Man of Medan

The first game of The Dark Pictures Anthology, Man of Medan, has some good ideas up its sleeve, but they are ultimately wasted on a very problematic story. The game fails to develop interesting characters and build a horror atmosphere, especially on repeated playthroughs.

The story follows Alex, a young man who decides to go for a dive with his girlfriend, Julia, to explore underwater wrecks. Alex’s brother, Brad, has found a note talking of a “Manchurian Gold”, with some coordinates in the paper, and they decide to investigate the subject. However, they’re soon boarded by pirates, who take them to the coordinates, finding a ghost ship.

Man of Medan opens on a negative note. We are accompanying two young military men at the end of World War II. There’s a bit of gratuitous Orientalism at play, connecting the Orient with the supernatural, with a Chinese soothsayer predicting that their future is a horrible one: only blood, death, and doom await them. They board their ship, but things soon take a turn for the worse, as they start to see dead people everywhere.

One of the problems of this opening is that it’s much more silly than terrifying: they get caught in a storm, and lightning strikes a box with a skull painted on it, making a green mist come out of it while a menacing score plays. It looks like the opening scene from a Scooby-Doo episode.

Characters don’t act realistically either, with one of them talking about a corpse he found inside a locker as if it was a bizarre and curious thing, instead of a “holy shit, what’s going on, are we under attack” thing. When his interlocutor answers, “Something’s wrong. Let’s get out of here,” the delivery is artificial, lacking panic and urgency, so when the camera closes on his face and even shakes to impart a great deal of tension, the effect is actually more comical than tense.

The moment when the camera focuses on the faces of the dead, shifting from one to the other while the music gets dramatic, has a similar effect: it’s supposed to shock, but that will hardly occur since they all look like videogame characters. Since we didn’t have any time to spend with them – or with anyone for that matter, as this takes place right at the beginning – the illusion that they’re real people cannot be formed, so it’s as if they showed us the face of dolls and expected us to be shocked.

When we finally take control of Alex and his friends, things get a little better. The voice acting is more believable and the situations are less cringe-worthy. The first act tries to show their personality and build them as characters – shallow characters, of course, but still characters. Julia is reckless and impulsive, Brad is timid and insecure, while Conrad is an asshole. It still looks and feels like a B-movie, but at least one that we won’t be laughing so hard at.

Man of Medan is an adventure game – think Telltale – which means you walk, find notes, choose answers and partake in quick time events that can decide the fate of a character. Choices are frequent – and can frequently mean the death of someone – but not all of them work.

The goal of putting the player in the shoes of a character in a horror movie to see if they make the same bad decisions so common in the genre is not achieved if there’s a blatant incompatibility between what the player knows and what the character knows. Early on in the game, you can choose to make a character come back to the surface without decompressing, for example. But the player that chooses this option is either testing the game – curious about the result – or is unaware of the suicidal lunacy of the action – unlike the character they’re controlling, who is an experienced diver. In other words, one of the choices is only made if the player is purposely not thinking as the character, or if they are not on the same page.

In an attempt to remedy this issue, one of the characters in the scene tries to warn the player of the danger of not decompressing. But the player that didn’t know that beforehand has to take in that information and choose an action in a matter of seconds, while the character who will or will not decompress had to study about the subject for days and should know about the dangers in detail. Again, the game tries to remedy the issue by making the character believe that someone may be in danger, but the balance still pends heavily to “let’s not kill myself for a suspicion”. Consequently, these attempts to make the scene work function more like bandages on a narrative wound, trying to heal it, but never disguising it.

The narrative problems of Man of Medan don’t stop here. There are scenes that simply don’t make sense: when the pirates take over their ship, they tie them up and lock them inside a room. Alex manages to free himself and when the pirates come back for him, he warns his friends, “Don’t let them see your hands,” so they can hit them by surprise. This could be a good plan in normal circumstances, but he had just banged furiously on the door with his free hands – in front of one of the pirates, no less.

There are times when the lack of consistency of the characters’ reactions pulls you out of the scene by shifting from one extreme to the other: when the pirates take Conrad out of this room where they’re being kept prisoners, the camera closes on Julia as she screams his name, but when it pulls back to follow Alex’s actions, she suddenly appears completely cool, as if she hadn’t just screamed in panic.

