The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan Price History & Deals…

Language	Interface	Subtitles	Audio
Simplified Chinese	Yes	Yes	—
Traditional Chinese	Yes	Yes	—
English	Yes	Yes	Yes

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French	Yes	Yes	Yes
Italian	Yes	Yes	Yes
German	Yes	Yes	Yes
Spanish	Yes	Yes	Yes
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Japanese	Yes	Yes	—
Korean	Yes	Yes	—
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Spanish-Latin America	Yes	Yes	—
Russian	Yes	Yes	Yes

RecommendedSteam player

09/02/2019

First off, I want to say that I'm disappointed in the majority of the steam's community attitude towards this game. It's funny how harsh people were on critics such as IGN when it came to Resident Evil 2 for only playing Leon's story, and writing their review without playing Claire's (Which was pretty much the same thing, with only minor differences. Characters, weapons, etc.) but when it comes to this game, a game that prides itself on it's replay value, people write their negative reviews saying how they've only played it once and are upset with how short the game is. This game is far from being short. The differences your choices make in this game are huge, and seeing all of them would take so long that you'd think this game is a steal for £30, which it really is. The game has so many different outcomes, and some which are very specific such as if X character is alive, then it's more likely that Y character will meet their demise because picked up a weapon and they chose to be friendly towards Z character. It's layers on layers of your own choices, and that's why playing this game once is not enough to give it a fair review. I had a lot of fun with this game, and I've still got more to see. I love the setting, and the story is interesting-- not so much on the first play through, but once you start piecing together more and more of the tale it becomes far more interesting. Scares are dependant on the character you play at a given time, and it adds a sick variety to the game that I haven't really seen in a game before. It's smart. Co-op is a lot of fun, this game is best experienced with a friend so you can yell at them for making a dumb choice. I think this is a great introduction to The Dark Pictures Anthology, and I'm really looking forward to Little Hope. Sadly, in some cases the game falls short when compared Until Dawn. Animations feel a lot more stiff now, the characters just weren't as interesting and they really gave away the twist a bit too early here-- if you didn't realise what was happening by the midway point with them borderline telling you the twist, then I'm really surprised.Show moreShow less

10.8 hours at review351 people found this helpful

Not recommendedSteam player

09/03/2019

This game is super mixed for me. I love what the developers are trying to do and Until Dawn was amazing. This game is a bit different. The game seems to focus on cheap jump scares all of the damn time to keep you on edge which is a huge red flag for any kind of horror story telling imo. Yeah of course someone will scare when you blast a sound in their face. Its just cheap, not creative and lazy. I didn't buy this game to experience a haunted house, I wanted to experience a damn horror story. What happens to your character seems to rely more on how quick you can smash a button rather than actual choices like in Until Dawn. I hope in your next game you really focus on creating a scary atmosphere that doesn't rely at all on jump scares to keep your audience on edge. Think of the best horror movies ever made. Alien, Hereditary, Silence of the Lambs, Nosferatu, Rosemary's Baby, The Shining. None of these fully focused on jump scares to keep the tension going. They all rely on the feeling of dread and a buildup of psychological instability and character development to survive, which is true horror. Your game has elements of these, but they are not the main focus and do not really shine. Best of luck on the next game.Show moreShow less

4.1 hours at review592 people found this helpful

RecommendedSteam player

08/30/2019

REMOVE! any symbols on your steam nickname and you should be good to play with your friends. I have the same problem and fixed it. Great game!Show moreShow less

