“Choose Your Own Adventure” games seem to have dropped off the face of the Earth.  

Enter Supermassive Games (“Until Dawn”), who have pioneered a sub-genre of terrifying stories that revolve around player choice. Their surprise hit, “Until Dawn,” grabbed players with the promise that every choice meant something. If a character died, that was it. No “Game Over,” restart or second chance, just a funeral to attend. 

This spirit lives on in the heart of Supermassive’s newest horror anthology series “The Dark Pictures.” A collection of short horror stories that ask players to make choices for a succession of halfwit horror clichés and hope they survive to the end. With a new story being released every six months, at a reduced price compared to most games. The first of these stories is “Man of Medan,” based around the myth of the ghost ship, the Ourang Medan.

The story opens with four college students, Brad, Julie, Alex and Conrad, spending their summer vacation searching through old World War II wrecks with the help of their hired help, a French woman named Fliss. Things quickly go awry when pirates show up and take them hostage, once that happens it is up to the player to decide how things go. Being brave at the wrong time might get someone stabbed, be too cowardly and players might run out of time to save themselves.

It is this tension that lies at the heart of “Man of Medan,” running down the broken corridors of the ship knowing that one wrong move could get your skull smashed in with a spanner is not something films can easily recreate. This anxiety might be the only thing that can keep players engaged, as the writing and delivery can be disjointed. Which is a likely compromise that comes with all of the alternate pathways the story can take. 

In fact, the overall story tends to lead off to a fairly anticlimactic ending, with the mystery of the ship being hidden in collectable notes and documents. Sometimes finding a clue can change the course of the plot but for all of the games pulse pounding moments, it is fairly easy to get your charges out alive. 

The most prized clues are the photos, which provide players with a premonition of the future. This could be anything from showing someone escaping the pirates to watching a favorite character fall to his/her death.  

Graphically speaking everything is great, with the ships eerie design and some of the inventive ways characters can meet their ultimate fate. Sadly, the unwieldly set of static cameras and polio-inspired movement system makes it hard to appreciate.

To improve upon the “Until Dawn” formula, new multiplayer modes have been added. The movie night mode asks you and four friends to split up the cast, which thankfully can be played without needing extra copies of the game. It is good fun and certainly brightens up an otherwise lazy Saturday night. 

However, it might quickly turn into a series of “find the plot hole.” As many of the game’s dialogue options become disjointed and nonsensical as time goes on. In order to keep up with the millions of ways the plot can go, it is normal to see characters appear out of nowhere or magically transport across the room or simply talk about something wildly unrelated. 

In the end the only thing that keeps “Man of Medan” a worthy purchase is its novelty. As well as living up to the promise of making your choices matter. Hopefully the team at Supermassive can improve upon things for its next entry into the anthology “Little Hope.” 

Image from Playstation via YouTube