Meaningful Video Games #9
Fran Bow
Dear, sweet, innocent-looking Fran. With your bobbed hair and pretty yellow dress — how unprepared I was for what you had in store for me. In retrospect, I probably should have had an inkling from your title art…but maybe I was too distracted by the cute kitty you’re holding.
These past eight weeks I’ve written about games I find joyful, be that because of nostalgia, inherent loveliness, relatability or just because they’re plain fun. This week is somewhat different. With the possible exception of fun (and I don’t mean that in the usual definition, as I’ll explain later), Fran Bow espouses none of those qualities. My experience was the very opposite of joyful. So why has it made it onto my list of meaningful games?
We’ll begin by addressing that picture at the top of the page. See that demon-goat with blood dripping from him? I am a self-confessed Massive Wuss, and he’s pretty bloody scary by my standards. He pops up at random points throughout the game as a kind of jump scare mechanism. But he’s not the most disturbing thing in it. Not by a long shot.
The entire premise of Fran Bow is the exploration of her mental condition, following an intense trauma which I won’t outline because SPOILERS. Set in the 1940s, the game begins with Fran incarcerated in an asylum, armed with her trusty bag (because all good point and click adventures have a magic bag in which the protagonist can fit implausibly large inventory items) and a bottle of red pills. Taking a pill flips the scene from a regular environment to…well, let’s just say I didn’t enjoy flipping into ‘pill mode’.
The way to progress is by using the pills to flick between realities, as objects, information and characters found in one can be used to puzzle-solve in the other. The clever part is that as the chapters progress, it becomes increasingly difficult to work out what’s real, what’s not, what’s in Fran’s head, and generally WTF is even happening right now. I have a theory as to what was happening, but SPOILERS (let me know if you’ve played and would like to discuss!).
Despite my aversion to horror and gore, I have to acknowledge that it’s very well-constructed in terms of storytelling. At the same time though…ughhhh. I can never unsee these things!
It’s not just the creepy monstery elements and bloody gore all over the place — though those were indeed horrible, despite the cartoonish art style — it’s the little references to real world horrors too. Never in an overtly HEY YOU, BE SHOCKED BY THIS SHOCKING THING kind of way, just subtle little things like noticing where a young girl has handprints on her hospital gown while in pill-reality, then reading her patient chart in regular reality to find out she was a sexual abuse victim. Or dead babies in wells. All sorts of cheery stuff! Psychological horror playing on our deepest fears of what humans can do, as well as the monsters in the shadows.
Why have I picked Fran Bow this week? Because I finally finished it, it’s fresh in my mind…and I don’t want to have to revisit thinking about it for a future #Write52 entry. Too wimpish to play it alone, I’ve even been playing on stream with viewers to keep me company.
I don’t watch horror films, or play actual horror games, or even watch other streamers play horror games. The jump scares provided by ‘Gary’ (as we nicknamed that goat-thing, to lessen the fear factor for me) plus the frankly disturbing subject matter would have been enough for me to switch it off and never return, had I not had an audience to entertain.
And entertained they were. The last couple of months has seen me add a face-cam to my streams, which meant that they were able to giggle away at my visible reactions to Gary and co — every jump, every peek from behind my fingers, every aversion of my eyes as I clicked the red pill bottle, not knowing what godawful horror show we were going to see this time. But despite all that, I’m glad I did it. Although it wasn’t fun in the usual sense of “ooh I could play this for hours and hours!”, picking our way through the story was still satisfying.
Moving out of my comfort zone is something that always niggles at me as a streamer. I like familiarity, and being ‘known’ (grand as that sounds) for playing certain kinds of games is great. It helps build up a loyal audience, as people know what kind of vibe to expect when they come and watch. But equally, I don’t want to stagnate into repeating the same kind of thing forever. Fran provided an excellent compromise, being a point and click (which I do a lot of) but also a horror game (which I do not).
One thing I’ve noticed in my time on Twitch is that people seem to really enjoy watching other people be scared. I have no idea why. Maybe I’m just too sensitive? Those kind of streams can lead to increased revenue for the streamer, as audience members donate to trigger scary sound effects and other such ‘hilarious’ forms of interaction, but that’s not an avenue I want to pursue. I don’t think my heart would cope, for one thing.
I will, however, not be so hasty in dismissing games which look a bit darker in style or content. Though you’ll never find me playing Alien: Isolation or Outlast, there may well be future streams of creepy games. They’ll just be safely within my preferred genres. And preferably minus chopped-up body parts and demon-goats. Shudder.
So to wrap up:
- It’s pushed me out of my comfort zone, just enough to feel that I’ve made some progress
- Musing over the ambiguous ending with viewers has been interesting
- Fran’s mental illness is explored tastefully, not exploited for shock value
And that is why Fran Bow is Meaningful Video Game #9.
This post is part of the #Write52 challenge. Why not join us? See who’s involved on this Trello board!
I’m Toyah and I write. I also proofread and — because I’m hugely curious — spend a lot of my time discovering and learning about new things. If you’re looking for someone to wrangle words, get in touch via any of these methods.
