Fran Bow

It's a creepy atmospheric fairy tale with lot of gore. It's a story of Fran Bow, a traumatized orphaned girl who currently resides in asylum. She goes on a fantastical journey to find her lost cat and meets a plethora of colourful and creepy characters. The atmosphere reminded me a little of Coraline. However, Fran Bow is much more gory :) Overall, it's a unique experience and a good game with pacing issues (the middle chapter is little too dragged) and for me unsatisfying ending. If a twisted fairy tale is your cup of tea, look no further.

Gorgeous and creepy art alone makes Fran Bow a game worth playing.

The game is actually great (I had already played it on mobile years ago) but be aware that it has no support for 64 bit Linux systems. Installing the dependencies is impossible because it uses too old versions of everything. You're better off running it on Windows.

Fran Bow is essentially Alice in Wonderland (or maybe more Return to Oz) meets Silent Hill. Early on, the central mechanic is introduced where you use your pills item to enter the dark world, much like Silent Hill. Except Silent Hill used the dark world as part of the story, and had you enter and exit it at fixed times in order to maintain pacing and allow you to explore each. In Fran Bow, you instantly enter the dark world at any time with the pills, then instantly leave it. It's creepy maybe the first 2 times you do it, but it becomes boring fast. The game quickly boils down into "enter room, search for action hotspots, takes pills, search dark world version of room for new hot spots, exit dark world". Repeat for every single room. Worse, with very few exceptions, the dark world is just lazy. Most of the locations are exactly the same in the dark world, but with just a couple pools of blood added, and characters replaced with corpses. The game experience boils down to "New room new character, take pills, yeah yeah blood and a corpse oh a new item take that, back to normal world yawn what's next?" What should be an atmospheric mechanic instead is reduced to Arkham Asylum's detective vision. There really aren't any meaty puzzles either. Most of them are just using an item or lever that only exists in the dark world with no additional thinking required. As if to balance this out, there is one total bullshit puzzle (hospital door combination) that, even after looking at the solution, still made no sense at all. The game is also all over the place tonally. It starts in a mental hospital where the dark world contrasts with the mundane ordinary one, but then shifts into an Alice in Wonderland weird forest, yet retains the dark world mechanic even though the dark world is hardly any different. In the end, Fran Bow doesn't know what it wants to be, unsuccessfully melds mechanics with atmosphere, and offers no puzzle meat to prop it all up.

the best game ever!!!