Supermassive Games announced The Dark Pictures Anthology in 2018. Published by Bandai Namco, the anthology will contain a series of standalone games beginning with Man of Medan on August 30, 2019. We now know to expect at least eight games in the anthology, with one game releasing every six months.
The Dark Pictures Anthology has eight planned horror stories, beginning with Man of Medan. The multiplayer horror game puts players in the shoes of a band of divers searching for a rumored World War II shipwreck. As you can imagine, their adventure doesn’t go as planned and the protagonists end up trapped on a terrifying ghost ship.
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Each game in the anthology will stand on its own, though all will have choice-based dialogue and quick time events. The only plot connection between them comes in the form of The Curator, a mysterious man akin to Twilight Zone’s Rod Sterling. In an interview with IGN, Supermassive Games CEO Pete Samuels discussed the role of The Curator:
“We have an arc in mind that plays out over eight games. He’s really the only consistency across the Anthology. Everything else from a story, character perspective, we want to be a surprise.”
The surprises will come in every game. Samuels mentioned that each entry in the anthology will have its own horror sub-genre to explore. With the success of Until Dawn‘s teen slasher-fest, Supermassive Games will tackle other sub-genres to keep players on their toes. In Samuels’ words:
“We want to surprise people each time – when we announce the second [game], we want it to be the last thing people expected, in terms of theme and subgenre and whatever. And then again with the third one. We have them mapped out for the first eight.”
Unlike Telltale episodic games, The Dark Pictures Anthology will be released as a single product with games being released approximately twice per year. Each game’s development teams, directors, actors, and writers are completely different, allowing Supermassive Games to work on multiple entries at once and strive for each game feeling different and surprising from the last.
Man of Medan and the entire Dark Pictures Anthology will release on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. Check out the trailer here!
