spindizzy | Yes we finished Man of Medan a thousand years ago, let's not mention that (Reply)

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.

Me, waking up alone in the bunk room: Ah yes, time for crime!
Also me: *IMMEDIATELY jumpscared by a corpse falling out of a locker*

Seriously no one in this game has a proper emotional reaction to anything. Like, is it supposed to be "I am so jaded by the horrors of war that finding the dead body of someone I know doesn't phase me"? If that's the case, what's going on with the Until Dawn-style "This jumpscare SHOULD provoke a reaction from the characters, and yet"? Is it supposed to be that they have very muted external reactions because it's possible for you to change their personality?
- splend: "That story was so scary! Especially when you turned your face into a screaming corpse mask!"

There are very few lines to equal "Understand the palm of my hand, bitch," but "There are sharks now? COME AT ME SHARK!" is close!

Maybe I shouldn't judge Alex and Julia more harshly than everyone else (except Conrad), but also who goes "Oh boy, I want to propose in front of three corpses! Unmarked war graves are soooooooooo romantic!" And then the whole "Okay, the explosion was just Conrad being a muppet, LET'S FOCUS ON ME AGAIN!" And then "Based on literally nothing but both of them owning boats and speaking French: FLISS IS IN ON IT WITH THE KIDNAPPERS!"

Deadpool has ruined the question of where people are hiding wedding rings.

I am very bored of the "romantic" relationships in this game. Fliss and Conrad is Sure An Option (which has an achievement and I don't support it!), and Alex and Julia clearly don't know each other well enough to be getting married if he doesn't know she'd like to keep her own damn name. Honestly I was expecting the game to go for Brad and Fliss as an end-game pairing because they actually have respectful conversations unlike every other arrangement of characters but what do I know.

I honestly just support Fliss being like "Fucking rich people" and never seeing any of these people again.

What were the fishermen even doing buzzing the Duke of Milan anyway? I know why they were there from a narrative perspective, I know why they come back to ruin Conrad's day, but not why in story they're out there in the first place.

Unsurprisingly, I found Conrad a lot more interesting once he was bleeding and semi-competent.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand then he ruined it by getting Fliss caught. Dammit Conrad.

Fun with environmental storytelling: Sam was very excited when we found a newspaper article talking about a crew of archaeologists who disappeared, because yes! He knew what game that was a reference to!

Me: *walks into an operating theatre* That's a room full of nightmares. Nope!

(I have so many questions about the timeline – the operating room specifically. The patient and the surgeon both having neurotoxin-induced heart attacks I get, but in that case I'd expect the electrocardiogram to be still in the machine, rather than on a clipboard, which suggests that the patient died way before the surgeon, which means that either they got a dose of it before they were knocked out, or the breathing mask for the anaesthetic does nothing, or...)

Tell you what, the writing staff may never have spoken to actual humans, but they are great at setting up tension. The seeds of everyone's hallucinations are right there on the initial walk through the ship, it's really cool. And they start so fast – Conrad starts hallucinating the sailor girl pretty much at the other end of the corridor where he first saw her picture! And it's pretty much a blink and you miss it thing; she's standing in a corner that I didn't notice until I was going through the door, and obviously she was gone when I got back.
- The jumpscares are very cheap, but some of them worked so I GUESS they cancel out.
- I did get to the point where I was identifying whether someone was a hallucination or not by whether they were wearing shoes. Seriously, pretty sure if the bends, the neurotoxins, and the kidnappers don't get these characters, tetanus will.
- I'm so mad that you don't get Brad's looping hallucination on every route, because it's so creepy and I love it. He goes through a door, trying to catch Fliss before she walks around a corner – and instead of her he finds a skeletal soldier with a bullet in his chest. Or he finds Fliss, but there's something off about how she looks. Or that soldier didn't have skin last time —
- But the man Fliss sees in the ballroom is from a poster near where they were held, sailor girl is a pin-up on a wall, Alex is jumpscared by rats, Brad's understanding of history and sense of responsibility for this whole trip manifests as Alex's death... It makes sense! I liked that!
- I'm assuming that Julia's hallucinations were a reaction to being woken up in the middle of the night by shadowy figures, closely followed by "The existential horror of only discovering what a man is really like once you've married him" buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut I will also accept an argument that it's just her being racist. Truly, who could say whether or not the game devs thought through the implications of "tiny blonde woman being menaced by violent men of colour" in US culture.
- Game devs, somewhere: "It's only because all of our villains are —"
  Me: Do you understand why that doesn't make it better?
- (Maybe I'm being unfair to them and that is exactly the point they were making? Maybe I'm being unfair in not expecting subtlety or cultural sensitivity from Supermassive Games.)
- That said, some of the scenes where one person is hallucinating and the other isn't made me laugh – there's one bit where Alex pokes a corpse and Julia's just there going "Why did you touch it?!" and honestly, we asked ourselves that as we did it.

