Weak Storytelling Hampers Man of Medan | Features

Four years later, the same team, including Fessenden, has developed a series of short film/games under the banner “Dark Pictures,” and the first title, “Man of Medan” has been released for PS4, Xbox One, and Windows. Sadly, it’s nowhere near as thrilling as “Until Dawn,” hampered by bland storytelling and repetitive action. There’s reason to hope this series could produce another great adventure, but this is a disappointment, a game that I kept wanting to fulfill its potential but that gets as lost as its characters.

“Man of Medan” is a ghost ship story inspired by the real mystery of the SS Ourang Medan, an urban legend of a sailing vessel that disappeared in the mid to late ‘40s somewhere near the Dutch East Indies. Basically, a group of adventurous tourists finds their way to the Ourang Medan (which roughly translates to “Man of Medan”), allowing the developers to play with ghost ship tropes like creaky doors and bodies falling out of lockers. Four people—two brothers, a girlfriend, and the girlfriend’s brother—charter a ship to investigate an underwater crash site of a plane. The bulk of the game takes place after the quintet is kidnapped and find themselves aboard a massive ship filled with bodies, mysteries, and ghosts.

The gameplay of “Man of Medan” alternates between conversation choices and what are called QTEs (or QuickTime Events), which require you to hit the right button or move the controller in the right direction to survive an encounter. So you basically do three things—investigate your surroundings, make conversation choices that impact relationships between the characters, and encounter action-heavy moments in which you try to keep these poor souls alive. For the record, I did the latter all the way until the final encounter when I lost one, although I suppose it made the entire narrative feel like it had a bit higher stakes than it otherwise would have, and I lost way more than one hapless idiot in my “Until Dawn” playthrough.