I don’t know if it’s because I’m old, or because a pandemic hit shortly after the game was released, destroying (perhaps permanently) our collective ability to accurately perceive the passage of time, but I honestly can’t believe it’s been five years since The Dark Pictures Anthology came out. Man of Medan still feels like a new game to me, so it’s sobering to realize that today marks its fifth anniversary.
Of course, there are now four Dark Pictures Anthology games you can play – five, in fact, if you own a VR headset – and we recently got a look at the next core entry in the series at Gamescom ONL As the first entry in the series, it would be unrealistic to expect Man of Medan to go anywhere. Less About five years older At least,in this case.
The Dark Pictures Anthology is a choose-your-own-death horror series from Supermassive Games. It’s the obvious spiritual successor to their hit Until Dawn, and each of the main games so far has taken a subtly different approach to the repetitive basic concept of “five people trapped in a horror story and must fight to survive.” So far, we’ve seen wealthy vacationers held hostage on a ghost ship in Man of Medan, a college field trip stranded in a ghost town in Little Hope, a military unit stumbled upon a long-buried ancient temple in House of Ashes, and a documentary crew menaced on a serial killer’s private island in The Devil Inside Me.
Opinions vary as to which games succeed and which don’t, which is perhaps to be expected, as different horror fans take turns seeing their favorite sub-genre each time. But each subsequent game more or less builds on the feedback from the previous one, so, unsurprisingly, the average reception for new games is slightly better. But since it’s Man of Medan’s birthday today, give it some flowers because I’m going to explain why it’s still the best game in The Dark Pictures Anthology – in fact, it may be Supermassive’s best horror game yet.
Let’s get the obvious criticism out of the way: yes, Man of Medan’s surprise storyline was quite controversial when the game first came out, and not without reason. I won’t spoil it here in case you haven’t played it yet, but I admit that even I was a little disappointed, but it wasn’t enough to put me off from the rest of the game. In fact, the data is so forgiving that I’ve played through Man of Medan six or seven times since then, even though I know where it’s going.
Man of Medan does have some narrative flaws, and the same criticisms leveled at other entries in the series apply to Man of Medan as well. The main character’s fully motion-captured facial animations can sometimes be horrible in the wrong ways, which is a big problem. But there is one thing Man of Medan does extremely well, and in that sense at least, I think it’s even better than Until Dawn.
The whole point of Supermassive horror is that any character can die, anyone can be the sole survivor, and any combination of victim/survivor with the protagonist is possible. Because of this, each of these games literally has dozens, if not hundreds, of potential endings, which you really can’t argue with in terms of replayability.
But most of the time, after a few playthroughs, you’ll see through the matrix and realize that at least a few characters have plot armor that keeps them safe until the end of the game. The worst of these is actually the most acclaimed Dark Shadows game to date, House of Ashes, which is the most satisfying to play through first time from a story perspective for the very reason that repeated playthroughs quickly become tiresome: in fact, more than half of the main characters are completely unkillable until the last two chapters.
Sure, there’s a certain narrative sense in making sure the core themes are properly emphasized before the protagonists fall, but that’s part of the charm of Man of Medan. The marketing for Man of Medan boasts over 60 potential character deaths, and that flexibility isn’t present in Supermassive’s other titles. While anyone could die at any time, enough situations could play out in a variety of different ways that it’s entirely possible to reach the end with any combination of characters that arrive in completely different ways depending on who they’re with, and when and if everyone survives. And the story doesn’t suffer because of that, because the web of relationships the game builds between the five protagonists allows any duo (or trio, or quartet, if the whole group really doesn’t make it that far) to make the final confrontation in an effective way.
Given that branching narratives are fundamental to Supermassive’s established legacy in horror games, I firmly believe that Man of Medan should be considered the game that best embodies the original intentions of The Dark Pictures Anthology. It’s probably the simplest in terms of gameplay, your opinion may differ on whether the characters are annoying (I actually think they’re the best DPA cast to date, but that’s an argument for another day); and, of course, there’s that ending to resolve. But if you really want a horror adventure game that you can play over and over again, and see completely different scenes and plots depending on your different choices? Five years later, Man of Medan still dominates.