The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan. Scary?

The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan is a new horror game developed by ‘Supermassive Games‘ and published by ‘Bandai Namco‘. The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan is said to be coming out in 2019 on the Xbox One, PS4 and PC. This isn’t just a horror game. It’s suppose to be supernatural horror game. Let’s take a look.

In The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan, players will watch and follow the story and adventure of 5 characters. 4 are young Americans while the fifth is their boat driver. They are on a dive boat and have got some plans. Firstly there’s rumours of a world war 2 wreck which they hope to find. Second is off course a boat party. It wouldn’t be much of a game is something doesn’t go wrong. A storm shows up and causes all of them to be stuck on what’s described as a ghost ship. This is a horror game remember.

This ghost ship isn’t your regular ghost ship at your local supermarket, as once on board the passengers are subjected to some serious terror and immense stress because of what’s going on around them. The objective is simple, they must escape this place and the obviously bad history it has. So expect danger, expect things to mess with your thinking, expect hard decisions, expect quick decisions, expect death, expect mistakes and more. 

The ones who developed ‘Until Dawn‘ are the same ones developing ‘The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan’. Therefore if you have played Until Dawn or watched it then you should know what you are in for. This is because from what we have seen they are similar. It’s dark, there’s a bunch of people and players have to pay close attention to certain details and think about what decisions to make carefully as there are repercussions… there’s always… repercussions.

So since you know what to expect there isn’t that much to say but here’s what we think about the whole thing. Games like this which are more cinematic based are good. They are different and offer variety to the game genres. Halo and Gears of War aren’t anything like this and that’s good. What games like this need is to provide enough obvious information about the characters, information that will come in handy for future moments in the game like their skills. There needs to be a good blend of obvious and more subtle consequence decisions and danger. For example deciding whether to walk across an unsafe bridge is obvious while deciding whether to hide or keep running when being chased is more subtle. 

Games like The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan also need to make sure that players cannot cheat their way through. Some youtubers and streamers will go back to a previous save if they make a bad decision or get someone killed. This needs to be stopped because when you can simply with two clicks undo a decision it tales away from the tension and stress of playing the game. If they want to redo then they need to start from the beginning again. Also the developers need to not allow pausing during timed decisions as this defeated the purpose of it being times and completely nullifies the pressure a player should feel. Supermassive Games, do these changes or gamers like X35 Earthwalker will have no tension or horror at all as we can simply undo everything and paste giving ourselves 30mins to think.

We checked out some The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan gameplay and yes it is what we thought it would be. We are liking how much darker and serious this game is compared to Until Dawn. The setting is nice too. We saw leeches, skeletons, other beings, holes, traps etc and that’s a good start. The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan has been described as a supernatural horror which means pretty much anything can happen and we hope they get creative here. It’s a ghost ship after all. So we do want to see what else they bring into the ship. 

Overall The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan seems like it’s going to be a very good game. The graphics are a step up from Until Dawn and the sounds are also good from what we can see and hear. We will wait for more details though. The developers ‘Supermassive Games’ have so far done a good job. We truly hope the developers apply what we suggested above. Now The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan may have repercussions but even those don’t matter when there’s… the ‘Earth Walk!’