#it's uncreative and hackneyed

[blueskyscribe]

Regardless of whether he's called Pablo or Wheeljack or whatever, his face is just awful. Like I'm sorry but the lips looked just as bad on the big screen.

The glasses were extremely unsexy and stupid looking, which is wild b/c how do you do that? How do you make robot glasses unsexy? Any artist here could have done better.

[canichangemyblogname]

Movie Review: RW&RB

Score: 2.5/5 ⭐ Conclusion: Yaoi Fanfiction strikes again Recommendation: do not watch WC: 1730

I will credit Casey McQuiston, the author of Red White & Royal Blue, for writing a book where coming out is depicted as something that can be stressful and daunting but not life-endangering. Her story actually focused on what Alex and Henry’s relationship would mean for history, each other, and their respective countries. These two characters actually grappled with what it means to be queer and in the public eye. They contemplated the erasure of queerness from history and struggled with the (false) choice between making history and being their authentic selves. In the book, both characters took time to discover what they wanted out of life and their relationship in a way that felt genuine. Alex exploring his queer identity felt organic and unique to his background and social position.

However, the book Red White & Royal Blue is prone to conventionality, cliche, dull and brusque dialogue, and heavy-handed political references (oh, the emails). The book features uncreative and baffling political conflict that could rival the taxation treaty debacles in The Phantom Menace, and it reveals the author’s inexperience with the subtleties of U.S. and U.K. history and politics. Additionally, the book's happy resolution feels underdeveloped. The characters got their happily ever after before the dust settled. It felt like the author slapped a bandage over the very-real relationship hurdles Alex and Henry had yet to work through.

Fortunately, the book was written to be a fun, queer rom-com rather than a serious work of fiction with a profound political message. It’s frivolous. It’s charming. The Los Angeles Review of Books called it "calorie-free." Unfortunately, the movie exacerbates the book's faults. The movie’s story is conventional and cliche in the worst possible ways. It tells a shallow and uninspiring story. The writing and performances will not leave the audience with many deep or complicated thoughts about the pressures of conformity, the harms of assumptions, or the benefits of safe spaces to come into one's "self." There was no message to sit with and contemplate when the credits rolled. It's perfectly forgettable. RW&RB is not a story that will stick in your mind or leave behind a profound legacy. In fact, the whole movie feels a little like a series of product placements for condoms and lube. Oh, and PrEP. 

Virality leaves no place for nuance, so those online break stories into small and often context-less moments: a series of gifs and a set of expressions. People hyper-focus on a particular moment— often one that is emotional or intimate— in which they wish to be in one of the character's shoes. They want an image or video that can be circulated rapidly and widely that, when separated from its context, allows any meaning or emotion to infuse with the imagery. RW&RB, the movie, delivers on that, and only that. It was made for the virality of the contextless moment where viewers can imprint their wants, desires, and feelings onto the scene. That's why movie promotion consisted primarily of 30-second clips of intimacy and emotional stills, and that's why the movie’s continued hype is primarily seen in a series of fan cams of the characters where their gazes, touches, tears, and smiles are reserved not for each other, but the viewer.

As a result of this hollow, context-less production, Red White & Royal Blue is formulaic and hackneyed, lacks personality, and its plot has been stripped of the messaging and the mental and emotional conflict which redeems the book. Compared to the book, the movie attempted to dedicate one, maybe two scenes to the importance of privacy and coming into your own on your own time in a space and environment where it is safe to explore identity. However, these scenes come too late and have no prior development. For those unfamiliar with the characters, the scenes feel out of place, and the concerns the characters raise in these scenes seem to come out of left field. When Alex confronts Henry about ghosting him near the end of the movie, I half expected Henry to mention something about Alex not keeping things casual enough because he can only “belong” to Alex momentarily, as this is all they had previously discussed. I was not expecting Galitzine to give a very heartfelt monologue about the pressures of politics and existing in the public eye as a queer man because the movie had forgotten to provide us with Henry’s motivations and main goals at any point previously. Production cut too much from book plot lines that focused on the main characters finding themselves and figuring out what they want, leaving them unable to develop the primary conflict later in the story. If the book is calorie-free, the movie is devoid of any nutrition.

