Zoe Fortier
Zoe FortierWarning: This article contains spoilers for Dark Nights with Poe and Munro, mentions of racism, and mentions of biphobia.
Recently, my article addressing the well-earned controversy around FMV Future’s announced, then rapidly walked back, Gamer Girl FMV, brought me into the orbit of a distinct FMV game developer, D’Avekki Studios. Kudos to them for keeping their finger on the pulse about developments in their genre to learn from them, first of all. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say some larger entities in the gaming industry could afford to take a hint, or five, or seven.
That’s a topic for another article. Opening myself to the conversation, such as it is, around Gamer Girl and FMVs more broadly brought me into contact with D’Avekki Studios. From there I was provided with a review code for their recent release, Dark Nights with Poe and Munro.
Why am I telling you all this backstory? The spirit of full disclosure, mostly. Being new to entertainment journalism, I’ll admit, it warmed and encouraged me to have my previous article on the subject gathering traction with someone who found it useful. I don’t want to obscure the fact that this warmth had me looking at D’Avekki in a positive light before I’d even looked at their game in any particular depth. I’ve been wrestling with concerns over whether my review would come off biased because I have warm fuzzies in the wake of being recognized and complimented on my writing. Ah, the slippery gifts and perils of “exposure,” am I right?
Here’s another relevant piece of disclosure, however: I have, essentially, zero experience with FMV games. It’s not a genre or style of play I’ve historically pursued, for one reason or another. I don’t think it’s disingenuous to say this is a genre with a niche audience to which I am something of an outsider. Even if I’m not entirely sure who that audience is, clearly they exist, or these games wouldn’t still be made.
What reassured me, in the end, about trying to approach this review in a balanced way was just that: I’m not the target audience, and thus I brought with me no preconceived notions or biases about what to expect. I’m not, per se, the loyal returning customer who’d have picked up a copy of Dark Nights with Poe and Munro entirely on my own. Nor am I the genre fan who’s always keeping an eye out for a new addition to the FMV universe. If anything, I’ve been skeptical about this approach to game development.
Thus, I feel reasonably confident that my skepticism, my lack of familiarity, and my warm fuzzies can meet somewhere in the middle and give Dark Nights with Poe and Munro an honest look-in. Enough about me. Dark Nights with Poe and Munro follows two radio show hosts living and working in the small town of August as they investigate mysteries of various origins. These investigations take place through six episodic chapters of fully-acted gameplay, in a choose-your-own-adventure format.
Overall, the narrative bent of the game seemed right up my alley, doubts about the genre notwithstanding. One of the first things I said upon watching the trailer was, I believe, “Oh, cute, this feels like The Magnus Archives but goofier.” To the surprise of exactly no one who’s read any of my articles, I love The Magnus Archives. Indeed, it’s definitely to Dark Nights with Poe and Munro’s credit that it is willing to get silly, and even campy. It speaks to a self-awareness from the developers that FMV is kind of a weird sandbox to play in, and taking yourself too seriously within it does no one any favors.
The nature of FMV is such that it demands a closeness with the characters (and their actors) that isn’t, necessarily, always as front-and-center in other types of games. This is both a blessing and a challenge for the genre, as it introduces such a stark element of “your mileage may vary.” I can’t tell anyone how they should feel about our titular protagonists. That would be like telling someone who they can and can’t be friends with based on what I do or don’t like about people. I can only speak, then, to my own experience, and the conclusions are: my opinions are mixed.
Don’t get me wrong, I got a lot more comfortable spending time with Poe (Klemens Koehring) and Munro (Leah Cunard) once I really settled into the clearly deliberate campy, bordering on over-acting, style of the game. Getting in the headspace of Dark Nights with Poe and Munro’s genre conventions allowed me to embrace the kitsch, rather than spending time questioning whether or not it was working. Nonetheless, I was struck time and again by how much more likeable of the two characters I found the animated, by turns coquettish and moody Munro.
I felt this to the point where I wondered if that was on purpose, too. I’ll admit, I was initially uncertain about her doe-eyed, seemingly dependent, “oh, Poe, what should I do?” quirkiness. I soon came to understand, though, that this was Munro’s deliberate “radio host” persona. In actual fact, oftentimes she was the sharper and more perceptive of the two characters when off the air and out in the world confronting the mysterious happenings taking over the otherwise sleepy town of August.
Poe, meanwhile, reminded me time and again of the Creature Feature frontman, which made what followed more than a little jarring. Not to shamelessly plug, but Creature Feature is easily one of my favorite bands, and there, the macabre persona works for me. When applied to a playable character and not to the deliberately over-written stage act of a self-described “horror band,” though, it begged the question of whether I was supposed to find him likeable. If Munro having cyclical, waking nightmares about all the different ways her sporadically possessive partner might murder her was supposed to make us invest in Poe, rather than being deeply disconcerted by him, I’m not at all sure it hit home for me.
