His Dark Materials to create
Supermassive Games were, to be blunt, massive when the Dark Pictures Anthology was first announced. I mean, they weren't at the height of their fame perhaps. Their biggest moment was probably riding the high off of the first big title of theirs, Until Dawn; a game which pretty much captured the entire world for a brief time. You couldn't go on the Internet for half a minute without seeing some playthrough or impressions video or just people lauding the fidelity of the thing, it was the height of graphical prowess for it's time, afterall. That was the tallest point of this roller coaster no doubt. Then they did a game called Hidden Agenda, which is probably the single most expensive video party game ever developed, and which featured the shocking twist that the single most suspicious person in the game was actually the perpetrator! I literally did the 'nah, it can't be that obvious!'. Then there was the VR game which was pretty good but hardly anyone played it because it was a VR game- and maybe it's safe to say they fell off a little for their highs.
But when Dark Pictures was announced it was met with a rush of enthusiasm from people who wanted more of that Until Dawn style of high quality interactive story horror games where random choices butterfly out into dead cast members before you even know what's going on. Dark Pictures Anthology was going to deliver exactly that, for several completely standalone unique adventures all boasting a cast of stunningly realistic models and at least one big famous face to sweeten the pot. Different locations, new casts, all horror; it was the ideal Until Dawn dream come true. And now we're on the tail end of this little experiment with the finale coming out in the very near future, has it all lived up to the hype that fans built for it?
Firstly I should point out that whilst Supermassive are marketing this as the end of the 'season' for DPA, this series has been going on for the past 4 years, so we can see more as a freezing of development so that the team can actually do something else before they end up going nuts thinking up ways for Teenagers to die. I can't imagine anyone slapping together fan pages in anticipation for season 2 if indeed the team are looking to go the multiple season routes; not many people can dedicate a sustained fandom for a franchise that lasts nearly half a decade per season! Let's look at this as a finale of everything that has been built up to for right now, and so if there's anything that still needs to be said in the overall metanarrative seeped into these games, it should probably be said around about now-ish.
Man of Medan was the first of these horror anthology pieces, and I was ecstatic for it. Heck, I was so swept up that I went out and researched the real-life story of the Ourang Medan for a blog on the subject! And I wasn't the only one, the lazy coals of pop culture heated back up for the drop of Man of Medan, and a swarm of personalities and folk who road the wave of Until Dawn rocked up for what they believed to be Until Dawn 2. Now inherently that was unfair, this wasn't going to be as fleshed out of an experience as that game was due to the nature of this episodic venture, but such is the whim of that beast called hype- she flies where she dares, damn the wind. And when it dropped, so too did a torrent of Youtube walkthroughs and reactions. So what did they think?
It was alright. Yes, the air in the balloon just sort of deflated a bit there didn't it? Which is sort of the way that the fandom felt on the tail-end of everything. The character's felt kind of bland, the situation was promising at first but sort of fizzled out pretty quickly and the endings weren't satisfying; but it all looked really good! I wouldn't call Man of Medan the perfect follow-up to Until Dawn, but it was still probably the best the team could pull together for an entire horror story truncated into such a small and digestible runtime. It felt like a narrative in a bit of a rush, and it suffered for that; but these guys had to pump out one of these a year, that was going to be a consequence. Still people came this way expecting something to the scale of Until Dawn and came away severely disappointed.
Then came Little Hope, a story which promised to delve into Salem and witches and time-bending curses but which turned into... something else. I cover it in a bit of detail here, but long story short I hated Little Hope. It was another 'pull the rug' style plot in the same one the first was, but this time it was performed in such a way that it almost felt like a convenient get-out-of-the-narrative-block-I-just-wrote-us-into, rather than a culmination of all the story elements which at least Man of Medan had going for it. Hell, the whole time-travel plotline ended up going absolutely nowhere and the ultimate resolution might have worked in a longer form of this plot, but felt way to hammy and performative here.
And most recently came 'House of Ashes', a story not involving teens and telling of an ancient secret hidden in the middle of a warzone which the characters become unwittingly embroiled in. We and the community might have our disagreements about Little Hope, (People seem to think it was better than Man of Medan: They're deluded) but I think the general consensus is that House of Ashes is easily the best of the Anthology so far. The characters felt like they had a path of development laid out in front of them, the setting had some legs to it and didn't conform with your absolute typical horror-plot and it's the first story in the entire Anthology that commits to its premise! They didn't do the Horror-movie (and it was all a dream) style resolution which only horror movies can get away with, and it served the replay value well. On Metacritic it's the only episode to break into the 70's, and that feels deserved. Of course, that doesn't rub with the high 70's and 80's of Until Dawn, but it's a decent protégé for a story delivery vector that no longer has it's 'niche' value.
Scrap by scrap and year after year, The Dark Picture Anthology has slowly been gaining more internet traffic overtime, and their overall scores (and presumably sales) have been rising in kind. But the fervour of the Man of Medan hasn't quite translated over for some. The games are improving, crowds are increasing, but this isn't the yearly horror event I thought it was going to become and that feels like a shame given the effort which goes into making these. Right now there's but a single episode ahead of us and given the slightly more star-studded cast than usual I think it's clear that Supermassive intends to go out on a spectacle. Can this be the smash hit that Until Dawn was once again? There's a chance, as Supermassive improves their craft and their fanbase with each release it seems we're building to a perfect set-up for one huge goodbye blowout. And I really hope that is the case, because I have a feeling it's going to be quite a wait until their next project after this year...
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