Supermassive Games’ newest narrative-driven adventure game, Man of Medan, is full of plot twists and story details that might be confusing to understand. Here’s a story summary of the plot of Man of Medan, the first entry in The Dark Pictures Anthology.
Spoiler Warning:
Obviously, this Man of Medan story summary is, you know, going to go through the entire plot of the game, spoiling all of the big story moments, so this your chance to turn away if you don’t want to know what happens.
Story Summary for Man of Medan
Prologue
The intro of Man of Medan is a short prologue that sets up the scene and introduces us to two Army men, Joe and Charlie, who are stationed on the Ourang Medan sometime post World War II.
After having a few beers at a dockside market in Manchuria (a location in Northeast Asia), Joe ends up having his fortune told by a mysterious, Chinese fortuneteller.
Depending on the dialogue choices chosen here, Joe hears his fate and pretty much brushes it off and doesn’t think much of it.
Joe and Charlie then go back on the ship in a drunken state and they both get in trouble with their sergeant for their disorderly conduct, resulting in them being locked up in their cells.
After a couple of lightning strikes hit the ship, the electricity goes out and we begin to see a strange and ominous green mist flowing around the ship that’s coming from cargo boxes.
Joe wakes up the sickbay after having a terrible nightmare and finds that he is locked in. He ends up finding a key off a dead body that he encounters in a locker.
He then finds his buddy, Charlie, and unlocks him from his cabin. Both of them then realize that something is definitely wrong and they go explore the ship for answers.
They then run into their Seargent who appears to have gone mad, yelling and waving his gun around as if he was hallucinating. Joe himself even starts to see things, as in one corner of the ship, he sees what looks like a young boy running about and Charlie didn’t see anything at all.
They run into another corpse that looks as if he was literally scared to death, with his eyes bulging and mouth wide open in shock –they see a few other stiff bodies along their way, as well as another boy running about that’s, again, only seen by Joe.
Joe begins to really start hallucinating now, and finds that Charlie is now dead and gone. He also sees the boy once again and once he makes eye contact with him up and close, Joe has what looks like a heart attack and falls dead to the floor.
The last scene ends with a radio operator trying to get help for the crew, but he, unfortunately, falls death to this strange affliction as well. This brings us to the opening credits of Man of Medan.
Part 1 – Duke of Milan, The Wreck, and The Strangers
Once the prologue has ended, the game introduces us to the curator who essentially acts as the narrator in Man of Medan. He takes notes and records your choices in the game and you will be bouncing back and forth from him and the game once each chapter comes to a close.
After the short intro, the story transitions to present-day where we get introduced to our five main characters: Fliss, Conrad, Brad, Julia, and Alex. The latter four are preparing for a special diving trip to check out an unmarked shipwrecked plane that Brad managed to find online.
Conrad and Julia and siblings, Alex and Brad are siblings, and Julia just so happens to be dating Alex. And then you have Fliss is the qualified boat operator that they hired to take them to the shipwreck.
After some light conversation, some flirting, and a couple of beers, Alex and Julia get their oxygen tanks and gear ready for the initial dive. Conrad stays on the boat though and has a conversation with Fliss about how she managed to afford the boat and if you make the choice, he can flirt with her as well.
When Alex and Julia are underwater, exploring the plane wreck, they encounter some skeletons, but don’t think much of it. The big moment here is when Alex proposes to Julia while they’re both underwater and the player will be able to choose how Julia responds to that.
Suddenly, a smaller boat comes crashing towards Fliss’ Duke of Milan and it’s a couple of fishermen named Olsen, Danny, and Junior, who look a little bit “off.” They ask that Fliss and Conrad pay for the damages even though they were the ones who ran into Fliss’ boat. After Conrad flaunts his money and yells at them to go away, the fishermen leave the group.
The rest of the night goes on and Brad ends up telling the group a scary story before they all retire to their respective rooms for the night. But, believe it or not, those three fishermen end up coming back to the boat while they’re all sleeping and take them all captive.
Part 2 – Ourang Medan, Manchurian Gold & Brad’s Reappearance
They try to talk their way out of this sticky situation but the four of them end up being taken to an abandoned ship called the Ourang Medan where there is supposedly some treasure called Manchurian Gold, and that is what the fisherman are after.
I say four because Brad ends up hiding out in the bathroom and later comes onto the ship and attempts to rescue the group.
After some investigating and deducing, the group realizes that something terrible happened to this ship’s crew and they decide to come up with a plan for escape, which involves calling for help using the ship’s radio and to get the distributor cap for the boat that was taken by the fishermen.