This being said, I have to applaud the supporting cast. They played well into the silliness and kitsch that permeated some of the stories, while also bringing a pleasantly surprising gravitas that grounded the stories, and our leads, in something that felt real. I was particularly impressed by Andre Lecointe-Gayle as Quentin Watts and Effy Willis as Wesmarie Bolton; a voice acting role from Justin McElroy was probably a fun surprise for fans of The Adventure Zone or Sawbones, too.
One of the major selling points of Dark Nights with Poe and Munro, for me, is the relative brevity of each episode. I know, I know, that doesn’t sound like a compliment. “How can you like a game and want it to be short?” In this case, though, it works really well. The bite-sized episodes balance well with the sequences where you’re simply watching the characters interact without your input. If the episodes were longer, the interactive elements might get lost amidst long, meandering “cutscenes,” if you will. Keeping the episodes to an easily consumable length lets players get a satisfying amount of gameplay time, without spending too much of it as a passive observer. In other words, the short, crisp episodes, each with distinct stories to make them stand out from the others, have Dark Nights with Poe and Munro feeling like “interactive TV done right.”
This brevity also encourages replayability, which is at minimum important and at most downright necessary to get everything out of the game. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with playing it through once and calling it a day. However, for the curious, or the completionists, among us, you’ll probably want to explore the different possible combinations of choices made available to you.
I particularly liked, on this note, the community elements of the game presented at the end of each episode. You can see the percentages of players who chose the same and different things, which is a nice touch. Being aware of what other players in your community are doing, without being pressured into an intrusively competitive multiplayer environment that requires you to communicate with strangers on the Internet, is, in my view, one of the right ways to go about “social gaming.”
Dark Nights is also overall technically very sound. The visuals are crisp and clear, and the soundscape is immersive and well-balanced. Those things are, I would say, essential to a successful FMV. What’s unfortunate is how this makes some of the less solid technical elements stick out like a sore thumb. While Dark Nights with Poe and Munro features very few actual quick-time events, which is a definite plus when it comes to accessibility, the two that I uncovered … didn’t work. At all.
It’s unclear if they weren’t actually QTEs at all and had a predetermined outcome whether I clicked the “hotspot” or not, or if I was doing something wrong, but they were wholly unresponsive, at least for me. This felt pretty jarring against how otherwise smoothly the game runs. To be honest, I don’t think they added anything to the story or gameplay either way. Deciding to include QTEs requires being very clear about what you’re supposed to do if they’re to be successful. If they were red herrings, i.e. not real QTEs in the first place, why make it look as though they were?
The other technical critique I have is that some of the other choices (not part of QTEs) made available to you are unclear in their meaning until after you pick something. Granted, the extensive replayability of Dark Nights with Poe and Munro doesn’t necessarily make this an inherent problem. If you picked something you didn’t mean to, you can always replay the episode and make different choices next time. Nonetheless, it was a little confusing to be presented with three or four choices and have no idea what any of them meant. I’ll grant that this might be a FMV convention I’m not familiar with, but from where I approached the game, it seemed to defeat the “choose your own adventure” aspect of the game if I didn’t really know what I was choosing in the first place.
This brings me around to tackling some story elements of the game, which is both the reason for the spoiler warning up top, and, I suspect, part of why D’Avekki Studios reached out to us. Just a hunch. As I’ve said, the campiness at play works. It’s fun. Not taking itself super seriously largely works in the game’s favor, and kept me from rolling my eyes at pretentious promises of innovation and pushing the envelope. Seriously, please spare me.
On the flipside, though, Dark Nights with Poe and Munro’s playful tone and innuendo-laden script sometimes led story beats to hit real clangers. The episode that seemed the most full of these tone-deaf stumbles was “Green with Envy,” which I’ll try and discuss in as spoiler-light a fashion as possible. It’s hard to give these an honest critique without unpacking some fairly central details.
The first thing that jumped out at me in this episode was the charged atmosphere between Violet Gallacher (Aislinn De’ath) and Munro when they met to discuss the case on which Poe and Munro were working. I admit, I sat up straighter, thinking: oh? Hello? Is Munro bisexual? The tension then devolved into cannibal jokes, though, and … went nowhere. I’m loath to cry queerbaiting where it hasn’t been merited, since I think the word gets misused a lot. Even so, Munro’s seeming attraction to women is played for jokes twice, with her later “threatening” to go for a “hot dinner date” with either a woman or a man … seemingly just to make Poe jealous. This didn’t sit right with me, to say the least.
The second issue I confronted was equal parts an issue of story and “gamification,” which you may remember I talked about regarding Gamer Girl, too. In this same episode, you’re tasked with investigating the disappearance of a teenage black boy, Joe, under increasingly tense circumstances. I’ve only played through this episode once, so to be clear, I don’t know if it’s possible to save him. That may pose a problem unto itself, if one of the few black characters in Dark Nights only exists to be abducted and murdered.
