Killmonday Games HB all rights reserved
Mac notice: The game is 32-bit only and will not work on macOS 10.15 and up.
Mac notice: The game is 32-bit only and will not work on macOS 10.15 and up.
Game length provided by HowLongToBeat
Posted on: February 3, 2021
EwigWandernd
Verified ownerGames: 738 Reviews: 263
Excellent, emotional story
Story: 5/5 Worldbuilding: 5/5 Art Design: 5/5 Graphics: 4/5 Sound: 4/5 Gameplay: 4/5
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Posted on: July 28, 2016
mintee
Verified ownerGames: 802 Reviews: 122
gorgeous art, annoying game mechanics
Let me first say this game is charming, the artwork is original and lovingly done and there are many unique scenes and environments to explore. The music is unobtrusive and goes well with the game but may be too banal to listen to by itself. The characters are quirky, bizarre, horrifying, cute, adorable and disgusting, sometimes all at once. the story is very intriguing and at times too obscure to enjoy. Its like reliving Twin Peaks with many unanswered questions, especially the ending. If you like clear cut conclusions then you may find this one unsatisfying. I bet you will hit the forums to see what others thought had happened, I know I did. Game mechanics were simple mainly, point and click, with dialogue trees, some inventory combination. To me this is where the game fails, the dialogue choices had no impact at all and seemed rather to be used to fluff out the game length and give an illusion of player activity thru the story telling aspects. You also could not skip the dialogues and this was maddening when you were attempting to solve puzzles and inadvertently clicked on a char that had lengthy conversations. Using inventory was also annoying as you had to open inventory, select the item then apply it to the item in the room, every.single.time. In a point/click puzzle game this was beyond belief, where using different inventory combinations on hotspots are normal. worst aspect of this game was the save game mechanic, or lack of one. It uses one save feature, where you stop the game is where you pick up. Works great in theory except for the fact that game saves are often corrupted. This happened to me, during play i accidentally pressed some random key on my keyboard and found that the game had skipped an entire chapter and gone to the next. My only recourse was to start over. I have no idea why someone would design a game to use this , it stunk really and ruined my experience. Forums were full of people with corrupted saves, inexcusable.
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Posted on: June 2, 2018
wootz0r
Verified ownerGames: 147 Reviews: 2
Dark, yet playful
If you like the art style, enjoy atmospheric adventure games and don't mind a "open to interpretation" story or even prefer those you should buy this game. Don't buy if you dislike disturbing imagery/situations. Music is great, puzzles are logical and you almost always know what you are trying to accomplish. The game does a great job with small hints IMO; I suck at adventure games and could finish this without any problems, so veterans will likely find little to no challenge. Story is interesting and not as dark and "edgy" as you might expect from the beginning or the promotional material. No bugs or crashes, game feels polished. First playthrough took me around 10h.
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Posted on: August 3, 2018
bloodrayne8
Verified ownerGames: 34 Reviews: 1
Delightfully ethereal game
This game is a beautifully dark adventure. The characters, artistry, sound and music made for a beautifully crafted tale well worth hours spent solving its wonderfully challenging puzzles. The game mechanics are very interesting and unique as characters frequent other realities and perspectives putting a unique spin on the game. I was looking for a puzzle game similar to The Room from Fireproof Games and this did not disappoint, I am looking forward to more from Killmonday.
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Posted on: March 9, 2017
fahbs
Verified ownerGames: 354 Reviews: 90
Where the atmospheric becomes rote
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.
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