Jump scare simulator
Shit camera
Shit voice acting
Shit characters
Shit story
No making sense
Just fun with friends laughing at this called horror game

How on earth do you go from Until Dawn to this. Literally everything is worse. Flat characters, boring story, uninteresting collectibles, worse QTE mechanics, an inferior future vision system, and somehow it looks worse too.

The setting is cool and the explanation behind the situation is interesting, but it needed far far more. Until Dawn’s direction and systems provided this game with everything it needed to be good, and yet it deliberately ignored them.

As for my results, I saved everyone, but one of the characters escaped at the start and so wasn’t there for 90% of the game. Not sure why there’s a path to make one character not even experience the game they’re in, and so everyone being alive felt very underwhelming. Not a strong start to this series.

Until Dawn was excellent. Man of Medan, not so much. I'm a good sucker for this sort of game, but Man of Medan just doesn't quite deliver. I was a big fan of Detroit, Heavy Rain and Until Dawn, so it seemed to me that Man of Medan was gonna be a slam dunk. But it's easily the worst of those.

The gist is real good. But the execution is a mess. The story is weak and it's a little too fast. The story is both in the way of itself and in a hurry to get it over with. There's not enough time to rest or enough backstory to get attached to the characters like in Until Dawn. There's not enough in the stakes or enough twists like in Heavy Rain or Until Dawn. The subject matter and universe isn't particularly engaging like Detroit: Become Human.

The heart rate minigame kinda felt like bullshit, I also didn't enjoy how often the 'right' choice required not doing anything (nor how quickly and easily it was to figure that out). Also, a pet peeve of mine in all of these games is abundantly present in Man of Medan. I hate when these games force you to slow walk and double back perusing every corner of an area when the pace of the game is picking up so rapid fire. You miss out on all the little secrets and easter eggs if you don't. But you crush the tension and fear when you have to slow plod around the room while your compadres sprint and and holler down the hall.

Ultimately the gameplay in these things is relatively thin. So it has to be crisp. And it's not. Even worse, the story has to be excellent. And it's vey much not. The graphics are still nice, production quality is pretty good. I love the concept of the narrator and the anthology nonsense. But execution is so bad. Dialogue is a mess, story is obvious and rushed. Just a real pity.

Oh I got a real bone to pick with this one.

I have never played Until Dawn, but like many i watched many playthroughs, so I know a lot about it, and I think that game is actually great example of a contrived concept that they ran with and ended up making special. You start hating the dialouge and characters but then you realize it was misdirection to lower your guard for when the cool stuff happens.

So then you get to Man of Medan but the problem is that there isn't any point where the story gets better. It starts fairly interesting and then when it's over you don't feel like anything happened.

None of the characters are likeable aside from the dorky brother. The captain was also pretty. Depending on your choices you may not even see one of them that much.

This game just felt really padded and stretched out. And the jumpscares are obnoxious. Games like this make me consider that Until Dawn was a happy accident, because all of the anthology games are so bland and similar to each other: long boring hallways with loud annoying jumpscares. Mechanically it's similar to Until Dawn but it's lacking any of the substance that was there.

The FINAL DECISION IS THE STUPIDEST THING IVE EVER SEEN- to get the good ending you have to FAIL the quick time event????!!!!! The only time in the entire game where you're suppose to. Yeah, no thanks.

Just stick to Until Dawn and don't think about this one.

A game about choices that doesn't understand their role in storytelling. A horror game that doesn't understand horror. A game that concludes a decent setup with an embarrassing ending.

The first half is bursting with jump scares, even the extremely silly ones where a deformed face screams at you directly, giving this high-budget game the feel of a free Unity horror game. We get some actual breathing room towards the end but at the same time the jump scares that still do occur destroy any leftover atmosphere. This is worsened by a dumbed-down narrative. The Storyteller is a childish addition, the archetype of a mysterious meta person who's above the narrative. His sole contributions are nebulous predictions and a patronizing pat on the back if you managed to save people - and maybe he reprimands you if someone died. I wouldn't know, I didn't bother to check any more endings.

And y'know, I got to my first ending and it sucked ass - a completely unexplained conflict suddenly emerged for that shitty 'ooooOOOoooo the evil thing is still out there' moment. I redid a dumb decision I made towards the end and saved everyone, but that ending is almost exactly the same and it still sucked ass. I even watched an ending compilation and they all sucked ass. If I let someone escape early and then save everyone else later on, why does that first someone come back to the spooky ghost ship alone and they don't even try to call each other before, while in the other endings he returns obviously not alone?

As often present in horror media, there's an ideology of nihilism where mostly bad things simply happen and you're forced to live with them. This cheap trick has little bearing because death can be thrown in at any time. Even worse, the game later tries and fails to rationalize the spooky happenings instead of staying with a purely supernatural explanation. As seen before in The Suicide of Rachel Foster, rationalization does not make horror more grounded, believable or impactful.

So what bearing do your choices have in the end? In a good narrative or even your local DnD campaign, the entire world changes with you. Here, there are binary choices: you survive or you don't. There is no moral, there is no larger point, character arcs begin and get thrown away. There's only a bunch of cutscenes with no emotional release. The gamification of the narrative can be seen by people commenting on how shocked they were when an early innocuous decision has grave consequences later on. One person even said that the storyteller is their favorite character. He's not a character, he's the writer's desperate attempt to give a nihilistic narrative an even more nihilistic twist.

Games like this are built on the belief that there's always a choice, but this one doesn't have an answer to any of them. As The Armed sang not so long ago:

Expectations, secret rattlesnakes
It’s never really how it happens
It’s never really how it happens