Yes we finished Man of Medan a thousand years ago, let's not mention that

splend and I are Back On Our Bullshit! By which I mean, The Dark Pictures Anthology was on sale over Christmas so my gift to me us was buying us a game of dubious quality to play together! I am a great friend who makes great choices. Anyway, we finished Man of Medan! Sam played it before and thus knew some of what's going on; I knew that we'd be playing it at some point so I know literally nothing beyond "Maybe there's three games? And spooky shit happens?"

General things I like: the anthology is specifically set up for people to do what we're doing! You can assign characters to a player, and it prompts you to pass the controller to one another as you go. Honestly, this is a more formalised way of doing exactly what we did for Detroit Become Human and Until Dawn, just with fewer opportunities for us to go "No, no, I insist," while handing over the controller when there's danger of an absolutely awful level coming up. I guess this means that Supermassive Games have correctly judged their target audience? I'm still not sure that the writing team have ever encountered actual humans in their lives, like, but can't have everything. And anthology horror with linking characters is my jam, so obviously I'm here for it – the curator is very satisfying to watch, even though his entire job is going "Well, that went badly didn't it?" I also liked that inaction was not only an option, but sometimes the correct one! It pleased me and my indecisive brain.

As for the rest: well.

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I think my biggest issue with Man of Medan is that its premise is you replay it a few times to try new things and get different results, but it doesn't have any of the tools that would make it enjoyable to do that. Like, Detroit Become Human had the flowchart of doom, right? You could see where you had a chance to do something differently, how many repercussions there were, and jump around in the story to experiment with them. Or if you've ever sat down with a visual novel, most of them have an option to either skip until you hit a decision, or skip until you hit text that you haven't seen before. The Dark Picture Anthology has... A somewhat ropey scene selector that only lets you change your starting point, not any of your follow-up points. (And that only works for the mode that you've finished, so the common route wears out its welcome very quickly.)

I get why it doesn't want you to be able to skip! You lose the tension of potential QTEs at any moment if you can skip from one to the next, and it kinda undermines the studio's ~all decisions ripple outwards~ oeuvre if you can pick and choose where you want to see that effect from. But my argument is that if a game is going to expect me to play it three or four times to get all of the endings/secrets/whatevers, it either needs to be short, really easy to jump around, or compelling enough to keep digging into. For me, Man of Medan doesn't fit that.

The mystery and hunting for clues parts were fun! While I was playing it: very compelling, definitely wanted to figure out what was going on. It leans into the bad horror tropes very well – good for being what it was advertised as and kinda what I wanted, kinda suffers from the curse of "aping a bad thing still means that your thing is bad."

... I just never want to hear Brad telling his spooky story again, okay?