Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan

Yesterday was Easter and what better way to celebrate the regeneration of Jesus H. Christ than to play a scary ghost story, a favorite passtime of his according to songs sung around his birthday. We had a lovely brunch at our friend’s house. There was Pizza Rustica and green bean casserole and deviled eggs and a cocktail made out of peeps, amongst other things. It was quite lovely, all around. And since our host is a burgeoning fan of all things horror, we decided to bring over a Supermassive Games horror thriller, Man of Medan! Catrena and I played this a few years ago and never went back to it - our original run ended in absolute disaster all around and for whatever reason we never tried a re-do. A perfect scenario for 3 people!

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of these games and as we play more and more I’m starting to recognize what makes them better or more successful. Man of Medan starts out strong with a couple of GIs getting drunk on shore leave, but the original plot leaned a bit too heavy on the red herring of Chinese Mysticism. It’s an overused trope that sits too close to sinophobic themes, even though this seemed to be more innocent than that. There was another trope present that we paused the game to talk about - our friend had listened to a podcast about overused horror tropes and this was on top of that list so she was excited to discuss. An again female body being used a discomfort and horrific jump scare. In Man of Medan, you are being stalked by an attractive pin-up model only for her to finally catch up to you and get old! Oh no she’s old! She’s got sagging breasts and a soggy butt! The terrors of aging! This is something that’s been used forever but 2017’s It Follows sticks out as a big example of this, as they often used old or “unconventionally attractive” women to cause tension in the chase scenes. In Medan there were plenty of en who were zombie-fied or mummified and they were not turned into “old men”, just regular men that became emaciated, but with this pin-up girl, she was also heavily aged up. This isn’t an indictment of the game, just something to keep in mind.

Another thing about these games, especially in a group setting, is they rely heavily on environmental storytelling which almost universally equates to “read a bunch of notes you find scattered around.” It’s fine, better than finding audiologs, my god, but when you want to run around and get scared, having to read a bunch of short stories in between that may or may not explain anything isn’t always that engaging.

I’m not going to go into all the details - I wasn’t taking notes or screenshots - but we had a great time over the course of the afternoon. We were able to divvy up the characters between us and play “pass-the-controller” style. It also gave us plenty of opportunities to pause and chat and just hang out. As the night set in we were getting into the really spooky parts and all of the jump scares were amped up. In the end, we did end up killing two of our characters - Fliss & Conrad. Catrena maintains that she DID NOT miss the last QTE that would have let Conrad climb to freedom, but did miss the one that led to the destruction of the engine part that would let us sail to freedom.