Fran Bow: A Storyteller and Artist Combination
As a point-and-click adventure game oozing with horror elements, Fran Bow from Killmonday Games uses creative style and skilled story-telling to keep players interested, from an emotional start to a cryptic ending. Yet, a veil of youthful imagination, naivety, and confidence covers the players eyes the entire time, planting seeds of doubt on Fran’s trust as a leading character. Because of her innocence, the game masterfully sets up an early standard of distrust with Fran’s comprehension of her experiences. Afterall, everything may just be the overactive imagination of a young girl. Handing the player a child that takes psychoactive pills to deal with the trauma of her parents being killed adds even more tension to the atmosphere of the game. Killmonday Games knew they wanted to make you question and consider everything in their game, and Fran’s character design alone ensures no one could play through Fran Bow without uncertainty inevitably creeping up on you.
With an incredible attention to detail, Fran Bow enhances player experience with the game’s art choices, specifically working to elicit emotional responses. Black and white cutscenes only allow one color to be used: red. For instance, the vibrant red is used to dramatize murders, bloody tears, and a loving heart. Each chapter takes place in a new location, like the home of conjoined twins and a realm of living roots and human-sized insects. With the locations being drastically different from each other in theme, it keeps such a simple game from looking and feeling the same. Fran Bow also includes minigames in each chapter, in a variety of art styles. For example, a claymation frog minigame is tied into escaping an island. Some minigames are also one of the only time arrow keys are used. These provide nice breaks from both the games general art style and the limited actions players have, keeping gameplay from becoming singular and totally monotonous. Finally, Fran Bow’s music and sound effects are both vital in setting the tone. A whistling cacophony of noises plays when Fran takes her medicine, enhancing the intensity of the moment. Whimsical and light music playing when Fran is inside an earthy kingdom feels natural and adds to the fantasy atmosphere of this location. The soundtrack matches scenes with appropriately effective music for each situation. All these artistic decisions work together to make the game an even better experience, necessary in finalizing a complete and well thought out game.
Fran Bow also focuses on objectives like solving puzzles and collecting trinkets to give the player goals to work towards. Items collected can often complete spells or potions that solve puzzles; meanwhile, other riddles require knowledge gained from other characters to determine an answer. Regardless of which type of tasks the game has given you to work on, al the smaller objectives contribute to completing each chapter and ultimately the plot as a whole. These goals also help keep a flow to Fran Bow, not allowing players to easily stagnate or become unsure in how to advance further along.
Without spoiling the content of Fran Bow, one of the best aspects of the game design is the ambiguous ending. Based off one’s own experiences with their mental health, childhood memories, family situations, and general imagination, players can form personal reasonings to justify how they see the ultimate fate of Fran Bow. The conclusion revels in its open-endedness, clearly inviting interpretation. This also invites everyone to continue talking about Fran Bow and keeping the game discussable long after completion.
As the first game released by Killmonday Games, they thematically and narratively hit the quirky, horror nail on the head. With simple mechanics in use, the single player indie game was made to stand out. Killmonday Games made players work through and confront emotions and feelings as a response to their story, designing their game appropriately make this happen. Fran Bow takes you on a fantastical journey, and by limiting your actions to point and click, a generally uncommon subgenre of adventure games these days, it allows for a unique, suspenseful experience that was an overall enjoyable to play through.
