Dark Nights with Poe and Munro

You won't be spending many Dark Nights with Poe and Munro, but you'll find a few memorable episodes of interactive TV in this FMV success story.

And while the episodic format makes for some eerie, tightly-scripted drama, Dark Nights forces you to sit through a “next time on Poe and Munro” each time, giving away a chunk of the next story. Frustratingly, there’s no way to skip this and the same is true of other FMV sequences in the game. The feeling that you’ve missed something, that you’ve let part of the story slip through your fingers, is enough to bring you back to Dark Nights, but watching the same footage a second time isn’t as much fun. And I’d still have appreciated being able to more actively guide the duo. Sure, in The Shapeshi...

Dark Nights with Poe and Munro, then, is certainly an enjoyable experience. For fans of the FMV games, and of D’Avekki Studios in particular, there’s a lot to like here. Poe and Munro are solid protagonists to guide you through the surreal and zany story and appearances from old FMV favourites are the cherry on top, though some of the lost, more expansive mechanics may be missed. For those looking to venture into the FMV genre for the first time, the game’s easygoing gameplay, short episodic nature, as well as the aforementioned bubbly performances are well worth the price of entry.

When it comes time to make a possible narrative-altering choice, the game goes into a split-screen view of your possible decisions, reminiscent of the television show “24”. These “decision points” as I’ve dubbed them, can affect what actions our heroes take, how the characters interact with each other, and even their fate. These decision points are a bit glitchy, and given the urgency of making a decision before the timer expires, the cursor is sometimes unresponsive. The UI does try to remain unobtrusive, but at the cost of clarity in what decision you’re actually choosing. There are meaningf...

This anthology series of six short but replayable episodes has just the right mix of charm, melodrama, and creepiness to make it worth a look.