Man of Medan begins with four friends who have chartered a small boat for a vacation going diving in the South Pacific. However, things quickly go south (Pacific) when the group is attacked by pirates, and then brought to a ghost ship known as the Ourang Medan that allegedly houses “Manchurian Gold.” The group must contend with both the pirates and something far more sinister if they wish to escape the ship with their lives… (As a side note, “Ourang Medan” roughly translates to “Man of Medan,” so the title doesn’t refer to an actual person.)
Gameplay is fairly straightforward, consisting of simple exploration mechanics, dialogue choices, and QTEs. In exploration you can walk around, talking to people and examining points of interest. Spots you can examine are denoted by a white sparkle, so you do need to physically walk around the entire area but you never need to guess if something can actually be examined. Also, when you find an item, you typically need to press an extra button for your character to actually pick it up and look closely, which on one hand I feel is extra busywork but on the other I think does add a little bit of interactivity and immersion.
Some items you find are classified as “secrets,” and get added to a board in the pause screen with a bit of extra information, which helps fill in the background and give some additional hints. You can also find paintings that serve as the “premonitions” from Until Dawn, showing a brief clip of a possible future. Premonitions can have either a black border, which means it depicts a bad outcome, or a white border, which signifies a positive event. Sometimes they can be useless (seeing a character get killed while gripped by a monster does nothing—obviously if they’ve been caught they’re going to die, the question is how to prevent them from being caught), but they can also be legitimately helpful (if you see a character fight off an assailant with a knife, and then later need to decide which character should hold onto the knife you find, you’ve got your answer). It would be nice if premonitions were a bit more useful, but I still like them for building tension and providing grounds for speculation.
Dialogue choices are always between two different lines, or staying silent. They are timed, so you can’t just think about what to say forever. They include both a small blurb of dialogue as well as a descriptor of the tone or mood, which is helpful because there’s a huge difference between “Thank you (Grateful)” and “Thank you (Sarcastic).”
Finally, there are QTEs, which occur during cutscenes. There are three types: the traditional QTE where you need to push (or mash) a button in time, one where you need to align a crosshair with a target and press a button to fire, and finally a segment where you need to press a button in time with your character’s heartbeat to keep calm. (Pro-tip for the crosshair QTE: you can just mash the trigger button, and the QTE will succeed as soon as you hover over the target.) None are particularly difficult or complex, but nobody’s perfect. Mistakes happen and this is a horror movie, so they help build tension and hammer in the feeling of being one slip away from death.
As I said before, the game isn’t amazing, but I think there is a fair amount of care put into it, and the narrative horror game chassis that Supermassive has developed and presented here is fantastic. I think the greatest innovation in the plot structure is that death is a real possibility for the characters, but it’s much less frequent than it seems on the surface. Even if your character appears to be fleeing for their life in a chase sequence, it’s possible that there aren’t actually any results that kill them and they’re guaranteed to survive this scene, but you don’t know that—you need to approach each QTE as if your character’s life depends on it. On the player’s side the threat of death is always looming, constantly amping up the tension, when in reality the game is much more forgiving, ensuring the characters don’t just all fall over and cut the game short.
Even when there is risk of death, I think Supermassive is generally fair and purposeful. You will rarely (if ever) die from failing a QTE. However, you can easily die from failing multiple QTEs, or by making certain decisions, although the game will often provide warnings or hints for those choices. Additionally, in the previous paragraph I discussed how there are many scenes that appear lethal but aren’t, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t dangerous. Failing a nonlethal scenario can still have a negative repercussion that makes death more likely later on. (For instance, a character can sustain an injury that makes a later, lethal sequence more difficult.) In other words, while death is certainly on the menu, you don’t need to worry about everyone instantly dying after one mistake.
And even if characters do die, there’s no need to sweat it. This is a horror movie, after all! The game is designed to be resistant to character death, by having versions of each scene with multiple permutations of characters so that it can always proceed with the current cast, and there are even some minor story branches near the end depending on how things play out. If you lose too many people scenes can be cut entirely, but death never results in a “game over.” While Supermassive did an impressive job designing the narrative to take into account and reflect all the choices and deaths, they unfortunately couldn’t be perfect and all-encompassing. Specifically, it’s possible for the characters to learn the “truth” of what’s happening relatively early on, but they’ll seem to periodically forget it in later scenes (since those scenes were written to also work if the characters missed the early opportunity to discover the “truth”).