The lack of depth leaves this movie feeling more like a Hallmark movie, a Disney Channel Original, or even the intro scene of a porno where everyone is talking and still has their pants on. It’s bland, and the acting certainly did not add any flavor. Zakhar Perez’s performance comes straight out of a Nickelodeon special. As Rachel Handler put it in Vulture, his performance oscillates between “Overtrained Child Star and Did Somebody Order a Big Sausage Pizza.” Gone is the nerdy, studious, earnest, and politically impressive Alex from the book, replaced by an arrogant, cheesy, ripped frat boy. On the exact other end of the spectrum is one of the few decent performances in the movie. Galitzine brought his dramatic background to a tonally inconsistent movie, making him feel out of place for the production quality and the genre and leaving me to wonder why the hell he took this role. And do not get me started on Thurman’s interpretation of a Texas accent.

This story felt rushed and stiff, and the character’s relationships and interactions felt forced and artificial. The production struggles with lackluster writing, exemplified by painfully cliche dialogue (and I thought the blunt dialogue of the book was bad). The story lacks a consistent tone, trying for a somber, serious, and heartfelt tone in a few scenes toward the end, something which felt very out of place for the Hallmark-esque camp of the rest of the story. It's as if the director and writers forgot the genre they were creating for. Scenes intended to be endearing were often flat and stale, while intimate and heart-wrenching scenes were painfully awkward, worsened by a seeming lack of post-production editing that left the characters blinking at each other on screen and very strange lighting decisions that left every scene so bright they bordered on overexposed. The movie has the same quality but none of the personality of a free YouTube movie, exemplified by insipid green-screen backgrounds and visual effects. The sets were tiny, the wardrobe uninspiring, and the crowds were eerily devoid of extras.

RW&RB’s terrible portrayal of U.S. and U.K. politics is emblematic of its significant writing, messaging, and direction issues. No one involved in the production understands how an election is run or how British society operates. Why was the first family involved in developing campaign strategies and discussing them on state time with the White House Chief of Staff? What was that mess of an electoral map featured at the end of the movie? (First, discussing a campaign on state time is a crime. Second, the President and Chief of Staff do not handle the development of campaign strategies. Third, a Democrat has not lost Minnesota since ’72, and if they were to lose Minnesota, the election would look more like ’72, where 49 of the 50 states voted for Nixon.) Who allowed a member of the Royal Family to appear at the DNC, practically endorsing the Democratic candidate, and later join her on stage for her acceptance speech? Where are the British tabloids? What is a Hanover-Stuart (also: how and why)? How many times would this movie call the third-in-line for the throne the Prince of Wales and the heir? The British government is homophobic, but the US is a bastion of progressiveness? Texas, blue? MSNBC???

These inaccurate and inadequate depictions of real-world issues and historical systems ultimately distract from the fact that this movie makes no commentary on queerness in modern politics despite that being a theme of the book. This movie critically lacks notice of the social, historical, and political nuances of male same-sex attraction or queerness in U.S. and U.K. politics. So much so that I would go so far as to say the movie is tone-deaf. For example, the main antagonist from the book— a homophobic Republican politician prone to abusing his power— is replaced by a mean, jealous ex-partner who is also a queer Latino and a political reporter. An example of tyranny was replaced by a political minority whose job is a pillar of democracy. 

The main characters’ relationship is “gay” only insofar as they're both men, but their relationship often seems to lack queerness. Director Matthew López described the movie as one of the most expensive fan fictions ever made. (What did that money go into because it could not have been the CGI?) The fan fiction tropes the movie employs— enemies to friends to lovers, royalty AU, forced companionship, relationship of convenience, mutual pining, etc.— don't just make the story devoid of any real human connection but also seem to "tame" the characters into a new set of social boxes. It's like these tropes provide an "acceptable" reason to be gay and, in the process, erase a man's queerness so he's gay only in ways that heterosexual people or heterosexist society can imagine. The movie filters queerness through a heterosexual lens and replaces one set of social conventions with another. The main characters become escapist fantasies that are just bland enough for straight women to project onto and conventional enough not to be offensive. Because this movie is escapism and self-indulgence for the straight audience, it has a very narrow view of how queer relationships should be. It's also the perfect escapism for straight women because no woman is featured in the relationship. No woman has to have her heart broken. No woman has to confront social taboos. No woman has to risk anything. It's just two hot guys. I keep returning to what Jackson McHenry said in Vulture: "It smacks of all the tropes of Yaoi-style stories written about gay men.”

