Review: Dark Nights with Poe and Munro

Dark Nights with Poe and Munro is the latest FMV to be released by D'Avekki Studios, the team behind The Shapeshifting Detective and The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker.

“You’re listening to Radio August…”

After making their first appearance in The Shapeshifting Detective, Poe and Munro are returning in their own standalone spin-off prequel. You’re tasked with guiding them through six TV-like episodes of supernatural strangeness and sizzling on-screen chemistry. Each of these episodes brings its own theme such as caller’s fantasies, 24-hour radiothon and hypnosis to name a few.

You’ll interact in a typical FMV fashion by choosing from a few choices at each decision point in the story and you’ll do this by selecting the related hotspots that’ll appear. If you’re streaming this game or simply need more time to make decisions go into the settings menu beforehand and you’ll find a handy accessibility option that allows the timed hotspots to be ‘frozen’, this also helps when achievement hunting to claim a few ‘think fast’ ones.

There’s a lot of weird things happening in the small town of August so it’s understandable why people stopped coming to visit because of this I’d recommend playing through the episodes a few times. This will help you to get a proper understanding of their part in the story rather than your first impression based on what you know so far, this will help guide you to better choices. It’ll also help you to discover all of the five hours worth of video content and each of the episode endings as there are two to three of them per episode.

At times the choices can feel a little vague certainly at the beginning but as you get more of a feel for the game you’ll soon realise how important your choices are and even consider replaying an episode to change your view on something.

It’s well-paced and you don’t feel a sense of being rushed or that they are overly explaining a plotline. The multiple branched timeline works well and you don’t get a sense of confusion which can happen sometimes from other FMVs when clips/timeline doesn’t always align well.

Final thoughts

It’s worth a full playthrough and clocking in at just a few hours it’ll be a short one you can do in one sitting. Although it has brief moments of confusion and sometimes feeling overly silly its detective-style will keep you interested as you discover more and more in each episode.

Will you discover all that August has to offer whilst keeping Poe and Munro alive?

Dark Nights with Poe and Munro

Platforms: Steam (Released 19th May 2020), Xbox and PlayStation (Released 4th May 2021), Nintendo Switch (Coming Soon)

Genre: FMV

Written by: Tim Cowles, Lynda Cowles

Directed by: Tim Cowles,

Staring: Klemens Koehring, Leah Cunard

Developer: D’Avekki Studios

Publisher: D’Avekki Studios

I received ‘Dark Nights with Poe and Munro' for free, to play and review thanks to the team at D'Avekki Studios who kindly gifted an Xbox copy of the game.