Like other adventure games, gameplay involves seeking various objects in the game world in order to combine and use them to solve puzzles, and speaking with many characters to learn more about the world and how to progress. In one scene, the player controls the protagonist's cat. Additionally, a small portion of Fran Bow consists of minigames within the broader narrative that present more complex logical challenges.
Plot
Set in 1944, the game tells the story of Fran, a ten-year-old girl struggling with mental illness after witnessing the violent murder of her parents. After being found alone in the woods, Fran is admitted to Oswald Asylum and separated from her black cat and only friend, Mr. Midnight. Under the care of psychiatrist Dr. Marcel Deern, Fran is administered pills. The pills cause vivid hallucinations of a parallel hyperreality, filling the Oswald Asylum with smears of blood, mysterious messages, grisly torture, human subject research in psychology and neurology, and otherworldly shadow beings. Driven to escape her imprisonment, find her cat and return home, Fran passes into this other world. Still searching for an explanation of her parents' murder, Fran finds herself transformed into a tree in a world called Ithersta, a land where vegetables and roots live in harmony. After departing Ithersta, she encounters a giant skeletal creature named Itward. Itward helps Fran in her search for her cat. Throughout the game, Fran and other characters grapple with psychological trauma, survive the abuse of parents and doctors, and learn what it means to live amongst other humans and spirits.
Development
Fran Bow was developed by Swedish studio Killmonday Games, composed of Natalia Martinsson and Isak Martinsson. The plot of the game includes autobiographical elements from Natalia's life, and she described the process of creating the game as therapeutic. The game was part-funded through an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign, raising $28,295 in August 2013. The game was released for desktop platforms in 2015, and mobile versions followed in 2016.
Reception
Fran Bow sold 10,000 copies in its first month. The game received a score of 70/100 on reviews aggregation website Metacritic, indicating a mixed response. Adam Smith, writing at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, gave the game a positive review, describing it as a game that "sits alongside Wonderland and Oz – imaginative, strange, unsettling, intelligent and charged with a rare and beautiful sense of hope". Smith felt however, that some plot threads were not satisfactorily concluded. Joel Couture, in an article for Gamasutra, used Fran Bow to discuss the merits of an ambiguous ending; Figueroa responded that she preferred to "give the answers in a metaphorical way", allowing players to interpret those signals through their own experiences.
Fran Bow also appears in The Sorrowvirus: A Faceless Short Story as an animate doll, used with the permission of Killmonday Games. Fran Bow in The Sorrowvirus: A Faceless Short Story holds no canonical connection to its parent title and is instead a guest-star in a separate video-game universe.