I also still cannot figure out what warranted the R rating in this movie.

[cdfreak]

Good to know that my argument slapped so hard the only response you can muster is yelling random shit about genitalia that even your average incel would consider hackneyed uncreative.

[outoflimbo]

small subgenres of hackneyed, obnoxious, uncreative youtubers:

those who go down “rabbit holes” on the internet (always using that term, for some reason)

horror youtubers who talk about works of art purely in the sense of whether or not they are real. debunky boys. heavy overlap with above.

people that just read articles from the cutting room floor.

people that just read askreddit threads.

[samdelurvanrafigon]

An end credits scene for a movie where characters dance to a real life pop song is hackneyed and uncreative. However, a climax for a movie taking place at a concert for a fictional musician is a classic, a decision eternally favored by the muses

[usamyzonians]

This came up in talking with a friend about characters and tragic backstories.  You know, one of those things that supposedly is the only way to make a character interesting?

There’s this old cliché that the characters you write are extensions of yourself.  I don’t know how generally true that is, but I’ve noticed one thing over the last couple of years of therapy: as my understanding of trauma and PTSD increases, it becomes more apparent that I have a tendency to frame characters in a way where they end up specifically demonstrating symptoms of PTSD.

This isn’t done to make the characters tragic, necessarily.  I don’t think of a lot of them as having bad or even traumatic pasts, though there are certainly some that do.  It would be horribly uncreative to write everyone the same way.

But then, that’s not necessarily surprising.  I’ve spent a good chunk of my life in denial.  Hell, I own beachfront property there.  The only way for me to be even remotely functional in life is for me to not process a lot of this shit.  And then it all catches up to me in one big burst, but that’s another story for another time.

I certainly don’t want to have all my characters suffer from PTSD or the like.  There are a couple where it makes sense.  It’s just that I thought the need to make everyone have a tragic backstory was hackneyed back when I was a teenager, and my estimation has not risen with time.

It’s more like I have difficulty framing things in any other way.  To people who know me, this probably isn’t all that surprising.  But hey, like I said, I’ve been living in denial.

[gamerszone2019-blog]

The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan Review - Synchronized Sinking

New Post has been published on https://gamerszone.tn/the-dark-pictures-man-of-medan-review-synchronized-sinking/

The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan Review - Synchronized Sinking

Man of Medan is set almost entirely at sea on an enormous, abandoned boat. Loosely based on the real-life mystery of the OSS Ourang Medan, which became a shipwreck in the late 1940s after its entire crew were lost under mysterious circumstances, Man of Medan is also the first part of Supermassive Games’ proposed Dark Pictures Anthology–a series of short, branching horror narrative experiences in the vein of its tremendous 2015 surprise hit, Until Dawn. If you’ve played Until Dawn, you’ll know what to expect. But despite a smart online co-op mode, Man of Medan’s weak narrative ultimately makes it a disappointing first installment.

The game’s plot jumps between five different playable characters who are all experiencing the same event. You’ll determine their ultimate fates by making decisions for them, as well as responding to quick-time events. There are reportedly 69 different potential deaths you can experience (including those of non-playable characters), but it’s also entirely possible that your whole crew will survive. Alternatively, they might all die. Man of Medan’s main selling point is that your decisions will affect how things play out, how the relationships between your characters will develop, and what you’ll uncover and experience along the way.

In conversations, and at pivotal points in the plot, you’ll often be given three options, one of which is always to say or do nothing. So focused is Man of Medan on its story, there are no puzzles to solve or combat systems to master outside of these choices, just lots of exploring and quick-time events. However, the game is plagued by a big central problem: a fundamentally weak plot.

