I've bought this game recently thinking I could play it on my laptop with core i3 and Intel HD graphics. But it seems I can't. I can play many adventures and brand new indie games with a lot more action or also 3D perpective, so I didn't even think about possibly getting in trouble with Fran Bow. But I ran into the issues mentioned on these forums, black screen, no apparent loading for minutes.

So I tried the offered solutions and the only one that partially worked for me is adding the parameter -software to the executable. But on the menu screen I still get occasional flickering; I first thought it might be a horror effect, but then I noticed the things that flicker into view for the blink of an eye are random GUI graphics and white geometrical shapes. It's no fun playing Fran Bow that way.

Now, I also have a desktop PC with corei5 or i7 and GTX660 (I think), but I won't be able to try the game on it before the 30-day money back guarantee runs out. Do you think there's a chance that it won't work that well on the desktop PC either? Should I ask for a refund rather than risk that? What are your experiences with the game on Intel PCs?

I'm also kind of disappointed that a little 2D indie adventure like this would be so resource and memory hungry that I can't play it on a laptop that's perfectly fine for some 3D action games like Bioshock, Alpha Protocol or Assassin's Creed. I'm much more likely to play adventure games on the road with my laptop, and rather use the desktop to play 3D action games ...

Intel HD what?

The device manager only says "Intel HD Graphics Family", although I thought my laptop model was advertised as using an Intel HD 4400 - or are those one and the same? The CPU is Intel Core i3-4030U @1.9 GHz, and RAM is 4GB. I'm running Win 8.1 64-bit. If those issues are only caused by the laptop GPU being a tad too weak and my desktop would be able to handle it, I can live with that. I'm just worried because I can't test it on the desktop this month and GOG's guarantee runs out after 30 days, so if I should discover it won't run smoothly on the desktop either, then the money will have been wasted.

Sounds like this is a common issue after the last update. On Steam they offer a patch through the client's beta tab, but that's not available here. And it doesn't really seem to fix the problem yet. Users first post that it's working now, only to report shortly after that the issue has re-occurred. So maybe I should leave the game alone for now to wait and see whether the devs will come up with a solution in the meantime; and if they do, I hope they bring it to GOG, too.

I'm just a bit stressed out by GOG's time-limited return policy. I guess it makes sense from their perspective not to be hold accountable for years or so, but from a customer's perspective it sounds stange that after 30 days the guarantee should become invalid, even if the game is still broken. Oh well, I guess we should be happy that there's some kind of guarantee and goodwill policy at all.

Anyway, thanks for the encouragement; I hadn't thought about checking the Steam forums yet.

That's a fully supported system. I would put in a ticket to see if GOG can get it working correctly on your laptop.

Updated video drivers would be a good place to start.

We are constantly trying to make a universal-fix-it-all patch and experiment on our steam users since the way of patching there is much easier for us to do! As soon as we have something solid we send it here :) I would recommend getting a refund though, since you cant even play it! This is unfortunate, but there are other games that you could spend the money on and then return to Fran when we get it even more fixed :)

Well, I might be able to play it on my desktop PC, I just don't have access to it at the moment while I'm on the road. But I'm neither that short on money nor lacking games to play, so if you're confident you can get this fixed eventually, I'm fine with holding onto my purchase. In any case, thanks for the reply!