We see a short scene with Olsen, the leader of the group, talking with Junior and Danny, who seems to be hesitant about the Manchurian Gold and them being on the ship in general. Apparently, the plan was to simply rob the group of their possessions and cash, but Junior thinks they might be going too far now.
After escaping from the fisherman, the group splits off into different teams and they pretty much all start to experience the same things that the crew did back in the prologue. They see corpses come alive, ghostly figures, and even loud noises that aren’t really there. The fishermen are going crazy too and basically, everyone is super-freaked out at this point.
Eventually, Brad comes out of hiding and manages to make it on the ship to search for his friends, and he too begins to hallucinate but then meets up with Fliss.
Olsen begins to wig out and attempts to kill some members of the group with a weapon, but depending on the choices made, the group eventually ends up meeting up and joining together to discuss all of the crazy things that they’ve seen on the ship.
Part 3 – The Radio, The Generator, & The Truth About the Ourang Medan
The group then finally finds the radio and it’s surprisingly still working. Depending on the dialog choices made, the group will make contact and successfully give out their coordinates to the military, or you could fail and lose contact with them.
The ship loses power and all contact is loss, so two of them decide to go and look for a backup generator so that they can turn on the power and get the signal back on.
Brad, the smart guy in the group, eventually figures out what the hell was going on this whole time and essentially spills all of the details.
To sum things up, the Ourang Medan was carrying something called Manchurian Gold, but it wasn’t actually gold like the treasure, but instead, it was some sort of hallucinogenic bioweapon that was developed in China during WWII.
The weapon was being held in cargo containers, so it was really unstable, which caused the hallucinogenic “mist” to leak all over the ship and after 70 years, there is still small amounts of the “Gold” dispersed among the ship, effecting the group and the fishermen causing paranoid hallucinations –none of the stuff they’re seeing is real.
A few moments later, the group eventually finds the generator, but you can choose not to turn it on, which can greatly affect the ending of your story. Turning it back on will make sure that the military knows your location but leaving it as is will make sure that they don’t come to help.
Another scene soon after shows Olsen tying up Danny to a chair and threatening him. He wants to know where the Manchruan Gold is and is definitely seeing some crazy stuff in his head. He then stabs Danny, leaving us to think that he’s dead.
Olsen then runs after some of the group members that watched him stab Danny and he chases them with a sledgehammer. After escaping, they then run into Junior, who is at peak hallucination and just so happens to have a pistol in his hand.
He states that he sees the mist in them, telling them to stop “changing.” Depending on how you speak to Junior, he will either end up shooting one of the characters and then himself, just shooting himself in the head, or if you’re good at consoling, you can calm him down.
The other members of the group that were waiting by the radio also run into Olsen and see that he has the distributor cap for the boat, so they end up chasing after him to see if they can take it.
After freaking out for what feels like the whole game, Olsen eventually dies and falls victim to the Manchurian Gold, and depending on how the next few moments play out, the distributor cap is either retrieved or lost.
Alex then encounters a monster with two heads and his first instinct is to stab it to death with his knife, but depending on what characters are still alive, it ends up being a hallucination. It could be Julia or Fliss and if you decide to attack, Alex ends up stabbing her and then ultimately killing her.
There’s also a choice that makes Alex stab himself in the chest, killing him in the process, but it all depends on how its all played out.
This is the last gameplay moment of Man of Medan, and from here, there are several endings that can occur depending on how you played, who’s alive, and what items you’ve managed to obtain.
Man of Medan’s Endings Explained
If you managed to keep the distributor cap intact, the surviving members of the group will safely flee on Fliss’ boat; if you call the military to the ship and break the cap, they will actually come on board the ship and kill the entire group in order to hide the secret of the Ourang Medan from the public.
There’s also another ending that shows us that Danny is alive and sort of well after being stabbed by Olsen. And there’s another ending when you don’t call the military and break the cap and Fliss leaves on her boat anyways, slowly paddling without the engine turned on.
We don’t really get a full explanation as to what happened or what the future holds for these young adults and considering that this is an anthology series, we more than likely won’t ever see these characters again, besides the Curator, who is planning on making an appearance in the other entries of this series.
And that’s pretty much the entire story summary for Man of Medan.
For more on Man of Medan, make sure to check out our expansive wiki guide on the game right here. We also have some other relevant guides down below, that you should definitely take a look at:
- How Long It Is & How Many Chapters There Are
- How to Unlock & Play Curator’s Cut & What’s Different
- How to Play Co-Op Multiplayer
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