The story isn’t engaging, as the player is given little reason to care about the characters and the horror tropes being explored mostly feel hackneyed and uncreative. After a brief prologue scene set in the ’40s, you spend Man of Medan’s four-hour (give or take) runtime in the present day. The story opens with the crew planning a dive to a previously untouched sunken fighter plane from World War II, which ultimately leads to a series of events that sees them trapped on the Medan, a seemingly haunted abandoned ship, held captive by a pirate gang who are convinced that the ship–which is riddled with dead bodies–contains treasure. Naturally, things start going bump in the night, and the gang finds themselves dealing with various ghouls and terrors too.

There are plot holes and character inconsistencies throughout, some minor, some more blatant. It’s perhaps easy to forgive the questionable presence of rats all over the boat, still gnawing on hunks of meat that have been on the ship since the 40s, but it’s less easy to excuse how blasé the characters act about the horrifying situations they find themselves in. They’re mostly unlikeable, too–There’s the cool but insecure Alex, his dorky younger brother Brad, Alex’s outgoing, wealthy partner Julia, Julia’s obnoxious but well-meaning brother Conrad, and Fliss, the captain of the small boat the four have chartered at the story’s opening. The dialogue is generally not very good; at times it successfully recreates the feeling of watching a fun-but-silly teen slasher, occasionally hitting that good-bad sweet-spot as a character awkwardly refers to something as ‘lit’ or flirts awkwardly, but it can also be annoying when the five central characters’ interactions sound stilted and unrealistic. Without spoiling anything, the story also explains a little too much about what’s happening on the Medan in a way that makes repeated playthroughs much less satisfying.

There’s also an over-reliance on jump scares, which cheapens the horror experience. One standout sequence midway through the game that does a great job of getting under your skin, as Brad finds himself stuck in a looping hallway that grows just a bit weirder every time he travels down it, but otherwise Man of Medan is reliant on spring-loaded cats and lots of suddenly-morphing faces. On the plus side, it looks tremendous–the character models can be a bit waxy, but the ship is extremely detailed and creepy, and the game effectively communicates how unpleasant the act of exploring a creaky rustbucket full of dark corners and rotting corpses must be. The trade-off, at least on a base PS4, is that animations frequently stutter, breaking the mood as frames slip away.

There are pacing issues, too, especially with the extremely slow opening section that weighs down repeat playthroughs. While you can see different scenes or experience unique outcomes with each playthrough, some scenes will be essentially unchanged each time, which can quickly grate. You’ll also occasionally have to check in on ‘The Curator’, an omnipresent suited man who is clearly meant to be the mascot for and host of the Dark Pictures Anthology. He’s a pompous version of the Crypt Keeper (from Tales From The Crypt), but without any of the “good evening, boys and ghouls” merriment you want from a horror anthology host, and as a result, he doesn’t quite fit.

Multiplayer is Man of Medan’s big addition to the formula laid out by Until Dawn. There are two forms of co-op: Shared Story, in which two players tackle the game together online, and Movie Night, where up to five players can play together offline, playing through the chapters of whichever characters they are assigned at the start. Playing together on the couch is perhaps meant to evoke that “don’t go in there” feeling of watching a fun horror movie with friends, but Man of Medan’s relatively straightforward level designs, which never make it seem dangerous to wander off-path and explore the open doors and alternate pathways you encounter, don’t particularly facilitate this. Death is more often down to a failed QTE rather than a dialogue choice you made or because you decided to investigate something spooky. In fact, right near the end, a mistimed button press can be the difference between everyone surviving and everyone dying–being responsible for that in front of your friends is more embarrassing than it is funny.

However, so many of the game’s issues feel like much less of a problem when you jump into the smart and innovative online mode. It is, without a doubt, the definitive way to experience Man of Medan, especially if you’re playing with another person who is familiar with the material. Shared Story sees you both playing at the same time, taking control of different characters as their scenes play out simultaneously. You’ll both, eventually, get a turn with every character (if they live long enough), and often your paths will diverge. Once the five main characters meet after the initial prologue, Shared Story immediately offers a more engaging experience than the single-player campaign can.