1.6 hours at review240 people found this helpful

Not recommendedSteam player

09/12/2019

I really wanted to like this game, but I simply cannot see past its multiple flaws. Horror elements Two words: Jump Scares. If an ugly face appearing in a doorframe, accompanied by a loud noise is the pinnacle of scary for you, you might enjoy this game. Never did I get a real sense of dread, just a slight uneasiness due to anticipation of the next QTE. The boat offers a lot of good opportunities to create a real oppressive atmosphere, but apart from the “ballroom scene” it is all just so dull and repetitive (I honestly think this is done on purpose to make you sleepy and more deceptive for the next loud noise that wakes you up and tricks you into thinking you got scared). It also does not help that the twist is so incredibly obvious and robs you of any tension. I am not saying that I am some sort of genius (trust me, I am not), I just felt it was implied from the very beginning. Cheap deaths There are some death scenes that are quite entertaining, don`t get me wrong. I realize that this is what a lot of people come to this game for. Unfortunately a lot of the deaths come down to “I did not press the X Button fast enough” or “I somehow picked the wrong conversation choice”. It feels unearned and cheap. Replaying those scenes to see what you did wrong and change it would be an option, of course, but that would require a good story you actually care for and want to explore further. Since the story consists mainly of characters walking through very similar looking, dull corridors and hiding from ghosts and Frenchmen while figuring out what is going on hours after you, the player, have figured it out already, it was very hard for me to be interested in any of it. All the acts before the ship are ok, though and had me, dare I say it, invested (gasp!). Characters As I said I quite enjoyed the first acts of the game where you get to know and interact with this misfit group of jerks and wet blankets. Your focus shifts back and forth, so you can experience everyones perspective. The performances range (in my opinion) from good (Conrad/Julia) to bad (Alex/Fliss). The interactions are convincing enough for you to be slightly interested in where this whole group is going. For me it got worse when they end up on the ship, but overall the characters are not a bad part of the game. I still have no idea why it matters if they like each other or not, though. Turning wheels My biggest issue with the game, apart from being not scary, is that you can see the mechanics working in the backgrounds every step of the way. Since the story changes depending on which decisions you made earlier in the game it is necessary to have a multitude of scenes that reflect those decisions. The game handles this very poorly. Especially in the later parts of the game you can observe the game struggling to piece together a coherent story by loading in the “correct” scenes. Tonal shifts from one scene to the other, people jumping from one side of the room to the other etc. make that very apparent and destroy any attempt at immersion. In a game that falls flat without a compelling narrative and atmosphere, that is a sin to me. The Curator I like him. Good dude with a dope haircut.Show moreShow less

