I loved Until Dawn until its last five minutes. A perfectly-pitched take on the teen horror genre, Supermassive’s choose your own adventure tale had me hooked up to the very end… until a character I’d struggled to keep alive for hours succumbed within the final few seconds. To be fair, I messed up – something to do with the game’s motion controls, I think. Clearly, four years later, I still care enough to be annoyed.
It’s been a long four years for Supermassive, too. Since Until Dawn, its creators have never quite had the chance to top its success – instead filling time with a raft of spin-offs, PlayStation VR games, and experiments for PlayLink. The Dark Pictures, the studio’s new horror game anthology, is something of a fresh start for the developer, then – and Man of Medan is its first chapter.
Due 30th August for PlayStation 4, but also PC and Xbox One, this new series will see Supermassive take its Until Dawn formula multi-platform (and to Unreal Engine, where Until Dawn and its VR spin-off used Guerilla’s famed Decima tech). Every game in the semi-regular series will tell its own story, with its own set of characters. All can live. All can die. I’m having flashbacks already.
