Five games to play if you liked Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan

Man of Medan offers a thrilling horror adventure where freedom of choice is your best weapon but also your worst enemy. Here are five other games to play next that offer a similar vibe.

Full-motion video games (FMVs) or more widely cinematic adventure games got a bad rap for decades as cheesy low-budget productions that were barely games and really barely interactive movies (see Night Trap for a prime example of this). But, they were games that focused more on story-telling than gameplay. Every once in a while when done correctly, that approach works incredibly well.

Today it’s not a massively popular genre but cinematic adventure games have carved out their own niche and there are some really great ones out there to discover. A recent big release in this category is Supermassive Games’ latest offering, Man of Medan.

In Man of Medan, you aren’t shooting a bunch of enemies or figuring out many puzzles or jumping from one platform to another. It’s a story that unfolds as you discover the secret behind a mystery that is possibly supernatural, trying to keep as many people alive as you can (or maybe not if you just want to see people die grisly deaths) and it mostly boils down to choices you make throughout the story. It’s a fun time with a lot of different ways for the story to go. But once you’ve exhausted all those, what if you want to play something in the same vein?

Here are five excellent choices for your next adventure:

#5. Return of the Obra Dinn

Sure, it has modern-day pirates and supernatural thrills, but at the heart of Man of Medan is one big mystery. What happened to this boat and the people on it? If the mystery part of Man of Medan is what appeals to you the most about the game, then Return of the Obra Dinn is a mystery game worth checking out.

The setting is a different time period but in Return of the Obra Dinn, you must also uncover what was the untimely fate of the passengers aboard an abandoned ship. The biggest difference here is there really isn’t an element of danger per se. You play as an insurance investigator that arrives after all the tragedy and horror has already transpired. You must use clues you find to piece together just what happened aboard this vessel. Some met a natural if tragic end, some not so natural. Some just disappeared.

You have a unique stopwatch tool called a Memento Mortem that allows you to return to a person’s moment of death and this will give you clues as to their fate, but it won’t solve the mystery for you. If you seek a compelling mystery to unravel that maybe is a little less tense than your experience with Man of Medan, Return of the Obra Dinn should be right up your alley.