The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan

The main plot of Man of Medan is presented as an unfinished story in the possession of the omnipresent Curator (Pip Torrens), who requests the player's assistance in completing it. Decisions made by the player alter the outcome of the story and the fates of its characters.

Prologue (1947) In post-World War II, an American warship is stopping in a Chinese port while making the final preparations to set sail. Joe and Charlie, two privates of the ship, are on Manchuria's shore leave and wander in a market. While they take turns playing punch dummy games in one of the multiple stores, they also consult a fortune teller who predicts them death and doom.

Back on the ship, both are caught and arrested by one of the sergeants due to their drunkenness and roughhousing. A couple of nights after, Joe wakes up in the sick bay but manages to get out after encountering a corpse in a first aid locker. Joe finds and frees Charlie in a seemingly empty ship. However, they encounter the same sergeant who arrested them. As they hide, they see him acting strange and paranoid with a submachine gun.

Going down the cargo hold 3, Joe and Charlie discover dead bodies. Getting separated, they both encounter threatening beings in cargo hold 2 that will end up killing both of them.

Present Day (2019) As soon as the prologue ends, the player is introduced to the Curator, who introduces himself explaining his entire role while being the accomplice of the player and recording everything that happens as the story progresses.

In the present day, brothers Brad and Alex, along with Alex's girlfriend Julia and her brother Conrad, begin boarding on Fliss' boat, the Duke of Milan, hoping to find a WWII wreck plane that is rumoured to have crashed in the South Pacific Ocean. As their guess was right, Alex and Julia dive into the wreck to investigate it and possibly find some sort of treasure, as they are souvenir sellers. Back up on the surface, Conrad and Fliss encounter a group of three fishermen who get their speedboat damaged by the Duke of Milan's recoil cable, which was connected to the underwater wreckage. The fishermen ask reparation but Conrad dismisses them mockingly. As soon as the couple emerges from their "underwater mission", the five protagonists spend the sunset on the Duke's outside deck while discussing the coordinates Alex and Julia found while exploring the wreck.

The player is then taken back to the Curator's repository, as he shortly discusses the personality of each character. He also adds the player has made choices that the protagonists will value later on.

During the night, the three fishermen, Olson, Junior and Danny ambush the Duke's crew and take the protagonists hostage, except Brad, who managed to hide. the rest of the group is tied up in the biggest cabin. As Fliss is taken outside with the fishermen, Conrad gets the idea of attacking them directly or breaking a window in order to flee with their speedboat. Conrad can flee successfully or die trying. Danny then discovers the coordinates of the Manchurian Gold and shows it to Olson, the leader of the fishermen, who decide to retrieve the treasure and brings the prisoners along.

The Curator comments on the outcome of the attack and offers a bit of advice to the player saying that everything is not as they should be, regretting he should not have said that thereafter.

After getting thrown around in an intense storm, the Duke crashes into a rusty freighter from WWII: the abandoned SS Ourang Medan. The fishermen decide to board the ship, and Junior takes the distributor cap from the Duke so that the protagonists can't escape via that boat. Minutes after boarding the ship, the fishermen lock the protagonists in a dark room, where they manage to escape.

As soon as the protagonists and the three antagonists are split, the first group explore the ship in order to find a way out and to retrieve the distributor cap needed for starting the Duke of Milan. On their way, Fliss (and maybe Brad if not hidden) gets captured while attempting to retrieve the boat's engine. Meanwhile, in the main deck, Alex, Julia and Conrad try to separate and later go for their captured companion(s).

Later on, in the workshop situated in the freighter's lower deck, Fliss is forcefully escorted by one of the pirates, Danny, who later flees and disappears in a panic after seeing some unknown threat. Fliss (along with Brad's company or not) continues her way exploring the ship's cold corridors until ending up in an out of place ballroom, where she will bump with a hooded figure, unless she exits the room for a moment and discovers the room appearing rusted and flooded like the rest of the ship.

If Brad managed to hide earlier, he will enter the ship by this point, trying to follow the trail of his friends. He will eventually fall off a ledge and find Fliss.

Meanwhile, Conrad, who separated from Alex and Julia in search of Fliss (his potential love interest), will encounter a terrifying female nurse that will chase him until he dies or the nurse disappears. On the other hand, Julia and Alex try to escape from Olson's hands as they all start to be affected by the fog.

With their destinies united, the five protagonists will meet in the weather deck to flee from any danger and take a safe place where they can refuge from the rain.

