Adventure games, especially those of the point-and-click variety, are very generally not my cup of tea. They are reminiscent of a bygone era in video games, one in which gameplay often had to be sacrificed for the sake of story. More often, they are more tedious than challenging, and I can’t abide games that have an utter lack of respect for my time.
Not all adventure games fall under that banner, however.
Fran Bow is a visual tour of the grotesque and the bizarre narrated through the perspective of its plucky, titular main character, and it’s equally as inventive as it is visually stunning. A mainly traditional point-and-click adventure game set in an approximation of World War II America — I think — Fran Bow guides players through several meandering, bizarre approximations of a single person’s mental state.
Simple in story, complex in visual aesthetic, Fran Bow takes players on a journey that veers wildly in tone but manages to remain interesting enough for those amenable to its quirks.
The game begins in a mid-century approximation of a children’s insane asylum. You are, of course, one Fran Bow, a young girl who had the utter misfortune of seeing her parents butchered. She’s over-medicated and undernurtured, locked up with a whole group of like-minded kids, and her kitty, Mr. Midnight, has disappeared. The men and women in charge only seem concerned with keeping the kids locked up and on mind-altering drugs, so Fran decides to break out.
One particular element defines Fran Bow as horror. In the bottom corner of the screen is a pill bottle. Click it, and the surrounding world transforms into a scene of the grisly and the macabre. It’s like when Rowdy Roddy Piper puts on sunglasses in They Live. The room stays the same, but the contents are utterly obscene with blood and violence.
Dead children, unholy figures, and demonic spirits fill the screen. Just imagine if L. Frank Baum had tripped on spoiled acid while writing The Wizard of Oz. It’s plenty freaky.
This interplay of ideas is where Fran Bow shines. It’s not so much a horror game as it is a weird game, kind of like a sketch from the 90s bizarro MTV show Liquid Television stretched out to feature length. Which kind of works. I wondered how long the game would be able to heft the load of constantly shocking the audience with gallons and gallons of blood, but as it turns out, the team at KillMonday Games is not interested in mere shocks.
At a certain point, you venture beyond the world of the dark and horrific, so the tone itself shifts. It is equally as bizarre as the game’s introduction, but there is something inherently less ghastly about the middle-to-latter section of the game than its first impression conveys. To complicate matters, the distance from the game’s original premise gets blurred as the game moves into its various chapters. It feels less cohesive, even if it is always interesting to behold. I’ll get to the writing later, but the lack of a strong moment-by-moment narrative hook obscures the impact of the game’s ultimate point.
Puzzle-wise, Fran Bow is as difficult as any adventure game I’ve ever played. Quite a few of the puzzles require the kind of old school, Sierra-esque experimentation you don’t see in a lot of games today. You’ll need to collect a whole host of seemingly unimportant items and keep them for worryingly long times before being able to combine them with other things and use them to solve some arcane puzzle.
I struggled mightily in a few places, to the point where I didn’t know if I’d be able to find a solution, but ultimately what I discovered made me feel stupid for not having seen it before. You’ll probably end up struggling, but it’s a good, productive conflict with the internal elements of the game.
The joy in the game comes from testing and retesting hypotheses about some of the puzzles’ different components, all while enjoying the visual aspects of the art design. The ‘ah’ moment of figuring out a previously impregnable puzzle is enthralling.
The only real, honest letdown in the game has to do with the writing. I like Fran as a character, but very often she exists only to solve the puzzles, not because it is in her character but because it needs to be done to move the plot forward. It does not serve the game’s set-up as much as well as it could have. Fran’s raison d’etre is blurred in some of the middle chapters, as Fran’s mission is not clearly defined.
The problems extend to the dialogue, as well. The illusion of choice is particularly frustrating, given that the binary choice that exists in dialogue trees isn’t really a choice at all. It’s like a text scrawl, where the other “choice” is merely the equivalent of “Okay, bye!” I spent far too much time clicking through meandering blocks of text, much of it without helpful, clue-saving hints.
Truth be told, I would have much preferred digging into the mystery seated at the heart of the game than repeated dalliances with the fantastical. It isn’t grounded in the story so much as it is just randomness writ large: “Oh, here’s this frog. Should it talk? Probably not. There’s no narrative reason for it, but it does. I guess I’ll just have to follow it. Crazy game!”
Overall, however, I have to say I enjoyed my time with Fran Bow. It’s truly one of the more creative games I’ve played in some time, even if it doesn’t quite come together as a single, cohesive experience as well as it could have. If you’re into more traditional adventure games with a unique art style, then Fran Bow is precisely the game you’re looking for.
The Final Word: Fran Bow, while not without its faults, is a solid adventure game with some frightfully creepy moments.
