Fran Bow

great visuals and story

If you loved the Cat Lady, are a fan of dark and serious topics and point and click games, this innocent looking game has some emotions in store for you if you dare. Just be aware, the game doesn´t f*ck around sometimes with its themes. Gameplay wise you can get stuck having to come up with a solution only a boneheaded crackhead would think of, other times it is very obvious what to do. Other times I had to look up a walkthrough, I´m not ashamed to say so, like any alice themed game, logic can be very hit or miss. The themes obviously go from alice and wizard of oz and anne frank to many other works of art. The opening of fran bows parents reminded me of dexter/batman of all things lol. But what makes this personal, after all is said and done is that it has its own charme. It is a form of happysad or dark and sweet rarely seen. Gameplay is great but annoying from time to time, art can also due to its low res nature be hard to distinguish from what is interactive and what is not, you just clickspam everything. I do like my Point n Click a bit more "guided" as to not waste time that feels like filler or a grind. Not much to complain about otherwise, but what stands out and still makes me itch is when the game suddenly gets serious and dark tothe point of having emotional flashbacks and then hits right home. "Daddy didn´t care, mommy wasn´t there". C-PTSD people will empathize alot with this game. It is a dark fcking world fran bow has to fight through. It is a survivors story. As a survivor myself I had to lay the game down a couple of times to take a breath. Not to mention like with the cat lady, suppress the urge to cry from time to time. So yes, big trigger warning and also walkthrough cheesing warning. Otherwise a fantastic simplistic sweet n dark adventure.

I can't help but feel a bit disappointed. Don't get me wrong, I agree that this game has an amazing immersive atmosphere, gripping story and certainly a great experience overall... right until the end, that is, where it just felt flat and anti-climactic to me. It was a lot like Brutal Legend in that regard where it just feels like there was supposed to be more... but there isn't. Certainly, if I only played through everything except the last scene, I would be giving this 5 stars but that last part just ruins a fair bit of the experience. I really wish it didn't though -- the everything else about the game is truly amazing. Lament, for this could have been perfect. But it isn't.

Insane opnening and strong first half of the game. But then the game sabotages itself with at times completely unintuitive and a few times extremely badly communicated puzzles, seemingly never ending dialogues with little to no essence or importance and progressively selfdestructing writing, which degrades into fully perfected and basically inconsequencial nonsense. All my investment in the backstories and questions were rewarded from the game with a big "La La La, we just make something up and the most implausible possibilities are what actually was happening." It is by no stretch a bad game in any way, but play it for the riddles, the really out there characters and designs and for the often great executed unpredictability of this game, because here it delivers, and it delivers really good. But if you are in search for a story, that respects the at times extremely heavy themes it brings up and tying everything together into a meaningful conclusion, you will not find it here and feel (like me) pretty insulted in a way regarding storytelling, because it devolves practically into full, unironic shlock, which in my opinion is inappropriate in regards to the very heavy themes it wants to lift.

The game looks great and works mostly ok, although the game lost my autosave after the first chapter and I had to ask for a savegame from Killmonday. The problem for me, a long time adventure fan, was the low difficulty of the puzzles. It almost felt like it was aimed for children judging by how easy the problems were. But of course, it can't be for kids because the game is pretty brutal and scary. Also, as a screenwriter I did think the script was not very strong, and there were very long parts where the player couldn't do anything else but follow the characters' conversations. All in all, a pretty big disappointment for me.