‘Until Dawn’ Creator Announces ‘The Dark Pictures Anthology’

Bandai Namco and Supermassive Games are working on a new series of games called The Dark Pictures Anthology that was revealed today during Gamescom.

Published by Bandai and developed by the creators of the similarly tense Until Dawn game that played out like a cabin in the woods movie where players directed the course of the story, this new game appears to offer a similar appearance, this time at sea. The anthology begins with Man of Medan, a game where four tourists encounter a ghostly presence out in the middle of the ocean.

“Man of Medan is the first game in The Dark Pictures Anthology, bringing supernatural horror on board a ghost-ship adrift in the South Pacific,” a brief description from the anthology’s new site says.

Similarly to how events unfolded in Until Dawn, the cast of Man of Medan stumble upon something that they didn’t intend. A diving expedition in search of a World War II-era sunken ship results in the group unwillingly being forced to survive on a ghost ship as they’re stuck at sea.

Sharing more information on Man of Medan in a post on the PlayStation Blog, Supermassive Games executive producer Pete Samuels said that this game will feature four different playable protagonists that the story will shift back and forth to. That’s half the amount of playable characters in Until Dawn, for reference, and each one of these four can be saved or lost depending on players’ actions. Samuels said that this game has even more branching options than Supermassive’s previous titles with multiple endings to discover.

Man of Medan is just the first game in The Dark Pictures Anthology though, with each title to follow introducing players to new stories and characters. An exact number of how many games will be in the series wasn’t given, but Samuels said that the team has at least 39 ideas in mind.

“Each game in the series will feature a brand new story, setting, and characters,” he said. “The Anthology format gives us the opportunity to tap into a variety of horror sub-genres. We’ve identified 39 that we’d love to represent in the Anthology, but that would take some time!”

The first game in The Dark Pictures Anthology is scheduled to release sometime in 2019 for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. That release will also mark Supermassive’s departure from the PlayStation-only titles that were released before.