The Dark Pictures Anthology, which opens with Man of Medan this August, is currently planned for eight games, with a release schedule of two per year.

Loading

Loading

Man of Medan: Co-op

Dark Pictures is a multi-game horror anthology created by Until Dawn developer Supermassive Games. Every game in the anthology will be a new story in a new horror genre, with the only major aspect tying them together being The Curator, a mysterious figure cut from the same cloth as Rod Serling in the Twilight Zone, or the Crypt Keeper in Tales from the Crypt.In an interview with Supermassive CEO Pete Samuels, I asked what the plan for the Curator is: "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."Samuels continued by pointing out that not only the Curator's story, but the individual games have also been planned: "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."Supermassive has repeatedly pointed out that it sees each Dark Pictures game being just that: a game sold as an individual product, unlike the likes of Telltale episodic games which have multiple entries loaded from a single shell program. When I asked how frequently we could expect Dark Pictures games to arrive, Samuels said, "our aim is to get to a frequency of two a year. From concept through to completion they're a couple of years in development, so if you do the math we've obviously got a handful that we're working on in the studio at the moment."Each game will have a different game director, different screenwriters and different actors, not to mention entirely separate dev teams - all of which allows Supermassive to work concurrently on multiple entries in the series.While every Dark Pictures game aims to take a different horror genre as its base, the game genre will remain fairly static. Dark Pictures games will always be narrative-focused and choice-based, with dialogue choices and QTEs driving the action onscreen."They'll be largely the same mechanics," Samuel explained. "We've no plans to introduce anything else. What we will do is, if we find we need something to tell the story - because that what our mechanics are there for, to tell a story - if we need something else to tell a story well then we won't be afraid to prototype that."They'll also seemingly all include full two-player online play, a feature announced today for Man of Medan, which promises to be co-op horror blast

Joe Skrebels is IGN's UK Deputy Editor, and he wants a playable Mandy, please. Follow him on Twitter