The Dark Pictures: One of Medan in the Test

Developer Supermassive Games is known for a Tell-your-own-story Games like Until Dawn or Hidden Agenda. With their new anthology, The Dark Pictures, now, return back to their Horror roots and tell us a variety of spooky short stories, whose course and outcome once more completely in our Hand. The Start of the new series: an adventure on the Ghost ship.

From the rain in the eaves

One of Medan begins in the China of the 1940s: Two Crew members of a massive war ship, enjoy your short holiday in the countryside, treat yourself to a few Beers and beat the shit out of the year, market-Dummies, a fortune-teller, your evil promising future, prophesy, and bring you, as a player, so by the way, the control of the title in case of: run, around, lift things/look at, and by as fast as possible button pressure various Quick-Time Events master.

The country holiday ends a few minutes later, a rather unpleasant: Back on Board, you’ll admonished by a fist blow, that alcohol is prohibited on the high seas, strictly, and then fix into the ship’s hospital will be transferred to you sober her up there until you are fit enough for a few days in the ship’s jail are. Whatever – first of a round of sleep. And what follows in Horror Games to sleep? Exactly, evil is awakening …

An eerie sound pulls you right in the middle of the night: Anything on the ship not to go with the right things. Your suspicion is confirmed when you find that some of the other crew members have already passed: In fearsome poses, as they would have died from pure fear, or with fatal gunshot wounds, fired from their own weapons, not to stare at you. Your drinking buddy is not yet part of the Sacrifice, so you free him from his cell and makes you to explore the ship until you suddenly the children hear and shadowy figures through the steel of a laugh to see-lined corridors of the ship, scurrying. Wtf? In the cargo area of the ship will disappear from the nightmare, finally, reality: Your buddy, screams follow, and the shadow will expose seconds later, tangible monsters, the our character the same fate as his colleagues. Game Over – at least initially.







Dive trip with consequences

From here, the action jumps to characters in the present day our main: Alex, the smarter brother, Brad, his fiancee Julia and their brother Conrad are planning a dive trip to a previously undiscovered wreck and have hired for Fliss, the captain of the small Yacht Duke of Milan. The boat trip starts in the idyllic, but soon things go down the drain, and before you know it, put all the characters in bigger trouble than you could imagine – and ghosts are just one of their problems.

As in Until Dawn, decide on your actions during the Story, who survives of the five protagonists that are allowed to take their turns, the events of the game. Each dialog option that catapulted the group in certain directions, influenced their relationships with each other, shaping their individual personalities and open up therefore new options and story paths. The approximately four to five hours long the Story can take any output of consistently positive, without any deaths until completely fatal.

Notes on possible outputs to give you pictures that can be found throughout the game, and give you curves brief visions of a possible Future. You interpreted this correctly, you may meet sometimes, more targeted decisions – at least then, if you manage to master the regular Quick-Time Events. You ruined this, it ends in the normal case, rather bad for you and your current character.







A ship full of secrets

While you were exploring the wreck, and later the Ghost ship you can find lots of “secrets” in the Form of documents, Faded, which you can investigate, badges, logbooks, and more, to tell you all more about what happened on the ship, and the mystery of the creepy events there to educate.

All of these little Tidbits to find, is practically the game in the game, and probably needs several iterations of the story – what is us to probably the coolest Side-Feature of One of Medan brings: the Multiplayer mode and the Multiplayer modes. Who the title alone I want to play, you can do this, of course, do you have just the possibility of One of Medan with either a second friend online to gamble or Couch-Multiplayer with up to four other players on the Team in attack to take, and then each of you his own character controls.

The common Gaming not only fun, it also takes significant influence on the game: While you can leave you in Solo-mode, namely to the fact that of your respective AI Partner perform certain actions, are your human cronies just as unpredictable as your self and lead you, sometimes the Story paths, which you would have discovered alone. In other words, the replay value is enormous – even if you revealed the real Story and the real mystery of the Ghost ship already.

Small Technology Of Hacker

Straight to the point: audio-visually presented , One of Medan for the most part fantastic. The graphics and animations are thanks to Mo-Cap the actual actor is good, the Voice Acting consistently great, and the sound design creates the creepy atmosphere of the Story perfectly to underline. Some small issues are there but The control is through the whole Game-through is a little bulky, action points are often only visible or selectable, if you stand in certain positions, and during my Tests I had the graphics is also a two-Time small Glitches, which could in the dialogues of strange lines through the image, scurry (who had to do with ghosts by the way, nothing). While I could see the latter easily over the bulky control, especially when often time-critical to Explore the surroundings, from time to time, but very tedious. Here, the series could improve in the next entry clearly.







CONCLUSION:

As a big Fan of Tell-your-own-Story-Games, as well as Until Dawn I was me on One of Medan especially happy and, by and Large, I get exactly what I had hoped: a (despite a bit of commonly-used Jump-Scares) atmospheric horror story with plenty of story paths, friendly characters, and – mostly – beautiful presentation. The playing time of just four to five hours, while not very long, but long enough, and, thanks to the high replay value (multiple Endings/paths, Multiplayer modes, secret-hunting) there are, finally, after the initial completion of the main story, still plenty to do and discover. Necessarily Supermassive Games for the subsequent part of the anthology should make improvements only at the stubborn panel, which provides again and again for a short frustration moments. From purchase to deter them but no one has to leave. All in all, is One of Medan is a successful continuation of the Supermassive concept, and a great introduction to the Dark Picturesseries, on the second part I already am.

What is The Dark Pictures: One of Medan is? Atmospheric Tell-your-own-Story-Horror adventure Until Dawn-makers
Platforms: PS4, XBox One, PC
Tested on: PS4-Version
Developer / Publisher: Supermassive Games / Bandai Namco
Release: 30. August 2019
Link: Official Website