Follow TV Tropes

Following

YMMV / Man of Medan

Go To

  • Alternative Character Interpretation: Are the pirates actually professional pirates, or just really opportunistic fishermen? They've only got one boat, there's just three of them, and only one of them is armed, suggesting their decision to rob the group was a largely spur of the moment decision.
    • Is Conrad just generally being a Jerkass when he goes out of his way to antagonise the pirates, or is he building up a head of steam because they ran over Julia's dive line and endangered his little sister?
  • Awesome Music: Khemmis's doom metal cover of "O Death" / "A Conversation With Death", the intro song that features the arrival of The Curator.
  • Awesome Video Game Levels:
    • Conrad, if he’s alive and on the ship, being chased by a deformed hag that takes the form of a girl in a sailor suit. The chase is exhilarating, tests the player’s thinking and reflexes, and lasts for a long time. Hardly giving the player room to breathe.
    • The potential final fight with Olson and any one of the other characters in the cargo hold. It’s fast-paced, exciting, and allows the player to finally get back at Olson for everything he’s done.
  • Disappointing Last Level:
    • "Matters of The Heart", the final level if Alex is up with someone else in the radio room, is a relatively uneventful chapter with only a few major moments near the end. Said moments aren't really that exciting, either. Olson dies abruptly from a heart attack without so much as a fight, Alex retrieves the distributor cap, or destroys it by accident, and he potentially kills his brother or friends by a standard monster hallucination in a very short encounter. This is all capped off with a pretty abrupt ending.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse:
    • Of the five lead characters, Conrad has surprisingly proven to be the most popular, mostly due to his role as comic relief with some hilarious one-liners while still being genuinely heroic. Shawn Ashmore's performance (widely agreed to be the best of the game) helps quite a bit too.
    • Ayisha Issa received a BAFTA nomination for her performance as Fliss, the only member of the cast to be singled out for an acting accolade.
  • Ho Yay: When Conrad and Brad first meet, if Brad tells him that he's never gone diving before, Conrad says this:
    "Water virgin! Nice, we're gonna pop your cherry, together. Gonna be gentle."
  • It's Short, So It Sucks!: Some critics and players note how the game is noticeably much shorter than Until Dawn, resulting in disjointed pacing that gives less development to the plot and to the scares onboard the ghost ship, while ending a little too abruptly.
    • On the other hand, despite each runthrough being short, the fact that there is such variation in the story depending on your choices means that there is significantly more replayability than in similar games.
  • It Was His Sled: The Manchurian Gold being a hallucinogenic bioweapon. People who already knew about the story of the Ourang Medan (or watch Bedtime Stories) already knew what the twist was and saw it coming from a mile away.
  • Memetic Mutation: "Dying from Tetanus" Explanation 
  • Narm:
    • The frozen-scared faces of the dead ship crew in the prologue mostly look kinda goofy.
    • Brad's Jump Scare during his ghost story can be seen as this, due to the obvious build up.
      • Really, many of the jump scares can fall flat (and even be unintentionally funny) due to the textures not loading in time. Several commentators have mentioned that it would have been better if most of the jump scares had been cut so that the unnerving atmosphere of the ship could perform the scares.
  • Obvious Beta: The animation is stiff, especially where the faces are concerned, the characters behave in occasionally inexplicable ways, and the cuts are occasionally jumpy and nonsensical (one possible ending sequence has a shot of two characters sitting down beside each other, and the next immediate shot shows one of the two characters sitting down by the other again without any change in scenery or time). This story was clearly in want of more polish before release.
  • Porting Disaster: On PC, the Quick Time Event can be notoriously fiddly. There is an option to turn them off.
  • Tough Act to Follow: The game has not been well-received by some fans of Until Dawn. The game has been criticized for notably stilted dialogue and less interesting characters. While critical reviews have been more positive toward the game, its Metacritic score is still notably lower than Until Dawn (70 vs 79). This is compounded by the fact that it goes in the utterly opposite direction of Until Dawn when it comes to the plot what with absolutely none of the supernatural goings on actually happening, with Until Dawn's Halfway Plot Switch generally being lauded as one of the best parts of the game's story.
  • Vindicated by History: Downplayed, but divided reception over the ending of Little Hope has caused many players to reassess their opinion of Man of Medan for the better. Since both games end with the revelation that the supernatural threat wasn't real and that the characters were hallucinating, it's been argued that Man of Medan did it better because at least there are real threats, the events of the game are really happening, and the choice/consequence system actually matters because characters literally do live or die based on the player's decisions. Of course, there are also those who prefer Little Hope precisely because of its focus on telling the story of a Battle in the Centre of the Mind, even if it comes at the expense of Story And Gameplay Integration.

Top