Fran Bow

When I bought this game I knew nothing about it so at first I thought this might be a cute little indie adventure with some nice puzzles and a child hero in some fantasy word. I was so wrong. The devs managed to tell a story of a child in a with the view of a child but at the same time they mix the story (as well as the locations) with pretty much hardcore grown up and gory stuff. This mix is quite crazy and scary and at sometime you as the player are feeling the same way the main character is feeling: you don't know anymore what is real and what is not. Never before was I torn this much between "oh, what a cute little game" and "oh, my god is this sick and brutal". The only game with this kind of atmosphere I could think of remotely would be Sanitarium. But Sanitarium only delivers the "crazy" part and not the "cute child" part. The mix in this game is what makes it that extraordinary regarding the narrative part of the game. I won't tell anything about the story at all because everything would be a spoiler. But be warned: the game icludes crazy, brutal and gory scenes as much as psychothrill. The story itself might confuse pretty much and to tell the truth I am not sure I have understood everything. But the fun about storys which don't explain everything is that they stick in your head far after you have finished the game and they give you a reason to replay the game at another time. The game is so full of metaphors that there is a good chance you might have missed one. The gameplay itself also for me was a near perfect experience. The inventory never contains too much stuff and all the puzzles are perfectly logical. I did not use a walkthrough once but still had some challenging moments an played about 10 hours. There are some mini games in the game too but in case you don't like them you can as well simply skip them. The artstyle is fitting the game and the sound effects are supporting the atmosphere perfectly.

I'm not too familiar or fond of the point-and-click adventure genre in particular, but with placing mental illness and a two-fold (four-fold) gameplay style in the centre, it caught my attention. The base story is not extremely complex, the you get sucked into the atmosphere by how unique the minor characters and the journey's nuances are! I know it has been done before, but the mixture of cute and fucked-up was just right. The only reason this is 4 stars instead of 5 stars for me is the fact that the ending leaves way too many questions open for my taste, while the developing team has just announced a different game in the making, so a sequel putting things straight isn't foreseeable in the near future.

This game looks very good : artwork, gameplay, cynicism and creepy hidden reality all work very well. But it works a bit too well for me. Indeed, do you have your own childhood trauma ? If so, be prepared to meet it's close relatives as soon as the game begins. You'd rather have a tough mind to go on.

Fran Bow is a wonderful dark tale, with beautiful graphics, fitting sound effects and music and some truly great puzzles. It’s a journey through 5 unsettling chapters of dread and horror, on which the main protagonist travels bravely in search of home and answers. The story begins with our main protagonist Fran at a children asylum where she ended up once her parents were brutally murdered and she was found alone in the woods. Fran escapes to find her beloved cat Mr. Midnight and to go back home to her aunt. From there we begin to question if the things we see are real or just delusions of mentally sick child. Through her journey, Fran meets numerous interesting characters that we’re never sure if we can trust. Most of the creatures are in fact good willing towards Fran and that gives some balance to otherwise very hostile environment. Where Fran Bow really delivers is puzzles: they hit the golden spot on the difficulty. Not a single puzzle is out of place or lacking in logic. Thus I managed to figure out the game without using the guide, however puzzles are difficult enough to leave me feeling good about myself for cracking them. I especially enjoy the ones that at first it is not even clear what I am supposed to do. The gameplay has an interesting approach: Fran is able to see other realities using her pills from the hospital. Taking a pill opens a new world of clues, items and characters and combining them is essential to progressing further and trying to make sense of the world Fran is living in. Overall Fran Bow is simply great in all aspects,it’s unique adventure game that already has a cult following and is destined to become a classic. It’s definitely not without flaws: ambiguous story could have been explained a bit better, and the chilling atmosphere is strongest in the opening chapter and goes a bit downhill from there, but these things do not get in the way of it being a truly enjoyable and great game.

The game was a very memorable experience, having both some of the most pleasing and the most creepy art I've seen in any game. Didn't expect to feel so uneasy in a hand drawn (or styled as such) world, nor to smile so many times out of pure joy for the world and its presentation. This juxtaposition of both sadness and pain with joy and compassion gives Fran Bow a feel that's pretty lifelike, like the developers wanted to express something out of their own experience with the game. That's a pretty great achievement in any medium, and I warmly recommend Fran Bow to anyone who feels even a bit attracted to it based on the store page. The reason I docked one star is, for one, that there are a few sections where it feels like the game is making you run from one end of an area to the next just to make you spend more time with the game. For example, in one area there are three bodies of water at a fair distance from one another and numerous quests where your only hint is to go find thing x in water, which forces you to check out all of these places and spent a lot of time transitioning. A minor thing but it annoyed me. The other thing is that I felt like the ending had potential to be more if the developers had more time to deliver it - right now it felt a little rushed with how things were developing. Then again, I was playing the end in the wee hours of the morning wanting to see things through before going to bed, so maybe it was just my mental state at that moment. Oh, one more good thing to add: Fran's dialogue and inner dialogue sound like that of a child, which really helped to sell the character for me, and was a nice change of pace for how kids are often written in different stories.