Early on, for instance, I played through a sequence where two characters dived down to inspect something underwater, while my co-op buddy stayed on the boat and experienced a different part of the story. In single-player, you’ll still see both scenes, but one will be greatly truncated. In online co-op, some scenes are expanded, or you might occasionally see parts of the story, or make choices, that cannot be accessed in single-player.

This led to the two of us conspiring to make certain things happen, to bend the game’s story to our will. We were more successful with some outcomes than others (a failed quick-time event led to an unexpected death early on), but working together to achieve dramatic satisfaction, and choosing when to reveal what just happened and when to let the other player try to figure out what we’d done in our scenes, was a delight. Each player won’t see every scene when playing this way, and it’s entirely possible to play without ever communicating, which makes the plot more unpredictable.

No matter how much or little you choose to share, though, Shared Story is absolutely the right way to play the game. It’s very well designed; my co-op partner and I never found ourselves waiting for the other player to hurry up and trigger the next cutscene, and being able to see how your friend is trying to direct a scene, and deciding whether to help or hinder them in that, is excellent. It feels like you’re working together to wring as many interesting outcomes as you can out of the game, and effectively doubling the number of potential choices leads to a much stronger sense of variety.

Man of Medan is still telling a weak story, though, as much as Shared Story plasters over this with its excellent take on co-op, which lets you plan things out and work together to craft the narrative you want to tell (and kill the characters you find the most annoying). If you can organize a session with someone else who owns the game and play through the whole thing together, it’s an excellent experience; but if you’re after another single-player horror narrative experience like the one offered in Until Dawn, it’s very disappointing. As a show of the potential for the Dark Pictures Anthology, Man of Medan is largely a success, but as a first episode, it leaves plenty to be desired.

Source : Gamesport

[gamerszone2019-blog]

The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan Review - Ship Of Ghouls

New Post has been published on https://gamerszone.tn/the-dark-pictures-man-of-medan-review-ship-of-ghouls/

The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan Review - Ship Of Ghouls

Man of Medan is set almost entirely at sea on an enormous, abandoned boat. Loosely based on the real-life mystery of the OSS Ourang Medan, which became a shipwreck in the late 1940s after its entire crew were lost under mysterious circumstances, Man of Medan is also the first part of Supermassive Games’ proposed Dark Pictures Anthology–a series of short, branching horror narrative experiences in the vein of its tremendous 2015 surprise hit, Until Dawn. If you’ve played Until Dawn, you’ll know what to expect. But despite a smart online co-op mode, Man of Medan’s weak narrative ultimately makes it a disappointing first installment.

The game’s plot jumps between five different playable characters who are all experiencing the same event. You’ll determine their ultimate fates by making decisions for them, as well as responding to quick-time events. There are reportedly 69 different potential deaths you can experience (including those of non-playable characters), but it’s also entirely possible that your whole crew will survive. Alternatively, they might all die. Man of Medan’s main selling point is that your decisions will affect how things play out, how the relationships between your characters will develop, and what you’ll uncover and experience along the way.

In conversations, and at pivotal points in the plot, you’ll often be given three options, one of which is always to say or do nothing. So focused is Man of Medan on its story, there are no puzzles to solve or combat systems to master outside of these choices, just lots of exploring and quick-time events. However, the game is plagued by a big central problem: a fundamentally weak plot.

The story isn’t engaging, as the player is given little reason to care about the characters and the horror tropes being explored mostly feel hackneyed and uncreative. After a brief prologue scene set in the ’40s, you spend Man of Medan’s four-hour (give or take) runtime in the present day. The story opens with the crew planning a dive to a previously untouched sunken fighter plane from World War II, which ultimately leads to a series of events that sees them trapped on the Medan, a seemingly haunted abandoned ship, held captive by a pirate gang who are convinced that the ship–which is riddled with dead bodies–contains treasure. Naturally, things start going bump in the night, and the gang finds themselves dealing with various ghouls and terrors too.

