NOCLIP Pocket E31 - Don't Stab Brad - Man of Medan

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.