The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan Review (| Longbread)
I honestly hate going out of my way to negative reviews, so I almost never do it. But unfortunately I feel like I have to in this case because this game was a frustrating experience on almost every level. Here are a few of my largest issues:
1. Friend Passes) To begin with, as soon as you purchase the game, you'll find a regular version of the game and a "Friend's Pass" version of the game. The store page does not explain this at all (with good reason as it turns out), but after a bit of googling, you'll find that on release, the buyer was provided with a free Friend's Pass to provide to a friend so they wouldn't have to buy a copy of the game to play multiplayer. The instructions provided by the devs for how to do this were evidently incorrect, but ultimately irrelevant, because after even more time spent googling how to get it to work you'll find that all of these Friend's Passes expired over a year ago and are no longer available. To play co-op now, BOTH player need to have a full copy of the game. Though the store page makes no mention of it either, previously offering a Friend's Pass and making no effort to inform buyers that it is no longer available is incredibly misleading. I, and likely many other people, have bought the game under the assumption that Friend Passes are still a thing, only to be bait and switched into having to gift another copy, or have their friend buy a copy themselves.
2. Multiple Monitor/Resolution Issues) As soon as I booted up the game it defaulted to my second monitor with no direct way to switch it to my primary monitor. Trying to switch it to windowed mode, so I could drag it to my other monitor failed as the game immediately switched back full screen every time. After multiple restarts and much frustration, it randomly decided to boot up on my primary monitor, although there was a ~40 pixel black bar on the left and top sides of the screen despite supposedly being the correct resolution. A few times, it displayed on two monitors at the same time, displaying different menu screens (this thankfully stopped happening after another few restarts.
3. Glitches) This is where we get into the real deal breakers (very much plural). During our whopping 3 hour co-op play-through to completion, me and my partner ran into more glitches than we have ever seen in a single game ever. It would be hard to list them all, but here's just a few that come to mind:
Multiple soft-locks that completely prevented any progression and required us to back out to the menu and restart. Some times all things became non-intractable, sometimes characters disappeared altogether.
Every single sequence with the heartbeat mechanic failed as a result of a glitch. On each of our screens, it claimed that the other player had failed, while in reality, neither of us had. In fact towards the end of the game, only I was given a heartbeat sequence and it still claimed that my partner had failed it at the end. This likely lead to the death of one of our characters in our play-through.
4. Basic Mechanics Issues) I'm unsure if this was being caused by lag from playing this as co-op, but initiating interactions with items almost always took multiple attempts and had about a 1-2 second delay before they went through. Having the most basic action in the game feel so difficult leads to compounding frustration very quickly.
5. Unfair character deaths) Out of the 3 character deaths in our play-through, only one of them felt remotely fair. One resulted from a single missed QTE, and another resulted for a vague dialog choice that didn't make sense.
6. Frustrating Co-op Mechanics) Overall this game is a master class in how to NOT handle co-op. Right from the tutorial section, me and my partner immediately interrupted each other's scenes, leading to cut-scenes abruptly being but off by other ones. This continued all throughout our playthrough. Another annoying trend, was the inability to interact with things at the same time. Taking turns reading the numerous notes scattered in shared sections was not a particularly fun experience.
Overall, this game had a lot of potential with an interesting setting, but ultimately ended up being an incredibly frustrating experience.