The Curator intervenes and comments on how the story now turns more into the spiritual. He adds that the player has hopefully guessed what happened on the freigther and offers advice that can be refused. The Curator then says that everything and everyone are not what they appear to be.

Back to the story, the protagonists discuss what they saw and what they could observe on the ship. They decide the best course of action to head towards the radio room. They succeed in getting a military bandwidth but the radio loses power and cannot transmit anymore. Two protagonists decide to go in the engine room to reactivate the power while the others stay to be ready to talk to the radio. The first team succeed in reactivating the power in the Generator Room. They also begin putting together the clues they found on the ship, and can discover that the Manchurian Gold was actually a hallucinogenic bioweapon developed during WW2, and that it has been leaking around the ship the whole time, explaining all the paranormal encounters. The other team that stayed behind can either act panicked or level-headed and communicate the coordinates and optionally the name of the ship. The team in the generator room encounter a hallucinating Olson, who is threatening Danny and eventually stabs him if Danny is protesting. After fleeing from him, Junior stops them, and points a gun at them. However, he begins panicking, referring to the mist. Junior can either kill a protagonist or join them if the protagonists succeed in calming him down with the rebreather.

Back at the radio, one of the protagonists in the radio room will decide to investigate after hearing a gunshot. If Alex stayed behind, he grows impatient, and goes down with whoever is with him before the gunshot. They find and chase Olson but get separated because of a fallen walkway. Alex finds the dead body of Olson and tries to retrieve the distributor cap from the rats, either succeeding or failing, which will destroy the distributor cap. Alex then encounters a protagonist hallucinated as a human experiment (if it was seen in cargo hold 3A) or a scary and bloody Olson. At the same time, a rat emerges from Alex's stomach. Alex can either attack the rat, killing himself in the process or attack the apparition, wounding or killing one of his friends instead.

If Alex wasn't present in the radio room (whether dead or tasked with fixing the generator), only one protagonist will go try to find the others. This protagonist encounters Olson again as they fight to retrieve the distributor cap. Olson floods the area they're in, and one of the generator protagonists will emerge and send a cargo door crashing down on Olson and the other protagonist. This protagonist can die as a result and the distributor cap can even be broken. The group reunite on the outer deck of the ship.

Endings The outcome of the game will depend on the choices made by the player. There are 6 endings with variations depending on the characters that survived. If a protagonist died, the game will show where and what is the current status of that same character. The survivors will also be shown either mourning the deaths of their friends, or discussing their experiences on the ship before Conrad smugly offers everyone a beer before drinking one himself. The endings are the following:

If the remaining survivors get the distributor cap, they will set sail on the Duke of Milan, escaping the freighter. If the remaining protagonists fail to get the distributor cap, but Conrad successfully escaped via the speedboat (Intrusion), he will approach the ship with the coast guard's boat and rescue anyone that survived. If all the survivors either die or escape and Conrad fled on the speedboat, Conrad will approach the ship with the coast guard's boat and will enter the SS Ourang Medan, where he notices a door opening in front of him. He then walks through that same door and most likely dies after suffering from the Manchurian Gold. If the protagonists fail to get the distributor cap, the military wasn’t called, and Conrad failed to the flee on the speedboat successfully, then the protagonists will debate on what to do. Some will try and escape on the inactive Duke of Milan or stay aboard the abandoned freighter and search for rations. If the remaining characters fail to retrieve the distributor cap, Conrad could not flee on the speedboat and the military was told the name of the ship, the military will arrive and kill any survivor. If the remaining protagonists fail to retrieve the distributor cap, Conrad failed to flee on the speedboat and the military was not told the name of the ship, the military arrives via helicopter to rescue any survivors. The protagonists are then interrogated and imprisoned. Credits During the credits, the Curator will comment on the outcome the story has on that point and the numbers of protagonists that survived. If the player gets a good ending, the Curator will congratulate the player, saying that everyone is still alive. If the player still has some protagonists survive but has some die, he will say that they could try again and that some lived and some died. On the other hand, if no one survived, he will outright laugh and will ask the player if they didn’t try and do that on purpose. After all that happens, he will mention that he and the player will meet again, "maybe in Little Hope, maybe somewhere else".

