Headscratchers / Man of Medan

• So is the Manchurian Gold essentially a hyper-potent form of DMT or similar psychedelics? It manifests as a gas, the effects take hold in a very short time and the hallucinations are quite vivid.
  • Yes, it's a weapons-grade hallucinogen.
• In one run, Brad can hide under the bunk bed and is not present on the freighter. How do the pirates not take the hint that they're one guy short?
  • The pirates probably never saw him. He's below deck in the initial encounter and hiding when they hijack the ship.
    • How could they not notice him, though? He's sleeping in the bunk right beneath Conrad, which Junior is assigned to subdue. Perhaps Brad is a -very- light sleeper, and he woke up and heard the pirates boarding and decided to hide under the bed... for some reason.
    • Or Brad could be a very heavy sleeper, and is bundled underneath his covers since he's seasick. It's also possible for Conrad to hit Junior with a bottle, which would make Junior more likely to just get out of there, especially since he's not that ruthless.

• In the Best Ending, Denny is last seen miraculously alive, bashing in a present-day soldier's face with Olson's sledgehammer. What happens to him afterwards?
  • He'll probably die eventually, or if they send more soldiers to investigate, he'll be detained.

• How on earth have the rats survived on the ship for as long as they had before the cast came on-board? I mean, there has to be a limit on how much rations there were stashed in storage and expiration dates on them, so...how?
  • Cannibalism is very common in rodents. Expired food also might not be as much of an issue for them.
  • Would cannibalism and expired rations really sustain them for decades, though?
  • It's mentioned that the ship hasn't been found for decades. Perhaps it has and no-one has survived (hence the ship remaining missing for decades), providing free rat-food.

• What substance is this Manchurian Gold exactly? As far as we know it's a powerful airborne hallucinogen, coloured yellowish-green with dark green gases.
  • A testing report mentions that it's a crystalline dust of some sort, which would make it similar to LSD. It was either made gaseous from the lightning strike, or was carried on air currents when its container was ruptured.

• Why would the military bother detaining or killing the survivors? All secret projects from the time period were declassified long before the survivors stumbled across the ship. The military would be shooting or detaining civilians to keep a secret that was already declassified decades ago. This is further compounded by the fact that the Coast Guard can show up to save the day if Conrad escaped early in the game, and they don't bother killing the survivors despite the Coast Guard being part of the military.
  • Maybe Manchurian Gold wasn't declassified; it's certainly dangerous enough to make that plausible. The military also doesn't necessarily know that the ship is the Ourang Medan, since they don't find that out until after the rescue in the detainment ending.

• Why does the Coast Guard driving the boat allow Conrad to board the ship in search of his friends? How did Conrad grab the Idiot Ball in such an egregious manner? Why didn't he do a lap around the freighter to ensure that his friends weren't already rescued?
  • Conrad's not exactly the brightest bulb (or at best is very impulsive), which at least explains his actions.

• Why do the survivors try using the ship's 70-year-old radio instead of one on the Duke of Milan? And how does it still work?
  • They're already on the ship and would just have to find their way back out, which would bottleneck themselves on the Milan if the pirates found them. As for it still working, maybe it's because it's a robust military system that wasn't too exposed to the elements and essentially sealed up the entire time.
  • Also, the cutscene of the boat running into the Ourang Medan shows the radio mast getting ripped off the Duke of Milan.

• There wasn't actually anything supernatural going on, meaning the Ourang Medan has just been drifting around for 70 years. Possibly excepting the incident described in an early 1948 Indonesian newspaper, is this the first time the ship's been found or has every previous time just been covered up and it's just been left to continue drifting again? And which is less believable? No other ghost ship is known to have been found free drifting for more than a year, maybe two without being known, so it seems unlikely that this one would have made it over 70 years. If the US military had found or been alerted to it, one would think they'd either make efforts to recover or sink the ship rather than let it continue drifting with an important secret. If someone else had found it, it would seem likely that either we'd see signs of them also dying on the ship or that they wouldn't have just left it drifting without saying a word about it. (There is a question as to how much of the real life legend of the Ourang Medan is true, but given that said legend ends with the ship exploding, at least some of it has to be incorrect in-story.)
  • It's probably just been drifting all this time. The Pacific Ocean is huge, and the ship is much farther south than its return route to the US. The ending where the characters are detained seems to indicate that the military didn't know where the Ourang Medan was beforehand.
    • Sure, the Pacific is huge, but this still would beat the standing record for time to first spotting a free drifting ghost ship by roughly 70 years. Nobody's happened to run across it in all this time?
    • It may very well have been spotted beforehand. Could be it just wasn't positively identified, but was known of.
    • The ship is full of gas that makes you hallucinate. Eventually the ship is going to rot away and sink, taking the Manchurian Gold with it. Maybe the military and America did find it and, knowing what was on board, deemed it to dangerous and left it to the elements and nature?
    • An engineer's log reveals that shortly after violence erupted on the ship, the order was given to drop anchor. The Ourang Medan hasn't been free drifting at all, and Brad can mention in a talk with Fliss that while people have gone looking for it, they were looking in the wrong place. A map shows that the ship was far off it's original course, and Brad only managed to find it by essentially guessing where it could be based on its point of origin and getting lucky.

• In a Golden Ending, If you save Junior and keep everyone alive, he doesn't interact with the others while they're back on the Duke of Milan or with the coastguard. Was he just happy to be rid of the mist he was inhaling or what?
  • He probably just feels guilty more than anything, and quite reasonably doesn't want to talk to the people he had a hand in mistreating. Plus his brother and fellow crew member are dead as far as he knows.
    • One of the planned endings for the game involved a much more climatic scene where the players confront Olson while the ship is on fire and sinking. It's been speculated due to leaked data that Junior would have had a much bigger role in this ending by attempting to help the players subdue his brother. Unfortunately, this ending was completely cut.
    • Fortunately, this possible scenario was added into the game in September 2022.

• Here's a great question. If you get an ending where everyone escapes on the Duke, whose driving the boat?

• What in the world does the possessed Olson kill Danny ending mean? I've seen playthroughs where Olson was cut in half and he still killed Danny. Despite the fact everything was supposed to be a hallucination Danny dies meaning something choked him but what? As I said there are endings where Olson is flat out cut in half and still kills Danny in the credits scene.
  • Danny could have suffocated (or had fear-induced cardiac arrest, etc.) and just hallucinated Olson was choking him.
• It's totally plausible to buy the fact all the soldiers freaked out and died because of a hallucinogenic gas. But why did more than one soldiers see the same child apparition tho?
  • The small coffin made them believe a dead child was on board. Just beat the game, and that was revealed in the Secrets.

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