As The Dark Pictures Anthology celebrates its fifth anniversary, here’s why its first entry remains its best

I’m not sure if it’s my advancing age or the literal pandemic that arrived hot on the heels of this game’s release, shattering (perhaps permanently) our collective ability to accurately perceive the passage of time, but I really can’t believe that The Dark Pictures Anthology has been around for half a decade already. Man of Medan still feels like a new-ish game to me, so the realisation that today marks the fifth anniversary of its release is a sobering one.

Of course, there are now four Dark Pictures games out there that you can play right now — five, in fact, if you own a VR headset — and we recently caught a long-awaited glimpse of the series’ next core entry at Gamescom ONL. It’d be pretty unreasonable to expect Man of Medan, as the franchise’s debut, to be anywhere less than about five years old at least, under those circumstances.

The Dark Pictures Anthology is a choose-your-own-grisly-death horror series from Supermassive Games. It’s a clear spiritual successor to their breakout hit Until Dawn, and every main game so far has taken a subtly different approach to the repeated base concept of “five people get trapped in a horror trope and have to fight to survive”. So far we’ve seen wealthy vacationers held hostage on a ghost ship in Man of Medan; a college field trip stranded in a ghost town in Little Hope; an army unit stumble upon a long-buried ancient temple in House of Ashes; and a documentary film crew menaced on the private island of a serial killer in The Devil in Me.

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