There are plot holes and character inconsistencies throughout, some minor, some more blatant. It’s perhaps easy to forgive the questionable presence of rats all over the boat, still gnawing on hunks of meat that have been on the ship since the 40s, but it’s less easy to excuse how blasé the characters act about the horrifying situations they find themselves in. They’re mostly unlikeable, too–There’s the cool but insecure Alex, his dorky younger brother Brad, Alex’s outgoing, wealthy partner Julia, Julia’s obnoxious but well-meaning brother Conrad, and Fliss, the captain of the small boat the four have chartered at the story’s opening. The dialogue is generally not very good; at times it successfully recreates the feeling of watching a fun-but-silly teen slasher, occasionally hitting that good-bad sweet-spot as a character awkwardly refers to something as ‘lit’ or flirts awkwardly, but it can also be annoying when the five central characters’ interactions sound stilted and unrealistic. Without spoiling anything, the story also explains a little too much about what’s happening on the Medan in a way that makes repeated playthroughs much less satisfying.

There’s also an over-reliance on jump scares, which cheapens the horror experience. One standout sequence midway through the game that does a great job of getting under your skin, as Brad finds himself stuck in a looping hallway that grows just a bit weirder every time he travels down it, but otherwise Man of Medan is reliant on spring-loaded cats and lots of suddenly-morphing faces. On the plus side, it looks tremendous–the character models can be a bit waxy, but the ship is extremely detailed and creepy, and the game effectively communicates how unpleasant the act of exploring a creaky rustbucket full of dark corners and rotting corpses must be. The trade-off, at least on a base PS4, is that animations frequently stutter, breaking the mood as frames slip away.

There are pacing issues, too, especially with the extremely slow opening section that weighs down repeat playthroughs. While you can see different scenes or experience unique outcomes with each playthrough, some scenes will be essentially unchanged each time, which can quickly grate. You’ll also occasionally have to check in on ‘The Curator’, an omnipresent suited man who is clearly meant to be the mascot for and host of the Dark Pictures Anthology. He’s a pompous version of the Crypt Keeper (from Tales From The Crypt), but without any of the “good evening, boys and ghouls” merriment you want from a horror anthology host, and as a result, he doesn’t quite fit.

Multiplayer is Man of Medan’s big addition to the formula laid out by Until Dawn. There are two forms of co-op: Shared Story, in which two players tackle the game together online, and Movie Night, where up to five players can play together offline, playing through the chapters of whichever characters they are assigned at the start. Playing together on the couch is perhaps meant to evoke that “don’t go in there” feeling of watching a fun horror movie with friends, but Man of Medan’s relatively straightforward level designs, which never make it seem dangerous to wander off-path and explore the open doors and alternate pathways you encounter, don’t particularly facilitate this. Death is more often down to a failed QTE rather than a dialogue choice you made or because you decided to investigate something spooky. In fact, right near the end, a mistimed button press can be the difference between everyone surviving and everyone dying–being responsible for that in front of your friends is more embarrassing than it is funny.

However, so many of the game’s issues feel like much less of a problem when you jump into the smart and innovative online mode. It is, without a doubt, the definitive way to experience Man of Medan, especially if you’re playing with another person who is familiar with the material. Shared Story sees you both playing at the same time, taking control of different characters as their scenes play out simultaneously. You’ll both, eventually, get a turn with every character (if they live long enough), and often your paths will diverge. Once the five main characters meet after the initial prologue, Shared Story immediately offers a more engaging experience than the single-player campaign can.

Early on, for instance, I played through a sequence where two characters dived down to inspect something underwater, while my co-op buddy stayed on the boat and experienced a different part of the story. In single-player, you’ll still see both scenes, but one will be greatly truncated. In online co-op, some scenes are expanded, or you might occasionally see parts of the story, or make choices, that cannot be accessed in single-player.

This led to the two of us conspiring to make certain things happen, to bend the game’s story to our will. We were more successful with some outcomes than others (a failed quick-time event led to an unexpected death early on), but working together to achieve dramatic satisfaction, and choosing when to reveal what just happened and when to let the other player try to figure out what we’d done in our scenes, was a delight. Each player won’t see every scene when playing this way, and it’s entirely possible to play without ever communicating, which makes the plot more unpredictable.

