Supermassive Games, the British developer behind the stellar Until Dawn, have announced a new series of standalone horror games under the umbrella title of The Dark Pictures Anthology. The first in the series got a trailer and is titled Man of Medan.
Hugely excited to announce @TheDarkPictures Anthology – a series of intense, standalone cinematic horror games. The first game – #ManofMedan coming to PS4, Xbox and PC in 2019. pic.twitter.com/vpUqpk3oPC
— Supermassive Games (@SuperMGames) August 21, 2018
The game exudes the same atmospheric chill as Until Dawn did, and looks just as visually impressive. If playing to the same strengths, and the trailer certainly suggests as much, you’ll get to experience the horror through multiple characters’ perspectives, making on-the-fly decisions that might affect who survives and who doesn’t.
If you skipped out on Until Dawn it’s a cracking romp through teen horror tropes and does a fantastic job of letting you play against your own ideas and expectations. You play as a group of friends who return to a cabin in the woods one year after a friend vanished in that same area, slowly unravelling the sinister mystery surrounding her disappearance.
Until Dawn released to solid reviews in 2015 exclusively for the PS4, but Man of Medan is slated to released on PS4, Xbox One and PC after the studio’s shift to multi-platform.
The trailer shows a group of friends on a diving trip in search of some treasure. Brilliant idea. There’s mention of a mysterious wreck, time travel and curses, which seems to ensure everything goes wrong with some creepy-as-all-hell scenes of hands grabbing people from the water.
A little research suggests the game will focus on the Ourang Medan: a ghost ship that apparently became shipwrecked after its entire crew perished under suspicious circumstances. Ourang is Malay for “man” and Medan is the largest city on the island of Sumatra, so this all fits. Apparently when the ship was found, corpses were lying everywhere with frozen faces, gaping mouths and piercing glares, all without any signs of injury. That alone is enough to tingle spines.
Until Dawn set an excellent precedent and even had an amazing feature which recorded you, using the PlayStation camera, just before scares, so that you could later watch yourself cower like a kitten. It was tons of fun and I have high hopes of the upcoming series, which is Supermassive Games’ first non-VR horror since the 2015 title.
You can read our Until Dawn review here.
