Man of Medan

 

The Dark Pictures Anthology starts with Man of Medan, a game with some good ideas up its sleeve that are ultimately wasted on a very problematic story, which fails to develop interesting characters and build an intense horror atmosphere – especially during repeated playthroughs.

The story follows Alex, a young man who has prepared a diving expedition with his girlfriend, Julia, and brother, Brad, after coming across a mysterious paper with some coordinates talking of a “Manchurian Gold.” However, on their way there, they’re boarded by pirates, who take over the expedition and lead them to the coordinates only to find… a ghost ship.

Man of Medan’s prologue is already a shaky start. We’re several years before the fateful diving expedition, accompanying two soldiers at the end of World War II. There’s a bit of gratuitous Orientalism at play here, connecting the Orient with the supernatural, with a Chinese soothsayer predicting that their future is a horrible one: only blood, death, and doom seemingly await them. And this Chinese soothsayer was really onto something, because soon after boarding their ship, they get caught in a storm and start to see dead people everywhere.

The problem is that the whole event feels more silly than terrifying: when lightning strikes a box marked with a skull, making a green mist come out while a menacing score plays, we feel like we’re watching a Scooby-Doo episode – the horror elements are too on the nose, too artificial. To make matters worse, the soldiers on the ship don’t act realistically either, with one of them talking about a corpse he just found inside a locker as if it were just a bizarre, curious thing, instead of a “holy shit, what’s going on, are we under attack” thing. When his friend answers, “Something’s wrong. Let’s get out of here,” the delivery is equally artificial, lacking any sense of panic and urgency, so when the camera closes on the guy’s face and even shakes to impart tension, the effect ends up being more comical than tense.

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, well, cringe-worthy. The first act tries to show their personality and build them as characters – shallow characters, of course, but still characters, at least. Julia is reckless and impulsive, Brad is timid and insecure, while Conrad, Julia’s brother, 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 we 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.

First, the goal of putting us in the shoes of a character in a horror story to see if we make the bad decisions so typical of the genre is not achieved if there’s a blatant disconnect between us and our character. Early on, for example, we can choose to make someone come back to the surface without decompressing. But the player who chooses this option is either testing the game – curious about the result – or 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 we’re purposely not thinking as the character or not on the same page as them altogether.

To remedy this issue, we’re indeed warned of the danger of not decompressing, but if we didn’t know about that beforehand, we’ve just got seconds to process this new information, while our character had to study the subject and should know about the dangers in great, vivid detail. Again, the game tries to remedy the issue by making the character believe that someone may be in danger on the surface, but would that be enough for him to kill himself? In sum, these attempts to make the scene work function more like bandages on a narrative wound than anything else: they try to make it better, but never disguise it.

But the narrative problems of Man of Medan don’t stop here. Some scenes simply don’t make sense: when the pirates take over their ship, for example, they tie everyone up and lock them inside a room. Alex manages to free himself and, before the pirates come back, he warns his friends, “Don’t let them see your hands,” so they can hit them by surprise. This would have been a good plan in normal circumstances… if he had just banged furiously on the door with his very free hands – in front of one of the pirates, no less. Maybe you’re still laughing hard at Men of Medan, then, but your mileage may vary.

Maybe you’re just disappointed that there are also some inconsistencies with characterization, as well. Early on, for example, the captain they hired to help them, a woman named Fliss, scolds Alex and his girlfriend for picking stuff from a wreck because each object would supposedly have some kind of “energy” attached to it. This shows she’s deeply superstitious, but later on, when one of the pirates defends that the ghost of the people who die on a ship stays on the ship, she’s suddenly skeptical of the whole thing. Energy that attaches itself to objects forever and can affect your life is okay, but ghosts? Those things that attach themselves to people or a location and can affect your life? That’s crossing a line.

The whole pirate thing also harms the pacing at first. It delays the arrival on the ghost ship – the game’s main attraction – while offering nothing in return. Man of Medan is a short game – which should, in theory, 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 any tension regarding certain elements. 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, after all, presenting lots of elements that seem important at first glance, but are actually there just to mislead us, to make it difficult for us to catch what’s going on too quickly. The nature of the gameplay – with our 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 of the scene will treat the event as a crucial one. However, since there are outcomes where they don’t play a part, it’s possible we’ll find many seemingly important objects that… will never be seen again.

In other words, most things in the game’s structure are either designed to deceive us or may end up being discarded because of our decisions. Consequently, during repeated playthroughs, the red herrings don’t work anymore – since we already see them for what they are – and there’s nothing left to make up for their absence. The story will now lack urgency and mystery, leaving us with just some flat, boring characters and quick time events.

The story could have doubled down on the psychological aspect of its horror scenes to make up for that, but they’re left underdeveloped. There’s a moment in which Julia sees Alex’s face on the creatures coming to attack her, but the conclusion that she fears him – that there may be something violent in their relationship – is immediately discarded soon after the event. Man of Medan should have focused and explored more moments like this, giving them heft and meaning, to make replaying it more interesting, instead of moments like “a rat suddenly JUMPS AT YOU”.

But this is a game that 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. And we don’t have to confront the dead either during normal gameplay, so we feel safe when it’s time to explore the ship: since danger only exists during cutscenes, tension is removed from normal exploration.

The game makes great use of its fixed camera angles, however. It usually frames the action from an unusual place, like positioning the camera beneath a staircase – the stairs obscuring some of the scene – or at the end of a long corridor, to make us 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 us anxious, expecting it to suddenly move.

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

We can also find some portraits that unlock a brief video – a premonition – of a possible future event. These would have been 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 them, which is even worse. With no context for their existence, these premonitions can pull us out of the story as soon as we unlock them, reminding us that we’re playing a silly video game.

Finally, we’ve also got some small interludes with a mysterious man called the Curator, where he speaks to us directly, judging our performance and saying things like “Congratulations, everyone is still alive.” He also gives us hints about the big twist, even if we outright ask him not to (dude, come on, we said no, control yourself.) The character’s purpose here – besides giving away the ending, that is – is to serve as a bridge between this game and the next ones in the anthology.

Man of Medan gets more things wrong than right, then. 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 just hope the next games in The Dark Pictures Anthology make better use of the systems presented here.

August 23, 2025.

Review originally published on June 30, 2021.