There are also some inconsistencies with characterization. Early on, for example, the captain they hired to help them, a woman named Fliss, scolds Alex and his girlfriend for picking stuff from the wreck because each object would supposedly have a kind of energy attached to them. This shows she’s superstitious, but later on, when one of the pirates defends that the ghost of the people who die on a ship stay on the ship, she’s suddenly skeptical, saying that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

The presence of the pirates also harms the pacing of the narrative. It delays the arrival on the ghost ship – the main attraction of the game – while offering nothing in return. Man of Medan is a short game – which should encourage repeated playthroughs – but the first hours drag on nonetheless. The pirates are just a diversion, never adding anything to the story besides some small moments of tension here and there: after all, Alex and his friends were all set to get to the ghost ship anyway.

The story itself also runs counter to replayability. First, the “big twist” hampers the horror element of any subsequent playthroughs, making the game devoid of tension when it comes to the supernatural. It’s usually nice when a twist makes us see previous events in a new light, but not so much when this light is a less interesting one.

Man of Medan’s story is built on an abundance of red herrings, presenting a lot of elements that seem important at a first glance, but are actually there just to mislead you, making it difficult for you to get what’s going on too quickly. The nature of the gameplay – with your actions and choices leading to different outcomes – creates even more misleading elements, filling the narrative with “fake Chekhov guns”. A character may find a wrench or a knife and the framing will treat the event as a crucial one. However, there are outcomes when those objects don’t get to play a part, so it’s possible that the player will watch characters find many seemingly important objects, which will never be seen again.

Since the game is rife with red herrings, most things in its structure are either designed to deceive you or may end up being discarded because of your decisions. Consequently, repeated playthroughs will stumble into the same issue: the red herrings don’t work anymore – since you already know what they are – and there’s nothing left in the narrative to make up for their absence. The story will lack urgency and mystery, leaving you only with some flat characters and quick time events.

The story could have doubled down on the psychological aspect of its horror scenes, but they’re left underdeveloped. There’s a moment, for instance, in which Julia sees Alex’s face on the creatures that are coming to attack her, but the conclusion that she fears him is immediately discarded soon after the event. The nature of the story should have provided more moments like this and less “a rat SUDDENLY JUMPS AT YOU”.

Man of Medan relies too much on jump scares to build its horror atmosphere – and there are several that just amount to a random animal appearing out of nowhere with a loud sound. You don’t have to confront the dead during normal gameplay, so the player feels safe when it’s time to explore the ship: since danger only exist during cutscenes, tension is removed from exploration. The ship itself is also pretty realistic in its design: barring the occasional decomposed corpse, it just seems like an abandoned ship.

The game makes great use of its fixed camera angles, however. It frames the action with unusual angles, like positioning the camera beneath a staircase – the stairs obscuring some of the scene – or at the end of a long corridor, to make you think something will happen along the way. Sometimes the camera even lingers on a corpse while a character is walking out of the room, to get you anxious, expecting it to suddenly move. But the rub is: what you’re expecting is just a jump scare.

Finally, there are some small interludes with a mysterious man called “the Curator”. But he just judges your performance, saying things like “Congratulations, everyone is still alive”, and gives you hints about the big twist – even if you outright ask him not to. The character’s purpose here – besides giving away the ending – is just to serve as a bridge between this game and the next ones in the anthology.

But there are some interesting ideas in Man of Medan, even if they’re not used well. Your choices during dialogues form character traits, for example. More games should use systems like this, especially RPGs, with the personality you built for the character early one locking them into small actions and decisions that come directly from the traits you chose. Here, however, the thing that traits appear to impact most is the quick time events – make them more difficult – which is just a waste of potential.

There are also portraits you can find that offer a small video – a premonition – of a possible future event. This would be great if there were a narrative justification for it – as they can hint at the consequences of some choices – but here the characters just have these premonitions without any reason whatsoever – even the big twist doesn’t explain them – and they don’t even react to the visions. With no context for their existence, these premonitions can pull you out of the story, reminding you that you’re playing a game.

Finally, there’s the matter of multiplayer, which puts two players in two simultaneous scenarios, playing different characters: one can be controlling Julia while she decides to get up without decompressing while the other is watching what’s happening on the boat. This means that part of the narrative will be missing whether you play alone or not. But if you play with someone, some scenes – like Julia suffering from decompression sickness – may feel too random, as you may not get access to the context of what’s happening.

Man of Medan gets more things wrong than right. Its ending sabotages the structure formed around repeated playthroughs, its characters are bland and forgettable, and the overabundance of jump scares can make the narrative feel cheap. Let’s hope the next games in The Dark Pictures Anthology make better use of the systems presented here.

June 30, 2021.