Staff – August 21, 2019 at 8:00 PM
While gamers have known forever that interactivity is the future entertainment, the rest of the world has been slow to catch on. However, recent successes like Netflix’s homage to choose-your-own-adventure games Black Mirror: Bandersnatch and the survivalist simulation You Vs. Wild have done wonders for introducing interactive fiction and branching narratives to mainstream audiences. Not quite games and not quite television, they allow their viewers to participate in the action on screen by making direct decisions that impact what they see. For people who love interactive media, it’s an incredible time to be alive.
The Dark Pictures Anthology is a series of part-game, part-film experiences that’s looking to seize the cultural moment. Developed by Supermassive Games, the creative minds behind the award-winning survival horror game Until Dawn, The Dark Pictures Anthology will be a collection of horror games that blur the lines between interactive drama and video game. Each of them has their own standalone story, and all playable characters can die.
In The Dark Pictures Anthology games, the choices a player makes ultimately determine who lives and who dies — with endings that vary greatly. The titles within The Dark Pictures Anthology aren’t merely games with gimmicks; they’re proof that interactivity can be used to defy an audience’s expectations and create new forms of storytelling.
What distinguishes Supermassive Games from other studios is their multidisciplinary approach to their work. “We feel the combination of cinematic production values and clever narrative design is the best way to tell the stories we want to tell,” The Dark Pictures Anthology Series Director and Executive Producer, Pete Samuels, said.
Supermassive draws as much from slasher flicks as they do from other horror games. The episodic structure of The Dark Pictures, in fact, is an homage to horror films in and of itself. “The anthology format has a great heritage in horror, and we thought it would work very well in games, too,” Samuels said.
Man of Medan, The Dark Pictures Anthology’s first installment, follows a group of friends as they embark on a diving trip in search of a rumored wreck from WWII. Naturally, their plans go awry when a storm rolls in and traps them on a ghost ship.
In some passages of the game, players simply choose dialogue options and watch the game’s cinematics. In others, players inhabit a character and use them to explore their surroundings in search of clues. It’s this code-switching, however, that causes The Dark Pictures to stand apart from its contemporaries; few other experiences can flit so naturally between feeling distinctly like a game and feeling distinctly like a movie.
One of Man of Medan’s most striking features is the fidelity of its facial animations. Throughout the game, characters express a wide range of emotions, some of which depend on subtle changes in a character’s disposition. To achieve this, Supermassive utilizes state-of-the-art motion capture technology to capture their actors’ faces and gestures. “We use Hollywood talent and place huge value on capturing their performances in a way that will allow the player to fully engage themselves with the story,” Samuels explained.
For a game like Man of Medan, reading a character’s emotions is paramount to the overall experience, so Supermassive took great care to simulate human expression to the best of their ability, both in their use of technology and in the direction of their actors. “The actors are directed to act as if they were performing in a close-shot in film or TV,” Samuels explained. “We don’t need any exaggeration in performance to achieve the results that we need.”
Man of Medan’s core cast of characters is exactly what you’d want out of a trope-y horror game: you’ve got brash rich-kid Conrad, the socially awkward Brad, and the hardened sea-captain Fliss. They’re joined by Brad’s brother, Alex, and Conrad’s sister, Julia, who are dating each other. There are socioeconomic class differences, clashing personalities, and nuanced relationships — in short, a situation that’s ripe for drama.
Any of these characters can die before the end of the game, but whether they do or not is dependent upon the player’s choices. The staggering amount of different endings provides incentive to play the game over and over again. “There are 69 death scenes in the game,” Samuels said. “You would need to play the game eight times to see them all.” If you wanted to see every iteration of an ending, Samuels estimated that you’d need to play Man of Medan hundreds of times.
Here’s where The Dark Pictures Anthology differs from other games of its ilk and begins to breach uncharted territory for the medium. Other survival horror games encourage the success and, well, survival of the player character; any premature deaths are treated as “game overs” and non-canonical to the game’s plot.
In Man of Medan, however, none of that matters. There is no “intended” ending, so all characters could perish at any moment, either consciously or by failing to execute a timed action. Inhabiting a character for a brief scene doesn’t ensure their survival by the end of the game.
Thus, Man of Medan plays much more like a slasher flick than a typical horror game, in which you’re never certain how or when your favorite (or least favorite) character might finally kick the bucket. It effectively cultivates a form of suspense that’s rarely experienced in other horror games, forcing players to oscillate between assuming and relinquishing control over its characters, leaving their fate up in the air until they perish. Man of Medan’s gruesome death animations certainly give the term “permadeath” a whole new meaning.
Since it teeters on the edge of film and video game, The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan is great for both solitary gaming sessions and social movie nights. In fact, it even supports two multiplayer modes: a “Movie Night” mode that encourages players to divvy up the controls between the five main characters amongst the people in the room and a “Shared Story” mode that connects two players online, allowing them each to experience different perspectives of the same story.
As such, The Dark Pictures Anthology finds itself in a category all on its own. As the average media diet skews more and more towards the interactive, The Dark Pictures Anthology will become just as viable a choice for Halloween movie screenings as any other pulp-y horror movie.
Luckily, you won’t have to wait that long to play it: The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan will be available for PC on August 30, 2019.
Recommended specs:
- OS: Windows® 10 (64-bit required)
- CPU: Intel® Core™ i5-8400 or better
- RAM: 8GB of system memory
- Graphics card: NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1060 or AMD® Radeon™ RX 580