After-Credits Endings If the player managed to have Julia survive, but didn't fully decompress at the end of Dive, and then chose to drink beer later in Ghost Story, Julia will start collapsing in pain as she suffers decompression sickness, either on board the SS Ourang Medan, the Duke of Milan or even in the coast guard’s boat. She will die either by her own or with her fellow survivors, who attempt to revive her but fail in doing so. If the player fails to retrieve the distributor cap and the military wasn’t called for help, the protagonists will split according to their ideals. Whoever tried escaping via the Duke will be shown sickly and sunburnt as the player is shown the vast ocean surrounding them. If the military wasn't given coordinates, Danny will regain consciousness from his injuries. He will wander the abandoned ship and pick up a sledgehammer, similar to Olson's. He will then find Olson's body, somehow in a different place than before. He will try to wake up Olson, but he will suddenly yell and stand up, revealing his flowing red eyes. Olson then lifts Danny and chokes him to death. If the military was contacted and given coordinates to the ship, Danny will still be shown to be alive. A military helicopter will arrive and two soldiers enter the ship, investigating the strange rooms. One of them is suddenly hit in the face with a sledgehammer as the other soldier looks to see Danny wielding the hammer, who then slams it down on the other soldier.

The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan is a survival horror video game played from a third-person perspective in which single players or multiplayers assume control of five different characters that become trapped on board a ghost ship.[2] Players are required to make decisions based on their character's "head" or their "heart", or can choose for them to do nothing, while selecting between different options when interacting with other characters. The selection of options are stylised as a compass, which is both representative of the characters' "moral compass" and reflective of the game's nautical themes. The narrative changes and adapts to the choices that the players make, thus making it possible for players to keep all playable characters alive or to have some (or all) of them die. Choices also affect the characters' personality traits (which affects subsequent cutscenes and dialogue options), as well as their relationships with each other. The game can be played multiple times, as there are multiple endings and multiple scenarios based on the decisions that the players make. Action sequences mainly feature quick time events, most of which, if missed, can lead to dire consequences for the characters. As players explore the ghost ship, they can find different "Dark Pictures" that gives them premonitions of what may happen in the future.[3] Players can also uncover the mystery surrounding the tragedy that occurred on the ship in the past, which can help save their character's lives in the present.

Inspired by the popularity of their 2015 game Until Dawn's streaming, and the number of people playing the game with their friends by sharing the controls, Supermassive Games introduced two different multiplayer modes in The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan titled "Shared Story" and "Movie Night".[4] "Shared Story" allows two players to play co-operatively online. "Movie Night" allows up to five multiplayers to select their own characters and prompts them to pass the controller at each turn.

The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan was developed by Supermassive Games. After favourable reception of their 2015 title Until Dawn, the team realized that there was a market for interactive drama horror games, and wanted to expand the concept to a larger audience.[5] Thus, The Dark Pictures Anthology series was created, with Man of Medan being the first of eight[1] planned installments in the series. Supermassive Games stated that they plan on releasing the subsequent seven games every six months in the anthology, with each game based on a horror trope that will feature a unique story that has no correlation to the other entries in the series.

Man of Medan was inspired[6] by the urban legend of the SS Ourang Medan, which is about a ghost ship that had allegedly become a shipwreck in Dutch East Indies waters in the late 1940s. Its entire crew was found deceased under suspicious and mysterious circumstances, with their faces twisted into horrified expressions, which seemed to indicate that they were terrified and had suffered before passing, despite having no visible signs of injury to their bodies and the ship being seemingly unscathed. An effort was made to bring the SS Ourang Medan back to port, but before it could be transported, the ship exploded and sunk underwater. Theories of how the ill-fated crew perished vary, ranging from the rational to the paranormal, though the story is most likely a work of fiction, as there is no evidence of the ship having existed at all.[7] The word Ourang is Malay or Indonesian for "man" or "person", while Medan is the largest city on the Indonesian island of Sumatra; giving an approximate translation of "Man from Medan".

Supermassive and publisher Bandai Namco Entertainment officially announced the title on 21 August 2018.[8] The game's cast includes Shawn Ashmore as one of the playable characters and Pip Torrens as the Curator, an omniscient individual who observes the events of the game and communicates directly with the player.[9] It was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on 30 August 2019.[10]

The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan received "generally favorable reviews" for the Windows version, while the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions were met with "mixed or average reviews", according to review aggregator Metacritic.[11][12][13]

The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan was the third best-selling game in the United Kingdom in its week of release, behind Astral Chain and Wreckfest. During its first week on sale, 81% of the game's retail copies were sold on PlayStation 4, versus 19% on Xbox One. However, Man of Medan didn't reach the same level of physical sales in comparison to Supermassive's 2015 title Until Dawn, selling 61% fewer physical copies at launch than the PlayStation 4 exclusive.[28]

The second installment in the Dark Pictures Anthology series, Little Hope, was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on 30 October 2020.[35][36]

• Official website