Get ready for your watery grave. Bandai Namco Games said that The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan will debut on August 30 on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and the PC via Steam.
Man of Medan comes from Supermassive Games, the maker of Until Dawn, which was my favorite game of 2015. The question is whether that style of gameplay, with awesome graphics fidelity at the cost of high latency, still holds sway with gamers.
I played the demo at PAX East, the big fan show in Boston a couple of months ago. Man of Medan has super-realistic computer-generated human characters. They move slowly and the latency is high, but it feels like you are walking around in a movie.
Man of Medan is a horror story about a crew of tourists that visits an abandoned freighter on the ocean. Fans can preorder the Curator’s Cut of Man of Medan today. The Curator’s Cut opens up a myriad of different options and an alternative path through the game, experienced from an entirely new perspective. The Curator’s Cut will reveal its secrets once the game has been completed once.
I played as a character walking down the dark corridors of a derelict cargo ship. She gets spooked by a fellow shipmate and walks by a picture that seems out of place. The picture gives her a clue, and it saves her life later on. In the gameplay, you have to mash buttons as Quicktime-style events flash on the screen and require you to make a decision quickly. The good part of this is that your decisions matter. The bad part is you have to take random risks, like choosing whether to go left or right.
The Dark Pictures Anthology will feature a number of short independent games that will be released over time.