No matter how much or little you choose to share, though, Shared Story is absolutely the right way to play the game. It’s very well designed; my co-op partner and I never found ourselves waiting for the other player to hurry up and trigger the next cutscene, and being able to see how your friend is trying to direct a scene, and deciding whether to help or hinder them in that, is excellent. It feels like you’re working together to wring as many interesting outcomes as you can out of the game, and effectively doubling the number of potential choices leads to a much stronger sense of variety.

Man of Medan is still telling a weak story, though, as much as Shared Story plasters over this with its excellent take on co-op, which lets you plan things out and work together to craft the narrative you want to tell (and kill the characters you find the most annoying). If you can organize a session with someone else who owns the game and play through the whole thing together, it’s an excellent experience; but if you’re after another single-player horror narrative experience like the one offered in Until Dawn, it’s very disappointing. As a show of the potential for the Dark Pictures Anthology, Man of Medan is largely a success, but as a first episode, it leaves plenty to be desired.

Source : Gamesport

[gamerszone2019-blog]

The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan Review - Port Holes And Plot Holes

New Post has been published on https://gamerszone.tn/the-dark-pictures-man-of-medan-review-port-holes-and-plot-holes/

The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan Review - Port Holes And Plot Holes

Man of Medan is set almost entirely at sea on an enormous, abandoned boat. Loosely based on the real-life mystery of the OSS Ourang Medan, which became a shipwreck in the late 1940s after its entire crew were lost under mysterious circumstances, Man of Medan is also the first part of Supermassive Games’ proposed Dark Pictures Anthology–a series of short, branching horror narrative experiences in the vein of its tremendous 2015 surprise hit, Until Dawn. If you’ve played Until Dawn, you’ll know what to expect. But despite a smart online co-op mode, Man of Medan’s weak narrative ultimately makes it a disappointing first installment.

The game’s plot jumps between five different playable characters who are all experiencing the same event. You’ll determine their ultimate fates by making decisions for them, as well as responding to quick-time events. There are reportedly 69 different potential deaths you can experience (including those of non-playable characters), but it’s also entirely possible that your whole crew will survive. Alternatively, they might all die. Man of Medan’s main selling point is that your decisions will affect how things play out, how the relationships between your characters will develop, and what you’ll uncover and experience along the way.

In conversations, and at pivotal points in the plot, you’ll often be given three options, one of which is always to say or do nothing. So focused is Man of Medan on its story, there are no puzzles to solve or combat systems to master outside of these choices, just lots of exploring and quick-time events. However, the game is plagued by a big central problem: a fundamentally weak plot.

The story isn’t engaging, as the player is given little reason to care about the characters and the horror tropes being explored mostly feel hackneyed and uncreative. After a brief prologue scene set in the ’40s, you spend Man of Medan’s four-hour (give or take) runtime in the present day. The story opens with the crew planning a dive to a previously untouched sunken fighter plane from World War II, which ultimately leads to a series of events that sees them trapped on the Medan, a seemingly haunted abandoned ship, held captive by a pirate gang who are convinced that the ship–which is riddled with dead bodies–contains treasure. Naturally, things start going bump in the night, and the gang finds themselves dealing with various ghouls and terrors too.

There are plot holes and character inconsistencies throughout, some minor, some more blatant. It’s perhaps easy to forgive the questionable presence of rats all over the boat, still gnawing on hunks of meat that have been on the ship since the 40s, but it’s less easy to excuse how blasé the characters act about the horrifying situations they find themselves in. They’re mostly unlikeable, too–There’s the cool but insecure Alex, his dorky younger brother Brad, Alex’s outgoing, wealthy partner Julia, Julia’s obnoxious but well-meaning brother Conrad, and Fliss, the captain of the small boat the four have chartered at the story’s opening. The dialogue is generally not very good; at times it successfully recreates the feeling of watching a fun-but-silly teen slasher, occasionally hitting that good-bad sweet-spot as a character awkwardly refers to something as ‘lit’ or flirts awkwardly, but it can also be annoying when the five central characters’ interactions sound stilted and unrealistic. Without spoiling anything, the story also explains a little too much about what’s happening on the Medan in a way that makes repeated playthroughs much less satisfying.

