FMV Games and Interactive Films 2026

This is not a ranking — it is a chronicle of the year in the genre, built on one rule: every release carries a date and a primary source. Dates and figures were verified directly against the games’ Steam and PlayStation Store pages, the official Wales Interactive catalog, and The World of Chinese’s feature on the Chinese FMV wave. Current as of September 30, 2026.

Projects without a confirmed release date do not make the table — or are marked “date not confirmed”. And when a date changes, this page changes with it: the roundup is updated quarterly, with the update date always visible at the top.

The Run (February 5, PC) is the new FMV thriller from Paul Raschid, the writer-director of The Complex and Five Dates. Fitness influencer Zanna Hendricks is on a mountain trail in northern Italy when masked killers start hunting her; the player keeps making the decisions that determine whether she survives. Three hours of filmed footage, twenty unique deaths and five endings, with a cast ranging from Roxanne McKee to Dario Argento. Developed and published by PRM Games, a Benacus Entertainment production.

Heart of the Forest (February 12, PC) is an interactive psychological horror movie from Wales Interactive (developed by Trapped Predator): an ill-fated hiking trip that spirals into a fight for survival, inspired by centuries-old tales of vengeful spirits from Germany’s Black Forest. The Steam price at the time of checking (September 30, 2026) was $12.99.

The year’s biggest story, however, happened outside the West. Road to Empress — Part 2 (June, PC/Steam), a 4K live-action drama about Wu Zetian’s path to power, passed one million copies in five days with over 85% positive Steam reviews. Alongside it came the crime FMV Northeast Past about the gang wars of 1980s–90s northeastern China (June), and in August Shao Song — a historical FMV about time travel to the Southern Song, which pairs its cinematic scenes with turn-based battles.

Rounding off the half-year is Akiba Lost (September 16, PS5 and Switch) from Japan’s IzanagiGames: a multi-perspective live-action mystery set in Akihabara, shot with a 360-degree camera, in which the player searches for a missing person by switching between characters’ consciousnesses. The project won a Japan Game Awards 2025 Future Division honor — before release.

If the differences between these games’ mechanics are hard to keep straight, start with the basics: what interactive cinema is and how an FMV game differs from a video game.

Tenebris Somnia lands on October 16 on PC and PS5 (with Xbox Series X|S and Switch also announced): a survival horror by Argentina’s Saibot Studios, published by New Blood Interactive. A hybrid of pixel-art adventure and live-action FMV scenes with practical effects — exactly the case where footage with live actors does not replace gameplay but is embedded into it as contrasting material.

The second title to watch is China’s Strange Tales of Republican China: a historical FMV that replaces live actors with AI-generated visuals. No exact date has been announced, but a demo is already on Steam. This is a boundary case for the format, and I deliberately keep it out of the main table: whether a game without live actors can still be called FMV is a separate question, tied to the format’s history I traced in my study of FMV on the 3DO.

As of September 30, 2026, I found no other FMV projects with confirmed 2026 dates. When a date appears, it will enter the table below in the next quarterly update.

Four of the six first-half 2026 releases are Chinese. That is no accident but a continuation of the wave that began with The Invisible Guardian (2019) and Love Is All Around (2023 — 1.9 million copies in three months) and continued with Revenge on Gold Diggers (2025). The World of Chinese describes a mature interactive-drama industry: large budgets, 4K live-action shooting, Steam distribution and million-copy runs.

The economics remain harsh: an industry survey cited by the magazine estimates that about 90% of FMV projects lose money, and a June 2026 report by analysts East-West Entertainment projects that AI tools could cut live-action production costs by millions of yuan and halve production timelines. The same wave that makes the genre visible is preparing its saturation — which is exactly why every release here comes with a source and a date rather than enthusiasm.

If you are new to the genre, the 2026 releases are not the best entry point: they assume you already read the language of choices and branches. These seven games cover the full range of the format’s mechanics — from arcade quick-time actions to archival detective work:

• Night Trap (1992, Sega CD) — the scandalous classic of the laserdisc era: watch the cameras and trap the intruders.
• Her Story (2015, PC) — a detective game inside a police video-interview archive; the title that made critics take FMV seriously again.
• Late Shift (2016, PC and consoles) — an interactive thriller with a timer on every choice, filmed like a movie with professional actors.
• Bandersnatch (2018, Netflix) — an interactive film with no game console in sight: proof the format can escape games entirely.
• The Invisible Guardian (2019, PC) — the Chinese spy thriller that opened the modern Asian wave.
• Immortality (2022, PC and consoles) — an investigation across three unreleased films; the most radical editing mechanic in the genre.
• Love Is All Around (2023, PC) — the romantic interactive drama that sold 1.9 million copies in three months.

Together these seven tell the whole history of the format — from laserdiscs to streaming. For how choices, branches and archive search actually work, see my overview of the FMV format and the piece on interactive cinema on DVD.

Steam is the platform of the year: The Run, Heart of the Forest and the whole Chinese wave (Road to Empress — Part 2, Northeast Past, Shao Song, plus the Strange Tales of Republican China demo) all landed there. For interactive cinema on Steam, this is currently the main entry point, barring regional restrictions.

PS5, for the first time in a while, has its own FMV lineup in 2026: Akiba Lost is already out, and Tenebris Somnia joins it on October 16. The Wales Interactive catalog traditionally reaches consoles too, so genre classics are findable on PlayStation. On mobile, FMV appears selectively — always check the store page of a specific release for platforms and languages: Steam has a dedicated Languages section for this.

2026 has exposed three vectors. The first is Western auteur FMV: Paul Raschid and Saibot Studios are not making “films you can click” but hybrids where footage is embedded into game mechanics (pixel art, timers, editing-driven search). The second is the Chinese interactive-drama industry, which for the first time gave the genre a mainstream scale with million-copy runs. The third is AI: it promises cheaper shoots, but Strange Tales of Republican China — with “actors” and no live actors — opens the question of whether FMV remains itself without its core material: filmed live performance.

In English, coverage of this beat is dominated by aggregator lists; the researcher’s angle — history, economics, mechanics — is what this roundup adds. My own contribution to the genre is documented separately: the FMV-01 prototype and the FMV Builder tool; for branch modeling, see my overview of structured narratives.