5.1 hours at review177 people found this helpful

RecommendedSteam player

08/29/2019

The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan is THE game if you like to have movie nights with friends. The Good This game offers a unique experience of playing and watching a movie with other people. This is one of the main appeals of this title and it works well. You can pester your online and local friends (or strangers) to play with you, shuffle playable characters around and enjoy 5 hours of solid socializing and banter. Will your friends play smart and help each other or intentionally going to try to drag you down? One playthrough is around 5 hours, even less if you intentionally avoid all exploration. The game expects you to play it many times, as there are a lot of branching paths which you cannot experience even in complete 4 playthroughs. First playthrough's ending leaves you feeling disappointed, but that gradually fades away once you realize that there are enough different dialogues and variables to make repeat playthroughs slightly different and surprising. Curator's Cut spices things up even more and allows you to play from other character perspectives, which makes things interesting and doubles the replay value. The thrill and enjoyment of seeing scenes that you've previously missed out on keeps you going. The game has support for local multiplayer, so you can use software like Parsec to play with your online friends. You can invite up to 4 friends, as the game supports up to 5 players. For a comfortable experience the host's upload speed should be around 10Mbps or more. It works out of the box, but there might be occasional gamepad hiccups. Use gamepad reset option if other players are having issues with the controls. With this method your friends don't even have to buy a copy of the game. If you'd prefer to have an experience where you can't see your friend's choices then there's actual 2p online co-op. General visuals are eye pleasing: High LODs for characters and geometry. Pleasant dynamic lighting across variety of daytimes. Adequate texture quality. Heavy post processing tint. The combination of static and moving camera angles, dynamic light sources (like a flashlight) and modern visuals makes this a really satisfying experience. There are issues like texture pop in during fast camera cuts and geometry load in during camera pan, but these could be a result of a hardware bottleneck. Includes occasional derpy faces that are going to make or break the game for you. The game builds up horror atmosphere by having gritty set pieces, static camera angles, subtle ambience soundtrack and intentionally low visibility due to lack of light sources. Then it starts throwing in jump scares left and right. It all depends on your tolerance to such things, but while a good chunk of them are fairly predictable, some may actually catch you off guard. Mechanics If you're familiar with Until Dawn then you'll feel right at home. The game consists of dialogue and action choices, QTEs and exploration segments, where you walk around, picking up "Secrets" (clues). The cinematic/dialogue parts and exploration segments are fairly balanced. Relationships affect your dialogue choices and traits determine how character acts when you're not controlling them. The Nitpicks Note: The following issues were found in pre-release code. Quick reload doesn't exist. If you made an undesirable choice then you get to face the consequences until you finish your current playthrough. It's possible to abandon a playthrough at any time, but that's just a waste of time. Once the game is cleared the Chapter Select unlocks, but only on that particular save slot. It's possible to select any of the played scenes, those inherit all the previous choices that you've made. Important thing about this is that if the present save slot is overwritten, then the Chapter Select will be disabled. To prevent this from happening the game offers to create a new save, but it's not a perfect solution either: it creates a new slot every single time and it doesn't offer to overwrite another potentially useless slot. The best part? You can't delete save slots within the game at all, only overwrite when you start a new game. The general workaround is just to backup the saves folder if you feel like experimenting, but be warned: if the save folder is empty (failed copy paste, for example) then the game will reset all your "Secrets" (clues) progression amongst other things. In theory, you can wipe out individual saves, as they're separated, but I haven't tested it out myself. If you decide to play your first playthrough with a friend then you might have a difficulty allocating playable characters. Depending on your character picks and in-game choices the playtime balance between the players can be severely compromised. If you want a general hint about most to least playable characters in the Theatrical Cut then it's Alex, Fliss, Julia, Conrad, Bradley and even this isn't set in stone. It's impossible to skip any of the scenes on first or consecutive playthroughs aside from the credits. Sooner or later seeing the same scenes over and over will start to bore and/or annoy you. The game utilizes real time physics, so there are moments when things can go haywire: during camera cuts sometimes clothes can glitch out, things that you carry in hands can collide with other objects and completely spazz out. PC Specifics Uncapped frame rate. Native support for Xbox One and DualShock 4 gamepads with switchable button icon layouts (no auto detect, requires manual switching). Mouse & keyboard support, from brief tests mouse feels like an emulated analog stick. HDR support (no way to test this myself, but there's a toggle, maybe Digital Foundry might cover this?). Native support for 21:9 resolutions (2560x1080 tested) and support for non arbitrary resolutions. Only basic graphics options. For "cinematic" purposes the game letterboxes the image to 21:9 and there's no option to actually show letterboxed areas. The letterboxed area is used for subtitles and nothing else. Considering the nature of the game being letterboxed on a 16:9 didn't feel too invasive, but makes you wonder if a toggle can be patched in. On the bright side, the game supports 21:9 resolutions and it scales with them properly, so you get a fullscreen image on a 21:9 monitor/TV, a polar opposite of something like vanilla The Evil Within that actually pillarboxed 21:9 resolutions. There are some bugs like people not being able to connect to each other when nicknames that contain anything besides English letters and numbers. There's also an issue where saving and returning to main menu cuts off the audio until a restart. One thing that should be a point of interest is the performance: it's all over the place. Depending on the scene you can have FPS as high as 160 and as low as 30. If you're going for high resolution (1440p and beyond) then it would be best to cap FPS at 30, otherwise stick with 60 and 1080p. While it's not crucial, unstable frame rate can negatively affect your QTE performance. While there are basic graphical options, the performance difference between high and low during an intense scene was 25% at best. If you're struggling to get high frame rate then lowering the graphical options might not even be worth it. But, again, this was my experience on pre-release code. If you have a mid-high graphics card then you're bound to have better than console experience. Conclusion I was looking forward to a good co-op experience with different friends and this game delivers exactly that. The joys of discovering different branching keeps you going and different friend reactions make things interesting. I'm already looking forward to the next entry in the series. See you at the Little Hope review! Review copy provided by BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment.Show moreShow less

29.3 hours at review178 people found this helpful

Received for free

Not recommendedSteam player

09/02/2019

THINGS WRONG WITH THIS GAME: - Random "Fatal Error" can corrupt your save file, no way to get your process back, since you can't select a chapter before having finished the game. - If you finished the game while someone else hosting the lobby you won't unlock the feature "Chapter Select". (and their propaganda was to "DON'T PLAY ALONE" but you're not given the feature if you finish the game with someone else hosting) - Usually stuck on doorways, unable to move, scenes won't continue right after a choice. - No big twist, pretty obvious, one dimensional story. - You can't skip a scene, so when you happen to get stuck and reload everything, you gotta sit down through it over and over until you have had enough and write a review to save others time. - Instead of patching their bug infested game, they have the audacity to announce another game. This game cashed on Until Dawn's success, and it was the reason I picked it up. But now this game is why I won't be buying their new "Little Hope".Show moreShow less

