Following my experience with The Inpatient, I was excited to see what Supermassive Games planned to do with The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan. While the demo takes place towards the beginning of the game, there was a brief video to set the mood for what happened prior. There isn’t much, basically a bunch of friends on a boat with one telling a scary story, until the horror becomes real.
The boat is hijacked by, for lack of a better term, pirates and you need to deal with the situation. This made for a thrilling demo, because there are logical quick time events (QTE) related to their attacks and two radically different ways to deal with the situation.
Players could be calm and wait for an opening or decide to be hostile and create an opening. I decided to go with the latter and a lot happened. I managed to get free, take one of them hostage, overplayed my hand and got beat. I genuinely don’t know if a different set of choices would’ve yielded better results, but it ultimately doesn’t matter.
Not because this is a demo at E3, though that didn’t help, but the adventure ends when another mysterious ship appeared. It looks like there is a lot of story to tell, with the developers saying your choices will have repercussions, none of which really manifested in the demo, making me excited to see where the road goes.