Dark Nights with Poe and Munro is the third game from FMV game veterans D’Avekki Studios and centers around two local radio hosts for the fictional town of August.
If you’re new to FMV games, let me explain a little about what to expect. FMV stands for full-motion video, these games feature live actors, in which the player will decide their fate by guiding the actors at unique points in the game.
What is Dark Nights with Poe & Munro about?
This is the biggest flaw with Dark Nights with Poe and Munro, the story feels a little all over the place. The game is made up of six episodes, but the first two of these episodes are absolutely terrible. To be blunt, make no sense at all.
The main issue with the first couple of episodes is that none of the choices you make as a player feel like they have any impact on the story at all.
When you are playing an FMV game, you are spending a large amount of the game simply watching actors. So when you get to make an impact on the story, you need to actually see that impact, which really doesn’t happen in Dark Nights with Poe and Munro.
Many of the choices in the game are spaced out, which often led to me missing them completely, especially the choices which revolved around mashing X during key moments of the story, much like how you would during Man of Medan or Until Dawn.
As I mentioned above, the story does start to get better in episode three, but after that it goes from bad, to really weird and frankly boring.
I know that there is a level of cheesiness from the actors, which has been done on purpose as if they’re aiming for the B-Movie hall of fame,. But it just falls short into terrible acting, which is less memorable than other similar games.
Dark Nights with Poe and Munro gameplay
Normally when I review a game, it’s pretty easy to pull apart both the good and bad aspects of the game, but Dark Nights with Poe and Munro has so little actual gameplay it’s hard to have much of an opinion on it at all.
Although I didn’t personally like the game, nor did I think much of the actors, I have to admit I did continue playing Dark Nights with Poe and Munro, just to see where the story went, if anywhere at all.
Had the decisions players make made more of an obvious impact, I could have forgiven the acting and even the extremely unusual stories. But they just felt completely meaningless, with no real visible consequences.
Summary
Dark Nights with Poe and Munro is a game that I genuinely wanted to enjoy, but no matter how much I held out for the story, things don’t get better.
I’ve mentioned the poor acting, which is more notable terrible from Poe than it is Munro, but the only part of this game that ever felt real to me was the chemistry between the two stars of the show.
Although acting was poor from both parties, somehow, they managed to pull off a believable connection to each other, although this could have just been a result of equally terrible acting making them seem as if they’re meant for each other.
The only real way to work out if your choices had any real impact on the game is to play it all over again, from the start, but this time making completely different choices, so you can see how things play out differently.
This of course would require you to put up with the terrible acting, the completely pointless first couple of episodes, and poor story, just to find out if you had made any impact on the game.
Dark Nights with Poe and Munro does have 90% positive reviews on Steam, so perhaps there is something everyone else sees in this game which I don’t, but having played previous titles from this developer, I personally feel very let down by this title.
I had noticed that many of the positive reviews stated, “loved the British sense of humor”, but being a Brit myself, I can honestly say there was no humor during my playthrough of the game, in-fact, there was no humor at all.
