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PC|ONE|PS4 The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan

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PC|ONE|PS4 The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan

Unread postby earthboundtrev » 21 Aug 2018 14:05

Supermassive Games Announces Horror Series The Dark Pictures Anthology - Gamescom 2018
https://www.ign.com/articles/2018/08/21 ... escom-2018

Lucy O'Brien wrote:Supermassive Games announced a new horror series, The Dark Pictures Anthology, at Gamescom's opening ceremony today.

Supermassive CEO Pete Samuels announced that the "intense standalone horror games" are being published by Bandai Namco. Like Supermassive's horror hit Until Dawn, "your decisions, your reactions to horror thrown at you, will determine who will and who won’t survive’.

Each game in the anthology will feature a new cast of characters, kicking off with The Man of Medan, due for release sometime in 2019. The Man of Medan appears to be about a group of divers who discover horrors buried in a plane wreck at the bottom of the ocean - check out the trailer below.

Unlike Until Dawn, which was a PS4 exclusive, The Dark Pictures Anthology is being developed for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.


Announcement Trailer | PS4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgW6xwr8AnU
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Unread postby earthboundtrev » 01 Nov 2018 16:28

Halloween Trailer | PS4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIVUSaVYHEg

Looking good. It definitely looks like more of the same from the developers of Until Dawn, but with a more interesting theme.
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Unread postby ChevRage » 18 Nov 2022 15:47

The biggest draw with this one is that it has 5-player coop. Though it's only local and you take turns sharing the same controller. You each pick a character at the beginning, and the game follows each character for certain sections before changing.

One of the issues with Until Dawn was that the game would have you play as all the characters and take turns throughout the whole thing, sometimes even pitting them against each other. Making you choose who you want to fuck over I guess, which is kinda jarring if you were playing as that character just before. I was under the impression before I played that game that you would play as the one character and then change only when they died, but that wasn't the case. Would certainly have improved the experience. Making this type of game multiplayer was a great choice. Although technically you could play Until Dawn this way too, but it was sometimes ambiguous as to which character was playing and some characters simply don't get an adequate amount of screen time. Ideally you'd all be playing at the same time and in different rooms with an independent setup with proximity voice. Maybe someday cinematic heavy adventure games will be like this.

Unfortunately, the rest is a letdown. Partially because of how short it is. We got through it all in the space of five hours, and storywise it's pretty weak compared to its singleplayer-only predecessor. The game doesn't have anywhere near as many twists and turns, and when there are any they end up feeling fairly pedestrian. The final reveal is lame to say the least. Most of the scares were just jump scares. The cool-ish setting felt underutilised on top of that.

Some of the consequences for your choices felt bullshit too. When I fucked up in Until Dawn it felt like it was my fault; I'd think back to what choices caused me to be in the mess I was in and go "Yeah I probably shouldn't have done all that". Not the case for this game at all. [SPOILER ALERT: DON'T READ THE REST OF THE PARAGRAPH IF YOU DON'T WANT TO GET SPOILED]. In one particularly egregious instance, my friend picked up a weapon (because why the fuck wouldn't you want to be armed while exploring a ship with potential enemies on it), then died a little later when continuing just because he was holding it. I don't think there was even a way to drop it, or an alternate route. And there are a few cases like this, where the obvious decision ends up screwing you over. And then you're basically just watching for the rest of the game. Of course it's still fun to watch your friends play, you can still make fun of your friends for screwing up. Pretty much the only time where you can watch a horror movie, yell at the protagonists to not be retarded, and they might actually listen to you lol. Though it feels dirty to get eliminated because of a single poorly designed choice, while the other mistakes from your friends get a bunch of second chances. My character got eliminated without even dying lol. I just got written out of the whole damn story, despite my choice potentially being the safest and most guaranteed to succeed.

The little peeks into the possible futures are worse here too. Until Dawn's at least made a tiny bit of sense, and spurred you into thinking about every little clue and detail you came across to figure out what could have caused it (and how to influence it to come true or false). In this game, they are completely useless. They show so little and are so ambiguous that we ended up just not caring about them at all.

I swear the game looks worse than Until Dawn somehow. We had it at max settings, on a PC no less, and the characters and environments didn't look like they were half as detailed.

And another thing, the game is also kinda woke lol. You have a rich white guy who starts off pining for this black chick who does not even look that good, and the only two white characters, a brother and a sister, are siblings. At least nothing in the game came off all preachy or anything if I remember right.

Anyway despite all these complaints I have it was still a kinda cool experience, and I'm looking forward to playing the next games in this anthology. Hopefully they buckled down for the next ones or just got the same director as Until Dawn back on or something. It'd be a shame if they were all merely at this level of quality.

I'd give it a 3/5, adding a point solely because of the multiplayer aspect.

There's also 2-player online-only mode where you play at the same time, but I didn't end up trying it.
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