Those guys are out panning for Manchurian gold, or whatever they think they’re going to find on this podcast.
Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket, and welcome, formally to the start of our Halloween season! We have a hopefully pretty satisfying variety of horror games to talk about this month, but first and foremost we’re going to be looking at one that takes a lot of its inspiration from horror movies, Man of Medan. Developed by Supermassive, Man of Medan is the first part of their ongoing “Dark Pictures” anthology series and plays very similarly to their previous game, Until Dawn. Your interaction is primarily focused around making choices in action and dialogue, with the rest of the mechanics being padded out by simple exploration and quick time events. The twist on what was set up in Until Dawn is that these games are designed to be played in a group of up to five people, with each person making decisions for one of the principle characters. While we didn’t have a full party of five, between the two of us, it did a good job of making you feel like your actions weighed on the other player and led to moments where we were yelling at the other player to try and influence them, which seems like the kind of experience this game was trying to foster. The other elements of the game, however, hold up a lot less positively under scrutiny. We’re going to be talking about game design in a series with so many branches to its story, the role difficulty plays in creating a satisfying multiplayer horror experience, and we learn what kind of fruit Crash Bandicoot picks up in a moment that fits perfectly into the discussion, I swear.
Thank you for joining us this week! We’re going to be pushing out several episodes fairly quickly to try and fit them into the appropriate spooky season, and the next game on our list for Pocket is going to be Fatum Betula, a game we know very little about, but should prove to be about as different from this as you can possibly get. And if you’re still in the mood for some terrifying audio entertainment, we have a playlist on our YouTube channel of all the horror games we’ve covered over the years, so maybe catch up on some of our backlog and play some classic (and not so classic, and sometimes not even real) games to make sure you’re in the spirit.