7.4 hours at review143 people found this helpful

RecommendedSteam player

01/04/2021

I really liked Until Dawn and therefore was looking forward to play the games in this series. While I do like the overall game, it isn’t near the quality and writing of Until Dawn. Man of Medan first of all feels really slow, something that the other games also suffer from. A lot of time is spent on the not that exciting parts of the game to kinda force some character development in, but we might as well have learned about the different characters through the interesting parts of the game instead. This game is also very predictable and it isn’t hard at all to avoid characters from dying. The time frames they give are way too generous, I had to let a few characters die on purpose just to see what their deaths looked like. This also makes the game not scary at all, not even the jump scares are that scary, which is a shame since this is a horror game, it should be scary. I do like the story though and the voice acting and visual design is really spot on and it is the only reason I recommend this. The game does feel high quality and it isn’t that expensive on sale. _________________________________ Help me out by following my Curator, I’d really appreciate it!!Show moreShow less

6.2 hours at review157 people found this helpful

Not recommendedSteam player

05/03/2020

If the FRIEND PASS system is no longer in use, maybe don't feature it prominently on your store page. At the time of this writing the featured post under recent events and announcements and marked as Major update, advertises the free friend's pass system. My girlfriend and I played Until Dawn Together so I jumped on it as the game was on sale. Long story short we jump through all the hoops to get everything going and then I get the screen that tells me we have to buy a second copy of the game, which I did. I only planned on playing this game with someone else and ended up paying twice unexpectedly because of a mix of old, but featured advertising(with expiration dates as a vague "early to mid January" relegated to the very end of the last paragraph), a good sale price, and me not paying close attention.Show moreShow less

0.3 hours at review135 people found this helpful

RecommendedSteam player

08/30/2019

It is not great as Until Dawn is, but this game was made on a smaller budget, and as a part of a bigger plan. That is why you see the price halved comparing to classic AAA games. BUT. I played it through 2 times, and I had pretty much different experiences, and I'm not talking only about the ending. Nice amount of scenes in the first playthrough were not in the 2nd and the characters in the scenes were more often than not different than the previous run. The consequences of your choices will really affect the gameplay. Their plan for Dark Pictures Anthology is to get closer to the Twilight Zone, which would be much more mystery game than a horror one. Plus, you have a great curator (and you can only guess who he is), leading you through this "dark picture". Gameplay consist of classic exploration, QTA and dialogues, but the graphical level of this game is way higher than their competition (and still lower than Until Dawn). Voice acting can be hit or miss, depending on the character, and don't expect some life changing dialogues (somewhere on the standard horror movie level). Those people are there to save their lives (or you to save theirs), not to give you emotional drama depth. I really liked almost everything that I experienced in Man of Medan, and some smaller annoyances like camera or exploration control can be fixed in the next installment of the Dark Pictures Anthology. VERY SOLID FIRST STEP! Can't wait for A Little Hope. p.s. As for people judging the game on the amount of hours: Quality over quantity always!Show moreShow less

11 hours at review127 people found this helpful

Received for free

Not recommendedSteam player

08/30/2019

The Dark Pictures Anthology is off to a rough start with Man of Medan, which pales in comparison to the studios previous cinematic horror title Until Dawn. PC version is pretty solid on the technical level: Graphics are gorgeous, performance was fine, sound design is pretty good aside from some poorly mixed "jump scare" sounds that will blast out the ears of any headphone users. However, it is the narrative, setting and writing that ultimately fail to deliver a compelling horror experience. Narrative is predictable and quite frankly disappointing as you will quickly figure out what is going on, there are no difficult choices as the narrative makes it rather easy to figure out what the correct thing to do is, even if at times the writing tries its best to make characters act like idiots to progress the story further. To me, a good horror game builds up on atmosphere and barely ever resorts to using jump scares (as that makes them so much more effective) - unfortunately Man of Medan relies on abundance of jump scares, to the point where you're lucky you can progress 5 minutes without the game trying to blast your ears out with a really loud noise and something sudden happening on the screen. That being said, the game isn't awful as such, it is just an incredibly average experience where the narrative kills the horror element and all that is left are the frequent and predictable jump scares that accompany you throughout the roughly 4-5 hour story. If you're a fan of horror games with atmosphere I wouldn't recommend purchasing Man of Medan at its full price.Show moreShow less

4.7 hours at review109 people found this helpful

The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan

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01About The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan

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