While on the subject, I found the “truth” a bit lacking. Once you know it, the game loses a lot of its oomph. It also feels like the game is lacking a conclusion. The events of the game don’t lead to anything—the group just spends a few hours on the ship and then they leave (or don’t). There is also no “true” or “best” ending, which makes me feel like I’m lacking closure, but maybe that’s just me. I understand that the dizzying nature of variations makes it difficult to plot an all-encompassing conclusion, but I can still be a little disappointed.
That being said, I felt they took advantage of the co-op structure in clever and fun ways. In each scene each player controls one character, but the character each player controls changes from scene to scene. So nobody is tied to a single character, and everyone gets a chance to rotate through the cast (to a certain extent—some characters will be controlled by one player more often than the other, which I think fosters a decent balance between caring about the group and certain individual members). Often your characters will get to explore together, but that just reinforces the sense of isolation when you’re forced to investigate alone.
Man of Medan has no in-game communication system, which I think is intentional. For instance, in one scene (and one of my favorite co-op moments) both players are being chased by a monster down a hallway and come to a fork, and each player needs to make a timed choice of whether to go left or right. It’s a simple situation, but there are so many considerations. Do I want to go left or right? Will my partner want to go left or right? Is it better to stick together or split up? Will my partner want to stick together or split up? Which path is better for me? Which path is better for my partner? Which path do I think my partner will take? Which path does my partner think I’ll take? These questions all need to be weighed in a few measly seconds, but it still boils down to a simple, binary choice: left or right. The decision-making here transcends the bounds of the game itself, since so much of it hinges on the specific person you’re playing with and how well you know them.
And it can all be lost by one player blurting out “Let’s go left!”
In the end this is just one choice of many, and, due to the way the game is designed, it’s likely not going to have a huge impact on the way the story ultimately plays out, but it’s still a moment that demonstrates to me that Supermassive was looking for places to add depth that’s not possible in a single-player experience. Of course, if there’s no communication then the game is nearly indistinguishable from a single-player game, but too much communication can ruin the intended experience. My friend and I struck a balance by agreeing to only talk when our characters were actually with each other, and we didn’t intrude or comment on each other’s decision-making, which I think worked. (We also sometimes hid information from each other, but because we thought it’d keep things more fun for the other, not for nefarious purposes. Like if I, as character A, discover a certain piece of information, and then there is dramatic tension over the fact that character B, who is being controlled by my friend, does not know this information, I wouldn’t tell my friend so that he could properly make decisions “in character B’s shoes.” And if that leads to tragedy, so be it, that’s how this game is.)
The game isn’t photorealistic, but high-quality enough that everything looks the way it’s supposed to. The character models are based on face scans and mo-cap, which is slightly uncanny but still provides a fair amount of emotion... although there are a few places where it falls through. When looking around, characters have the “confused John Travolta” face, which I think is hilarious. Also, each Dark Pictures Anthology game has one character who is modeled on and mo-capped by a high profile celebrity, and in later games the “guest star” character typically has a major role, while in Man of Medan that character can be immediately written out of the story, which is an amazing game design decision.
While the focus of this review has been on co-op, it is possible to play Man of Medan solo. When playing alone, the computer will automatically make choices for the other characters. Each character has a list of “traits” which are affected by the choices you make as that character. They didn’t seem to do anything in co-op, but my understanding is that the traits affect the choices the AI makes for the other characters in solo, so your choices still have repercussions beyond just the character you’re directly controlling at the time.
Additionally, there are two “versions” of the single-player story, known as the “Theatrical Cut” and “Curator’s Cut.” While the story is the same in both versions, the character you control in each scene is different. (When the characters are together you play out the same scene from a different point of view, but if the characters are separated you might play as a character in the other group and get a completely new scene.) So in a sense, single-player has more content to experience than co-op. To pull back the curtain a bit, the co-op campaign is composed of the Theatrical Cut and Curator’s Cut glued to each other, so in essence one player plays the Theatrical Cut at the same time the other player is playing the Curator’s Cut.
Man of Medan isn’t revolutionary, and there are certainly places it seems ambition exceeded resources. But the basic format Supermassive has developed for The Dark Pictures Anthology is solid, and backing it up with clever, even-handed game design and high-quality visuals delivers a satisfying experience. “Co-op narrative horror adventure” is a pretty narrow sub-genre, and as far as I know Supermassive is the only show in town, so if you’re interested in that genre it’s unfortunately a bit of a take-it-or-leave-it scenario, but fortunately Man of Medan is easy to recommend. It won’t be the best horror movie you’ve seen, but it’ll be a fun and memorable one.
No comments:
Post a Comment