The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan Review (Nintendo Switch OLED)

by Jim Smale · May 17, 2023

For our The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan Review, where we play a series of stand-alone, branching cinematic horror games that can also be played online with a friend. In Man of Medan, five friends set sail on a holiday diving trip that soon changes into something much more sinister.

The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan Review Pros:

Gorgeous graphics.
11.4GB download size.
HDR support and settings.
Invert axis and sensitivity sliders.
Accessibility options – Single action button, hold to complete button mash, disable QTE timeout, disable QTE combat timer, Dyslexia font, subtitles, subtitles background, subtitles text size, subtitles color, choice text size, and sub choice text size.
Multiplayer has two types – movie night (offline 2 – 5 players) and shared story (online Co-op 2 players).
The collections gallery shows off found secrets and pictures.
Tutorial pop-ups as you play.
Fully animated opening menu.
Three game difficulties – Forgiving, challenging, and lethal.
Scene selection for all completed scenes.
Decent loading times.
Film quality fmv and cutscenes.
Interactive survival gameplay.
Excellent voice work.
As you interact and play on the world your traits are affected and change how the game plays out going forward.
Multiple-choice encounters are the name of the game here.
Play how you want.
A lot of the game is quick time events (QTE).
Everybody will have a different experience.
It’s not all videos and reacting to them, you do get to freely walk around and interact with the world.
Interactive points show button prompts to help with the controls.
When you are moving around it’s in the third-person perspective.
Seamlessly blends action and cutscenes.
Best played with headphones.
Next-level cinematography.
Jump scares plenty.
In solo play you don’t play a character, in different scenes, you play someone else.

The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan Review Cons:

The text size options don’t show a preview.
Cannot rebind controls.
A few pop-ups and pop at times.
No touchscreen support.
At times you get some hard-cut transitions.
Gets very reflex-heavy.
Ugly textures in places.
When inspecting something you can turn it around, doing so causes an unnatural twisting of your wrist.
Very little camera control.
Sometimes you don’t realize an event has triggered or that you are out of the cutscenes.
The moving around part is sluggish.
Bad acting in places.

The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan:

Official website.

Developer: Supermassive Games

Publisher: Bandai Namco Europe

Store Links –

Nintendo

8/10
Graphics - 8/10
8/10
Sound - 8/10
8/10
Accessibility - 8/10
8/10
Length - 8/10
9/10
Fun Factor - 9/10

8.2/10

Summary

There is no doubt that this game has a gripping story, the way they have you interact with the world is basic but it works. Conversations shape the narrative and you are not in charge of just one person so you get to really mess around with the story in all new ways. I just really like how the story is paced, the characters have an excellent mix of OK guys and guys you just can’t stand. The performance of the Switch version is not the best but it’s functional, more of a big-screen game than a small-screen experience but it still holds up. I cannot go into all the twists and excellent Interactive elements of the game because to do so would rob you of so much.