The controls were uncomfortable, the implied multiplayer system is a joke and the story itself was boring. Tracing over a good game does not guarantee similar results.

The Dark Pictures Anthology is a series of stand-alone, branching cinematic horror games that can also be played online with a friend. In Man of Medan, five friends set sail on a holiday diving trip that soon changes into something much more sinister.

Five friends set out on a South Pacific diving trip, are hijacked by modern pirates, and stranded on a derelict WWII freighter inspired by the SS Ourang Medan legend. Strange sightings and growing paranoia drive a branching story where anyone can live or die.

The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan is an interactive drama survival horror game with strong paranormal elements, played from a third-person perspective with fixed camera angles. Movement uses tank-style controls, making navigation feel heavy. You control five different characters, solo or in multiplayer, and between chapters encounter the Curator, a mysterious figure who offers cryptic commentary and optional hints. The game encourages multiple playthroughs, as choices affect character outcomes, branching scenarios, and endings.

Choices & Repercussions
The game features five playable protagonists and a branching narrative shaped by player choices. Many decisions can dramatically alter the plot, and any protagonist can die permanently, allowing for all to survive or some—or all—to perish. Each character has many possible deaths.

You choose based on a character’s ‘head’ or ‘heart,’ or can opt to do nothing. Choices occur during interactions or situations, with consequences that may be immediate or emerge later in the story.

Traits and Relationships
Choices also shape characters’ traits and relationships. Traits can change, appear, or vanish based on your decisions, impacting dialogue and cutscenes. Example: a character who begins as a coward can become courageous through consistently brave choices, influencing both their actions and how others see them.

Keep Calm
Keep Calm segments occur when a character needs to stay hidden. You must press the right button in rhythm with on-screen heartbeats—mistiming it alerts enemies. Failure can lead to anything from losing an item to a character’s death. Difficulty affects the speed, button count, and timing, but the number of segments is always fixed.

QTEs
Action relies mostly on QTEs—on-screen prompts during tense moments where mistiming can lead to injury, capture, or death. Some sequences also use button-mashing to push objects, escape holds, or fight back. These mechanics keep encounters tense and high-stakes.

Co-op
Following the success of Until Dawn’s streaming and co-op play, Supermassive added two multiplayer modes: Shared Story, where two players play online together, and Movie Night, where up to five players pass the controller and control different characters.

The game is set in the South Pacific near French Polynesia. You start aboard the Duke of Milan, a small boat owned by Fliss, with little to do besides diving to a sunken plane wreck—until pirates arrive, rob the group, and drag them onto the ghost ship Medan in search of gold. Most of the game takes place on the Medan, which is very linear.

While exploring, players can find collectibles that expand the story and reveal what happened in the environment before their arrival. One type is Pictures (Dark Pictures), artworks that reveal possible future events when viewed by a character. There are 13 in total: six white, six black, and one gold. Black frames show how a character dies or scenes where they can die, white frames show dangerous situations you should avoid, good choices, or the outcome of making good choices, and the gold frame teases the next game.

Man of Medan is very dark, using lighting—flickering bulbs, shifting shadows—to create a creepy atmosphere. Classic jump scares abound: loud noises, lunging apparitions, or environmental bursts, often punctuated by musical stings. A core theme is not trusting your eyes—characters and players encounter grotesque figures that may be hallucinations. In Shared Story, two players can see different versions of the same scene, adding to the tension. The fear of losing characters is a scare in itself, as deaths can happen abruptly from missed QTEs or poor choices, creating sudden, permanent loss.

The graphics aren’t the best, but they’re decent—just good enough to carry the atmosphere. Facial expressions can feel a little stiff at times, which weakens the immersion.

The game begins in sunny, open waters aboard the Duke of Milan, with a relaxing dive to a sunken plane providing one of the most visually striking moments. Once on the Medan, the mood shifts to claustrophobic horror: decayed corridors, peeling paint, rust, flooded compartments, and flickering lights create an oppressive, uncanny atmosphere, filled with shadows, fog, rotting corpses, and sudden apparitions.

The abandoned freighter creaks constantly: metal groans, dripping water, rattling chains, echoing footsteps.

“Heartbeat” sequences are tied to sound — the muffled boom of your pulse in sync with button prompts. Missing the rhythm often comes with a sharp audio sting to amplify panic.

The voice acting is solid overall—convincing enough to carry the story, though there are a few weaker deliveries, and some of the dialogue comes off weird and cheesy.

The tank controls feel awkward and clunky, and the fixed camera angles often make navigation more frustrating than tense. That said, since movement isn’t a big focus of the gameplay, this ends up being more of a minor annoyance than a major flaw.

Most of the scares rely on cheap jump scares, often involving objects or situations that pose no real threat. As a result, many moments feel predictable and fail to deliver genuine fear.

Backtracking isn’t possible: once a cutscene triggers, the game auto-saves, and reloading resumes from that point. Forks in the path can make exploration tricky. If you take the ‘correct’ route first, you’ll miss valuable collectibles in the other direction. The only way to revisit areas is to replay an entire chapter. While this design prevents players from easily undoing character deaths, it makes exploration feel restrictive.

The story is dull, and the writing is inconsistent. For instance, Conrad throws his own money into the water to annoy the pirates—illogical, even if the intention is clear. Similarly, Alex warns Conrad not to show their untied hands, only to bang on a door himself, exposing them without consequence. Moments like this break immersion. The characters are flat and unremarkable, making it hard to care about their fates.

The dangerous fog is poorly explained—how long do hallucinations last, and is there a cure? The hallucinations themselves are inconsistent, and revealing their source too early diminishes mystery and fear. They’re also underused: often we see a character reacting without ever seeing what they experience, which limits the impact until the game’s final moments.

The pacing is uneven, with the final sections feeling rushed. The ending is abrupt, just as the story starts to get interesting, leaving the conclusion unsatisfying.

I played Until Dawn in 2015 and was blown away—it’s a 10/10 for me. Man of Medan inevitably disappointed, as its actors, characters, story, horror, and atmosphere don’t match that standard. Overall, it’s a mediocre experience at best—dull environments, weak scares, slow pacing, and an unsatisfying ending keep it from standing out. That said, it’s more fun in co-op and works well for its short, roughly four-hour length. It’s an okay experience—worth a playthrough if you have not played any of the other games from Supermassive. After you can check out character deaths and alternate outcomes on YouTube.

This one was my least favorite but we've definitely gotten worse since and a lot of the performances in this have become pretty meme-able in returning to them.

+ Interactive horror movie with multiple endings
+ Inaction is an action
+ Good graphics (for year 2019)
- Not an open-world game
- Short game: it takes ~4 hours to get to an ending

I´d say 5/10, story was kinda short and weird and we encountered some random bugs but overall it was decent, wont probably approve but feel free to test :)