In addition, though, if you take too long in the questioning stage, or do things in the wrong order, there is, I kid you not, a Steam achievement for failing. A Steam achievement which is accompanied by presenting Joe’s impaled corpse in full display. I’m white, so I won’t swerve out of my lane and belabor the point too far. Suffice it to say presenting the brutalized body of a black child and tying this to a Steam achievement — hence my reference to gamification — felt almost dangerously flippant. Seriously, we can do better.
I have some fairly major concerns about how the true identity of Green with Envy’s murderer was revealed, while we’re at it. The jump between “they’ll up my meds” to … the actual discovery of what happened rubbed me the wrong way. Again, I’ve only played this episode through once, so there may be nuance, context, or details that I’m missing. Still: is she a mentally ill young woman in need of psychiatric help, or a deceitful murdering kidnapper? Equating one to the other felt deeply out of step, to put it lightly.
Moving forward to the fourth episode, “Everybody Changes,” I’m not the first to comment that this episode may have been a little self-indulgent. While the vast majority of the game is easily playable without knowing anything about D’Avekki Studios’ other games, this episode threw me for a loop. Adding in a story beat that players have to have played your other games to understand might be a little unfair to new players who haven’t realized that they’re entering the series in the “wrong place.” Not to mention it is unfair to people who don’t have the funds to buy both games. If you describe a game as a “standalone spinoff” which Dark Nights is, (supposedly) it should really be standalone, not requiring external knowledge of the other games from a studio to make sense.
Still, I’ll concede that it was fun to watch Leah Cunard take on an entirely different character from Munro for the duration of the episode. It was interesting, even if I couldn’t understand why she was doing so, or who she was meant to be. “Everybody Changes” was also the only episode to really play with body horror in its narrative, which is certainly one of my favorite areas of horror, and thus probably appealed to other body horror geeks similarly.
The story that unfolds over the course of this episode’s interview-slash-therapy-session, though, ultimately hit some false notes for me. It was not just because I felt thrown in the deep end either. Over the course of the episode, we learn about the circumstances under which Nisha, a young woman working in a dry cleaners, was murdered. Okay. Horror stories that already begin with a teenage girl being killed — usually in a graphic fashion — are by no means new, though I think it’s safe to say we are by no means obligated to enjoy that as a trope.
“Everybody Changes” doesn’t stop there, though. We soon enough learn that Nisha was seemingly bisexual, and that she was engaged in sex work. Both of these facts are presented as though they’re supposed to be shocking or scandalous. That’s not to say LGBTQ+ people are incapable of misjudging situations, making mistakes, or acting badly, but come on: this is your first, and only, explicitly non-straight character, and her attempt to kiss another girl is “assault” and deserving of being slapped over? Okay. Yikes.
Double yikes: the sex work is also presented not as a legitimate source of income but rather as a scandalous “gotcha,” prompting a question over whether you, the player — or, I guess, the therapist you’re playing as — would ever engage a sex worker’s services. This is one of the choices that comes up in your percentage of “this or that” choices at the end of the episode, by the way. Just so everyone in the community knows how many people would pay someone for sex. To the surprise of no one, there’s a hard skew toward those who claim they wouldn’t. Is this because sex workers, and their clients, are a deviant minority, or …? I’m not finding the good look in viciously killing off a sex worker just so you can shame her and her prospective clients, folks.
The trouble with these narrative clangers is that there’s so much that’s fun and well put together about the game that they stand out, in stark relief. I can roll my eyes at bad horror that is, simply, bad horror. I can roll my eyes at bad horror that’s a product of a certain era and get on with it. Dark Nights with Poe and Munro is fun, and it clearly wants to care about the characters in its stories. It was released this year, so there’s no “oh, this is from the 80s, yikes, let’s move on” hand-waving available of its narrative stumbles available, really.
I don’t think it’s disingenuous to say Dark Nights with Poe and Munro will appeal to some audiences and not others. I don’t think it’s unfair to say D’Avekki Studios has some important lessons to learn around writing respectfully when it comes to LGBTQ+ characters, black characters, mental illness, and sex workers. On the other hand, the way that they reached out to us for input signals to me that those are precisely the lessons they’re trying to learn for the future of their games, and I hope to see that bearing fruit in whichever project they come forth with next.
A PC review copy of Dark Nights with Poe and Munro was provided by D’Avekki Studios Ltd. for this review.
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🔥352Dark Nights with Poe and Munro
$14.49
Pros
- Technically solid
- Fun acting
- Great supporting cast
- Extensive replayability
Cons
- Some unclear choices
- Sensitive topics could be handled more respectfully
- Quick-time events are confusing
