Game #1097: The Dark Pictures Anthology - Man of Medan

  Hope you got your tetanus shot.

 I wasn't Until Dawn's biggest fan, but I appreciated it for what it was, and I found myself remembering it with some fondness, which is why I was looking forward to The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan. Following in its footsteps, this is another walking simulator riddled with QTEs that does its utmost to feel like a playable horror movie.

 Man of Medan scales things down a notch, now we are down to five different playable characters, which I think is a better choice since characters get more playable chapters each, but the length of the game is also shorter, clocking in at about 4 hours. That said, your choices are more dynamic this time around, as this game allows for more alterations to how things play out, as well as characters have more chances to die, as opposed to Until Dawn in which it felt like a few characters had too much plot armor. So, yeah, I'd say the downscaling works to this game advantage.

 That said... I felt like this game simply wasn't as interesting and the characters weren't as likeable as the ones in Until Dawn. Until Dawn succeeded in feeling like a slasher movie, with dumb teens and their dumb choices. Man of Medan is a bit more generic, so to speak, four friends and a guide set out on a diving expedition, a bunch of pirates raid them, their boat comes across the haunted Ourang Medan, everyone gets into the ship and crazy stuff starts happening. What's more, I felt like the secret behind what was happening was sorta.... lame. I really appreciate the replayability, I appreciate how much more variety in how things play out there is, but... yeah, I didn't care about the plot or the characters as much as I did with Until Dawn.

 One new feature I really liked was 'Movie Night', in which you can have other people join you and set a character to every player, or more than one character if you are less than five people total. Basically, before each 'scene' the game will have a prompt 'ready player X' so that you can hand them the joystick. You could easily do this yourself, but still, I like how this mode encourages multiplayer. I would've gone one step further and allowed every player to use their own joystick, but hey, it works.    

 The good news is.... the mandatory six-axis motion inputs are completely gone, every QTE is a button prompt now, praise the lord. There are still a lot of them, and now you can make it so that mash prompts can be pulled off just by holding down the button. I like it. That said, movement is still super stiff, character move like sacks of potatoes, their walking speed is pathetic and turning around can be ridiculously annoying at times. I mean, how can the movement be so stiff? How?

 The graphics took a bit of a hit, as character models don't feel as polished, and they barely emote sometimes, to the game's detriment, as seeing non-emoting characters speaking in tones of distress is quite off-putting and breaks the immersion. The game overall feels rather... sloppy. Characters may simply blink out of existence instead of walking or animate in overly stiff ways, some scene transitions are rough and... it feels like the game is barely holding on together at times. Mind you, I didn't come across any notorious bugs or glitches, but sometimes it feels like the game is about to break.

 There's a rather neat new feature, 'director's cut', which lets you replay the game switching up some scenes, adding or removing scenes or even changing the playable character. There's one caveat though... you must download an update. This was done so that they could sell early access to this mode as ap re-order incentive. LAME.

 I think that with Man of Medan the developers made a lot of great design choices, which maybe were just a consequence of having a smaller budget. But, on the other hand, I didn't think this game's plot was as entertaining, which is kind of a huge deal in a game that's all about its plot. The stiff visual presentation also really hurt the game, while I'm not a stickler for graphics, a game like this NEEDS decent graphics to sell you on the premise, but these stiff faces made some supposedly scary scenes funny. Still, it was a fun time, particularly with another player, so it's not a bad pick for a Halloween game, but I'd stick with Until Dawn. On another note, I just started Little Hope, and lemme tell ya, it's already a step up from Man of Medan....

 6.0