Trivia / Dark Tales

• Blooper: For a few seconds in The Bells, as the carriage is taking Jeffrey and Martha to the police station, Albert can still be seen in the storm drain where you found him.
• Cancellation: Although it wasn't stated to be the final installment of the series, Devil in the Belfry was released in August 2020 - and it was the last game put out by AMAX Interactive in any of their properties. The company has been rebranded as Rightcom United LP, either due to renaming or a purchase, and they seem to have stopped producing any of their game series. Given that they had previously released the Dark Tales games at a rate of approximately two per calendar year, it seems very likely that the series has been canceled.
• Follow the Leader: Possibly. At the time that Nightfall debuted, Big Fish Games was offering several Freemium games connected to some of their more popular series, presumably as a way of increasing player interest (and making extra money from in-game purchases). All of these have since been discontinued.
• Genius Bonus: In Tell-Tale Heart, in one bedroom in the suspect's home, there are portraits on the wall. Anyone who's ever done any research on The House of Tudor may recognize the two women; the one on the left is Mary I, while the one on the right was at one time thought to be a portrait of Katherine Howard (#5 of Henry VIII's six wives).
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition: Each game is available in a Vanilla Edition and also one of these, which include bonus gameplay, screensavers, concept art, and other additional content.
• One-Steve Limit: Considering how small the casts of the individual games are, names are reused with surprising frequency.
  • Mary is the name of Frederica's mother in Metzengerstein, Lenore's mother in Lenore, and your client in The Oval Portrait.
  • Marie Roget, in Marie Roget, and Maria Ledler, Felix's daughter, in the bonus chapter of Tell-Tale Heart.
  • Estelle, in House of Usher, and Estel Roget, in Marie Roget. (Madame Roget's first name is only revealed in her will and in her profile at the notary's office.)
  • In The Raven, Alan Dillinger is romantically involved with a woman named Lenore. In Lenore, Alan Guillinger is engaged to another young woman named Lenore. As far as the games indicate, these two couples have nothing to do with each other, although the fact that the two games are said to be connected can make the player initially believe they're supposed to be the same people.
    • Ligeia gives us another Allan - Allan Phoenix, the title character's brother.
    • Also, a roster Alan Guillinger makes of members of the Crows League indicates that one of them is named Morella - which is the name of the next game. This may be an extremely subtle case of Production Foreshadowing.
  • In Lenore, Thomas Brown is the name of both the Old Smugglers Tavern owner in the main game and the banker in the bonus chapter.
  • Louise Fore in Tell-Tale Heart, Louisa McDougall in Morella, and Louise Wheeler in the bonus chapter of Devil in the Belfry.
  • The series has lots of Annas - Nurse Anna in the bonus chapter of Morella, Anna Fleurs from Nightfall, Anna Clifford in the bonus chapter of Ligeia, and Anna Wheeler in Devil in the Belfry. The Bells also gives us Annabelle McClain, the late wife of one of the main characters.
  • Madeleine Usher, from House of Usher, and Madeleine, Morella's sister, from Morella.
  • Henry Usher, in the bonus chapter of House of Usher, and Henry Griswold, Lilly's deceased biological father, in Morella.
  • Victoria Ledler, Felix's wife in the bonus chapter of Tell-Tale Heart, and Victoria, Fowles's sweetheart in the bonus chapter of Ligeia. We may also count the similarly-named Victorine Lafourcade in The Premature Burial.
  • There's also Chief Constable George in The Oval Portrait and George Wheeler in Devil in the Belfry. (However, it's unclear whether George is the chief constable's first name or last name.) If including related names, we also have Georgette the monkey, in the bonus chapter of Morella.
• The Other Darrin: Dupin's voice actor is different starting in The Fall of the House of Usher.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: To a good extent, Marie Roget is this. The Other Wiki notes that the Poe story on which this game is based was almost certainly the first ever example of a real-life crime being turned into a detective story.
  • More specifically, it was based on the newspaper accounts of the murder of a girl named Mary Cecilia Rogers. Many details between Poe's story and the actual newspaper accounts are identical; the only real changes Poe made were to move the story to France and change the names of the characters to French ones.
• Shrug of God: No explanation has been offered to date for why Pluto, the eponymous Black Cat, keeps showing up in the subsequent games in the series. The character sheet has a list of his involvement in the series, usually in a much more corporeal form than he has in his own game, and neither Dupin nor the detective ever seem to recognize him.
• Trolling Creator: Knowing how much the fangirls are in love with Dupin, the developers stated that that the eponymous detective would have his shirt off in the bonus chapter of Masque of the Red Death. They just forgot to add that the shirt would come off after he gets shot in the chest and the player has to patch him up.