the demo ends with the arrival of the titular Man of Medan, a huge haunted ship, and through my actions after the standoff, Conrad has seemingly exited the story already.
I was already eager at this point to know what happens next, but the real magic of Man of Medan came from the discussion of our playthrough afterward. Suddenly we find out about entire situations we didn’t get to see while the other player was off doing their own thing, wildly different outcomes, and some forehead-slapping revelations about what was going on during certain scenes. That there were so many variables in just over an hour of play, and before the story has even hit its spooky stride showed how improved the choice-based formula is here compared to Until Dawn, and multiplayer played a huge part in that. That it’s not just the game making ticking the choice boxes for you, another human being can too.
We then had an opportunity to test out the other multiplayer option, the local pass-the-pad experience known as Movie Night Mode. Here, five of us sat at the same station and each selected a character to play as, going through the same demo as before, but now it played out in more of a regular single player way, with one character taking the focus of each scene. Movie Night mode aptly feels like the combination of two pastimes, watching a movie together and playing a game together.
Given the way the game is set up for failure to not inhibit enjoyment, and allow the adventure to reach a natural conclusion no matter what the skill level is of those in attendance, The Dark Pictures Anthology series positions itself as a rather unique, but accessible, party game where fucking things up is just as fun as trying to ‘win’.
Away from the multiplayer and choices, Man of Medan has some other improvements on the Until Dawn formula. Remember those infuriating sections where you had to keep the pad absolutely still? I know I do because I had to try doing that whilst rocking a baby on my lap at 3am, and there wasn’t a chance in hell that was going to work. Now, you time your button press in rhythm with a heartbeat meter. Keep matching, and you’ll remain hidden, skip a beat and well…you won’t. A simple, yet much-needed change. It’s also worth mentioning that the totems of Until Dawn are replaced by paintings, doing the same job of giving you hints about events yet to come, but you get to look at art now.
It’s also a step up in the technical department, even at this stage. The characters look a bit more natural than before, and movement is also slicker. While sunlight shows up some of the quirks in the attempt at realistic visuals, once darkness hits, Man of Medan looks gorgeous. During the cabin escape attempt, the character models looked good enough to make you forget you were playing a game for a minute, such was the impact of the lighting.
Perhaps most importantly, Man of Medan sets a better early pace than Until Dawn, introducing the characters just as well as before, but peppering that with plenty of interactions that don’t feel arbitrary, no matter how trivial they might seem. It’ll be interesting to see where certain threads lead in the finished game, but for now, the build towards the ghastly sights on the Man of Medan itself, and the seamless introduction of multiplayer, are very promising steps in the right direction.
Man of Medan previewed on a PS4 Pro.
Man of Medan is out August 30 on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.