Man of Medan review: A ghost ship on a course to nowhere
This is a cinematic horror game where your choices matter - but it's not a very good one.
Man of Medan is developed by Supermassive Games.
Until Dawn was Supermassive Games’ most well-received attempt at making a choice-based cinematic horror game, and for good reasons. With Man of Medan, Supermassive plans to launch a whole new slate of horror games like Until Dawn, with it being the first of the anthology.
It’s just a shame that Man of Medan is a massive step down in every single way from the developer - from irritating quicktime events and bad voice acting and animation, to poor writing. Everything in this game is subpar at best, with its only redeeming factor being its multiplayer modes. Let’s get into it.
For a horror game, there’s very little horror here
No, the rest of the game isn't as scary as this picture.
Man of Medan centres on four dumb thrillseekers - brothers Alex and Brad, and siblings Julia and Conrad. Accompanied by their boat captain, Fliss, they head out for some deep sea diving to investigate a wreck - against Fliss’ wishes. Things spiral out of control from there, and the group find themselves on a haunted ghost ship.
First of all, if you watched a trailer or two, you’d think this was just a game about some teenagers encountering spooky stuff in a ghost ship. That would've been a much better game than the one we got, which only put these characters on the ghost ship two hours in.
These are your not-so-lovable characters.
Just for comparison, this is a four hour game. That means you only start seeing ghosts and actually horrific things in this supposed horror game almost halfway into the entire game. Before that, you just hang out on a boat and fight off some pirates - an extremely dull affair that sounds a lot more exciting than it actually is.
I’d like to say that spending the first two hours waiting around for the ghost ship to make an appearance is worth it - but it’s not. Very little in this game is actually scary. I’m a scaredy cat - I scream when others laugh, but nothing scared me here. The scariest this game gets is when it throws jumpscares at you every five minutes, and that’s a novelty that wears thin almost immediately.
Who wrote this?
This game has small flashes of brilliance here and there - but it's never quite enough to save it.
The writing in this game is so, so bad. When the story isn’t chugging along dully, the characters are constantly spouting cliches and really badly written dialogue. Man of Medan relies on you making choices to either spare characters from certain death, or kill them off halfway through the story. The whole game hinges on you caring enough about these characters to keep them alive or get sad when they die but it fails at that. All of them are extremely annoying and you really won’t mind if any of them get killed, which completely sucks out any tension the game has to offer.
The Curator is voiced to perfection by Pip Torrens - who also acted as Herr Starr in AMC's Preacher series.
I will say that the Curator - a character who witnesses you, the player, make all these decisions and comments on them throughout the game - is written pretty perfectly. He’s the right mix of suspicious and friendly, and instantly makes the game interesting again whenever he appears. However, he’s probably only in the game for under 15 minutes in total, so even he couldn't stay long enough to save the game.
How do you play this game?
The ghost ship had so much potential for some creepy atmospheric moments - but it was all squandered.
At the very least, Man of Medan is accessible. You basically play through a long movie, with fixed camera angles, dialogue choices and quicktime events where you have to button mash your way through an action scene or choose where to go. Other than that, you can just walk around areas and see what collectibles and secrets there are to find, of which there are many.
The visuals in this game are pretty okay by today’s standards. Environments and monsters are pretty atmospheric and scary in their own right, but nothing quite as impressive as other games like Detroit Become Human of this game genre. Facial animation in particular is absolutely horrendous - every character looks like they’re talking in Japanese but dubbed over in English. Their lips just don't sync.
How did this face make it into the game's release?! No one cries like that!
This isn’t helped by the fact that they are astonishingly poorly acted. Characters don’t sound like they actually mean what they say, and the writing only adds to this sense of fakeness. You can’t take them seriously. They don’t act or talk like real people - even what they say doesn’t sound quite right.
I should also mention that Man of Medan has two multiplayer modes: ‘Shared Story’, where players can play through the game together online, or ‘Movie Night’, where up to 5 players can play through the story by passing the controller around throughout the game. I played Movie Night with my brother and it is by far the best way to play this game - we got some good laughs out of it, at least.
Conclusion
Man of Medan is a journey you'll desperately want to end.
I’ve never quite seen a game like Man of Medan - a game that tries to emulate its spiritual predecessor, Until Dawn, but fails to capture its essence. Until Dawn had an interesting story with plenty of twists, characters with meaningful development, good actors and great visuals.
Man of Medan has none of these elements. It fails at being a successor to Until Dawn, and it fails at being a good horror game to boot. I understand that Supermassive Games no longer have Sony’s budget to work with (their games are now for all platforms) and they want to continue pursuing their horror roots. Unfortunately, this game just isn’t a promising start to the Dark Pictures Anthology. That ghost ship has sailed.
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