How I knew splend and I had probably missed something in Little Hope: we did not discover that the blood coffin was in fact a box of leaking neurotoxins on our first playthrough! The only reason we ever found out about the ~Manchurian Gold~ was lucking into the one piece of paper in a safe that explains that. We are super good at this game.

Finding out what on the ship was real and what was a hallucination was fun, though? Especially the room with the coffins because I was like "Cool, everything here is a hallucination, including the mutated corpses and the unusually sized coffins," and the game's like "That's not what I said at all."

I liked the haunted ship having a mundane explanation a lot more before we played Little Hope, not gonna lie. The set-up of all of the intense haunting and loops not being real, while also having the very real and very human villains caught in it? Interesting! Cool! Bit weird that people, say, didn't hear Brad screaming at a jumpscare in the next room, and didn't find any of the gas masks, but cool. After we played Little Hope, I'm feeling a lot more judgemental.

Not gonna lie though, when I found out that it was a neurotoxin, it never actually occurred to me that it wasn't being deliberately tested on the crew. Like, legit asking Sam "Why would you test that on one of your own ships?! Does that make it less of a war crime?"

I cannot express to you how much I hate the stay calm minigame. I haaaaaaaaaaaaaate it. Do not ask me how many times I had to retry the one to run off with the diving gear, because I will growl and gnash my teeth and curse Olson and the game devs to the xth generation. I just wanted to save Junior, okay! Dude didn't want to be here either, but the combination of QTEs and stay calm sections to save him were a PAIN IN THE ARSE. D<

splend: They wouldn't have game-ending consequences hinging on one quick time event, surely.
Me: *fucks up the QTE to get the distributor cap off Olson's body*
splend: I was wrong!

The first ending we got was sending Conrad off to get the coastguard, so it was fine that we fucked up the QTE! The second one, I think I just went back and unfucked the QTE to see what would've happened, and the answer is that the characters leave, but the coastguard bringing Conrad to the rescue don't get that memo, so Conrad goes tearing around the ship looking for everyone and it ends BADLY.

I think I was expecting the Curator's Cut to change the story more than it did. The main difference seems to be that you can FORCE the characters to be decent people! But the big differences don't seem to be between cuts as much as it does between whether your climactic confrontation is with Olson or Junior, which is strange to me. I get the point that it's supposed to be different POV, not a whole different storyline, just seems odd.

Junior and Danny just really want to Not Be Here, and while there is an option to get Junior out? Danny is fucked in literally every route. RIP Danny. Nothing good happens to you.

If you find out the name of the ship and then don't escape another way, the military show up and murder you. I'm not joking; you call in for a rescue, they promise one is on the way, and then they just open fire on you. What the hell! Now I want to know what happens if you told the military that you're on the Ourang Medan and then escape – I'm pretty sure that the closest I got to an ending like that was Danny dying alone in the hold.

(I did not google Ourang Medan when we first unlocked that secret, but HUH. The game devs took their set-dressing from an actual 1940s ghost story, that's really cool. ... Also it's a good thing I didn't google it because that would basically have given me the whole plot right there.)

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?