There’s also an over-reliance on jump scares, which cheapens the horror experience. One standout sequence midway through the game that does a great job of getting under your skin, as Brad finds himself stuck in a looping hallway that grows just a bit weirder every time he travels down it, but otherwise Man of Medan is reliant on spring-loaded cats and lots of suddenly-morphing faces. On the plus side, it looks tremendous–the character models can be a bit waxy, but the ship is extremely detailed and creepy, and the game effectively communicates how unpleasant the act of exploring a creaky rustbucket full of dark corners and rotting corpses must be. The trade-off, at least on a base PS4, is that animations frequently stutter, breaking the mood as frames slip away.

There are pacing issues, too, especially with the extremely slow opening section that weighs down repeat playthroughs. While you can see different scenes or experience unique outcomes with each playthrough, some scenes will be essentially unchanged each time, which can quickly grate. You’ll also occasionally have to check in on ‘The Curator’, an omnipresent suited man who is clearly meant to be the mascot for and host of the Dark Pictures Anthology. He’s a pompous version of the Crypt Keeper (from Tales From The Crypt), but without any of the “good evening, boys and ghouls” merriment you want from a horror anthology host, and as a result, he doesn’t quite fit.

Multiplayer is Man of Medan’s big addition to the formula laid out by Until Dawn. There are two forms of co-op: Shared Story, in which two players tackle the game together online, and Movie Night, where up to five players can play together offline, playing through the chapters of whichever characters they are assigned at the start. Playing together on the couch is perhaps meant to evoke that “don’t go in there” feeling of watching a fun horror movie with friends, but Man of Medan’s relatively straightforward level designs, which never make it seem dangerous to wander off-path and explore the open doors and alternate pathways you encounter, don’t particularly facilitate this. Death is more often down to a failed QTE rather than a dialogue choice you made or because you decided to investigate something spooky. In fact, right near the end, a mistimed button press can be the difference between everyone surviving and everyone dying–being responsible for that in front of your friends is more embarrassing than it is funny.

However, so many of the game’s issues feel like much less of a problem when you jump into the smart and innovative online mode. It is, without a doubt, the definitive way to experience Man of Medan, especially if you’re playing with another person who is familiar with the material. Shared Story sees you both playing at the same time, taking control of different characters as their scenes play out simultaneously. You’ll both, eventually, get a turn with every character (if they live long enough), and often your paths will diverge. Once the five main characters meet after the initial prologue, Shared Story immediately offers a more engaging experience than the single-player campaign can.

Early on, for instance, I played through a sequence where two characters dived down to inspect something underwater, while my co-op buddy stayed on the boat and experienced a different part of the story. In single-player, you’ll still see both scenes, but one will be greatly truncated. In online co-op, some scenes are expanded, or you might occasionally see parts of the story, or make choices, that cannot be accessed in single-player.

This led to the two of us conspiring to make certain things happen, to bend the game’s story to our will. We were more successful with some outcomes than others (a failed quick-time event led to an unexpected death early on), but working together to achieve dramatic satisfaction, and choosing when to reveal what just happened and when to let the other player try to figure out what we’d done in our scenes, was a delight. Each player won’t see every scene when playing this way, and it’s entirely possible to play without ever communicating, which makes the plot more unpredictable.

No matter how much or little you choose to share, though, Shared Story is absolutely the right way to play the game. It’s very well designed; my co-op partner and I never found ourselves waiting for the other player to hurry up and trigger the next cutscene, and being able to see how your friend is trying to direct a scene, and deciding whether to help or hinder them in that, is excellent. It feels like you’re working together to wring as many interesting outcomes as you can out of the game, and effectively doubling the number of potential choices leads to a much stronger sense of variety.

Man of Medan is still telling a weak story, though, as much as Shared Story plasters over this with its excellent take on co-op, which lets you plan things out and work together to craft the narrative you want to tell (and kill the characters you find the most annoying). If you can organize a session with someone else who owns the game and play through the whole thing together, it’s an excellent experience; but if you’re after another single-player horror narrative experience like the one offered in Until Dawn, it’s very disappointing. As a show of the potential for the Dark Pictures Anthology, Man of Medan is largely a success, but as a first episode, it leaves plenty to be desired.

Source : Gamesport