The Dark Pictures: Man Of Medan
Supermassive’s dark anthology series suggests a new dawn
PC, PS4, Xbox One
Not all horror stories involve stupid college students, marauding spirits and fountains of gore. Some horror stories are real. Okay, ‘horror’ might be too dramatic a word, but there’s no denying that Supermassive Games has had a rough old time of things lately. The success of choice-based schlock-horror drama Until Dawn thrust the studio firmly into the limelight back in 2015; its activity since then suggests it wasn’t entirely prepared for it. Moving to a multiproject model and continued prioritisation of high-fidelity visuals above all has proved quietly disastrous for Supermassive, with tightly squeezed teams and shorter development cycles producing some experimental but poor-quality work.
It’s a relief, then, to see the developer return to what it knows best in Man Of Medan. Its B-movie slasher shtick is familiar, the intentional cheesiness legitimising some groanworthy elements in a way that Hidden Agenda’s po-faced crime drama couldn’t. A group of mannequinesque twentysomethings in search of a good time on the high seas run into a pirate gang and, shortly afterwards, a haunted ship: shenanigans ensue. We enjoy rolling our eyes at ridiculous jump scares and chuckling at the heavy-handed way in which characters are introduced, with traits like “excited” and “reckless” floating in front of their faces that the designers clearly hope will influence your decision-making and have you subverting horror tropes and stereotypes. It’s clear the studio is focusing strongly on what players liked about Until Dawn.
Indeed, Supermassive’s latest mechanical experiment proves it. The Dark Pictures games feature both local and online multiplayer modes. Movie Night prompts you to pass the controller between up to five players between scenes. “Seeing people passing around the pad
with Until Dawn, playing it multiple times – we hadn’t intended it, it emerged from the players,” producer Dom Ireland tells us. “Seeing that on Twitch and other platforms inspired us to actually make it real.”
It’s the twoplayer online Shared Story mode that took the most planning and is the star attraction, divvying up characters in scenes between players – and even having them play different scenes simultaneously.
It’s clear the studio is focusing strongly on what players liked about Until Dawn
We take Alex and Julia on a wreck dive while our demo partner stays on the boat, playing through a whole other set of choices that will affect events further down the line.
Supermassive started building the first demo for The Dark Pictures – from scratch – at the end of 2015 “just to see if we could even do this”, authoring the entire game via a system of mapped flowcharts that it
insists is in a different league of complexity than the likes of Detroit: Become Human, even changing a character’s delivery and tone for particular lines as relationships fluctuate according to the choices players make. “We’re interested to see how Redditors map it out, because it’s very difficult for us to do it,” senior producer Andy Nuttall says.
There are signs of trouble in our demo, however. When our ship’s boarded by pirates, we’re unaware of why it’s happening, which feels unsatisfying. There’s no voice chat in The Dark Pictures, so talking to our partner in person after the demo ends reveals they’d antagonised them while we were on our dive (we also discover their scene was cleverly and imperceptibly padded out with extra dialogue while we struggled to make sense of the wreck’s level furniture). There’s a worry, then, that this could be complexity for the sake of it instead of something that augments the story, and that it might lead to the sort of practical issues such as plot holes or fundamental mechanical flaws from which Hidden Agenda suffered terribly. But the move back to triedand-tested schlock-horror for the first Dark Pictures game feels like Supermassive trying to restore confidence in a playerbase that is, surely, wary of the studio’s next gimmick.
“The only way to grow is to experiment,” Nuttall says, “and you just have to take something you think is going to work, put it out there and hope other people will think the same way. With Dark Pictures, the core of it is singleplayer – but singleplayer and multiplayer were both developed together as a kind of symbiotic thing, so we don’t really see multiplayer as a risk.” We hope he’s right: this time around, we’d like to see Supermassive make it out alive.