While there are minigames, like a maze that requires you to move quickly to dodge shadows, they have an optional skip button, which is a nice touch. Find a comb to disentangle severed heads in a tree? Craft a magic recipe to bewitch your captors? Sounds like a good time to me. It is, in other words, intuitive until it isn't, though despite that occasionally rearing its head and some quests that drag on too long, Fran Bow keeps its gameplay interesting. Of course, there are exceptions, like the more obtuse "find a blue rose" objective in a certain chapter whose hints are too vague and coupled with hotspots that are only interactive at certain times. You'll still need to combine items into weird jerry-rigged solutions for your problems, but most of it is rarely outlandish or unreasonable, and the game gives you little nudges through dialogue or other clues as you explore. Most of the puzzles are actually surprisingly logical, even the standard adventure-game fetch-quest ones. While there are a few jump scares, Fran Bow is more interested in making your skin crawl than trying to make you leap out of it. The artwork is fantastic, lending a lot of macabre life to its expressive characters, and the environments are chock full of things to examine and cringe over. You spend a lot of time wondering whether she really is crazy, but even that doesn't necessarily explain a lot of the things you see and learn. She's a creepy little kid, one who's been through horrible trauma and yet still maintains an oddly upbeat approach to many of the things she encounters, prone to cryptic musings about the things she sees. It's by turns darkly whimsical, weird, and pitch-black morbid, and Fran herself is just as sympathetic as she is strange. The imaginative and unsettling design is constantly surprising, while the story keeps you guessing throughout. Though some dialogue options are oddly worded so that it can be hard to tell what Fran will say or do, Fran Bow is still absolutely chilling. The game makes use of an autosave-only save system, but if you close the game and choose "continue", you'll pick up right where you left off.įran Bow is, of course, an extremely dark and morbid game, but it's also at its best when it's focusing on the core story instead of being shocking for the sake of being shocking, and when it buckles down on Fran's story, you can't help but want to know more. (Gee, what harm could ingesting vast quantities of an experimental drug possibly do to a child who's already had one bad reaction to them?) Most of the puzzles you'll encounter require you to know when and how to use the right item, or how to combine what you've got into something that'll do the job, but there's a solid amount of other types of challenges for you to solve around the way as well, so always watch for clues. If you want to go back to the "normal" world, well, just pop another. a nightmarish prospect, but one that can let her discover new secrets or clues in her surroundings. When she finds them, Fran's red pills can be used to shift reality. Any items Fran picks up can be found by opening her purse in the bottom left corner, and then clicking the "use", "examine", and "combine" buttons to try to find uses for her inventory. Sometimes they might only be something for Fran to make casual observations about, while others can have more useful functions. if you can stomach it.įran Bow plays like your typical point-and-click adventure game, which is to say you point your cursor at things, and click on them to interact. But is she ready for what she may find even if she survives? Nightmarish, darkly whimsical, and creatively perverse, Fran Bow is an engaging game with an inventive story and characters. Fran stages a daring escape, but the world is dark and full of danger, and while horrific visions and creatures plague her every step, including the horned beast that taunts her dreams, Fran pushes onward. through the use of her pills, Fran can see the monstrous shadows that loom over everyone, and it seems like the other kids are aware of them too, though they can't escape them. But since when have the rules (and a foreboding dream or two) ever gotten in the way of anything? You quickly discover that there's something very wrong in the Asylum. Midnight, though she's not allowed to leave. All Fran wants is to figure out who (or what) killed her parents, and find her beloved cat, Mr. Following the brutal murder of her parents, she's locked away inside the Oswald Asylum mental institution for children, where therapists and new medicines try to help her unlock the secrets of her past so she can heal. Little Fran Bow, the star of Killmonday Games' indie horror point-and-click adventure title, can barely remember happier times, even though she's still just a child.
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