The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan Review (Adidas)
Full review with both endings (5% and 12% of players): better than "Little hope", but not on the HoA level either
"The Quarry" did so well and used up all the usual tricks in the books (shooting at your friend thinking it's a demon, etc) that it feels SMG reused a lot of these tropes in their Quadrilogy effort. "Man of Medan", surprisingly enough, is better than it's follow up "Little Hope" in many ways.
Graphics with everything on max look just as good as Little Hope but evidently not quite as good as HoA or the last episode in the season. Sound design is solid,and the horror / scare tactics are very effective. I hope you're not too afraid of ghosts :)
Where the game falters quite a bit, is in the QTE element. I know people hate when ALL the story lines converge in one final point - but I understand why devs do it - to prevent the incessant save scumming resulting from investing so much in characters that die in one sequence because you didn't press "S", then "W", then the right mouse button, then the left, then the left again, resulting in permadeath.
Granted, you can set the game to 'story mode' and even to 'accessibility' mode where you never die. But I feel that takes the fun out of the game. Good QTEs are a) slightly slower than what's asked of you here b) consistent, c) forgiving. "MoM" is quite forgiving, but unfortunately goes on a killing rampage towards the last 3rd of the game, which feels a bit ... unfair.
Even more aggravating, there are technically only 2 ending: total wipe out , or total survival. The second path allows for some losses, which you can think of as 'your lifes'. VERY unfortunately, the collection system doesn't equate to 'perfect ending == perfect collectables' and requires multiple replays where the dialog cannot be skipped. At all.
At least in HOA I didn't feel like losing much in a game controller soldiers. In "The Quarry" well, "being taken out one by one" was sort of the point. But here, I fail to see the purpose in some design decisions. I kept everyone alive for 5 hours, and the body count started piling up. Sadly, that forced me to save scum, since you cannot ,unlike "Little Hope" force the QTE warning to at least give you a fighting chance while you try to admire the graphics.
In "Detroit becoming human", they solved that problem by meaningfully allowing major character deaths by having an extremely branching tree. SMG games are not well known for their 'meaningful choices' (the story is always the same, the question is 'how many go home'), and since both titles were released roughly around the same time, I did expect better.
That being said, if you are to pick up an SMG game, this is not the last you should get. I think so far for me the best titles have been, in that order:
- HoA
- The Quarry
- Man of Medan
- Little Hope
- Devil in me
.. with the last 2 not really deserving a purchase.
Now that i completed the game (both 'extreme' achievements') - I'm giving it a very hesitant thumbs up and a 5/10 score, assuming you can buy this on a big sale.