Fran Bow
| Fran Bow | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Studio | Killmonday Games | ||
| Publisher | Killmonday Games | ||
| Senior Developer | Natalia Figueroa | ||
| composer | Isak J. Martinsson | ||
| Erstveröffent- lichung |
August 27, 2015 | ||
| platform | Android , iOS , Linux , OS X , Windows | ||
| genre | Point-and-click adventure | ||
| control | mouse | ||
| medium | Download | ||
| language | German, English, Russian, Spanish | ||
| Age rating |
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Fran Bow is a point-and-click adventure game by the Swedish development studio Killmonday Games from 2015. It deals with the fate of a ten-year-old girl named Fran and belongs to the horror genre.
action
1944: Ten-year-old Fran Bow Dagenhart is an inmate at the Oswald Asylum mental hospital . The girl saw her parents brutally murdered and has been traumatized ever since. Her aunt Grace now has custody of her and pretends to be extremely worried about Fran and would love to bring her home. In the asylum, Fran has no more contact with her only friend, her cat, Mr. Midnight, which also clouded her mood. The psychiatrist Dr. Marcel Deern treats her with Duotine (a fictional psychotropic drug ), which transports her into a dark, terrible parallel world . Dr. Deern initially forbids taking Duotine and informs Aunt Grace that Fran is still far from healthy enough to be able to leave the institution. Meanwhile, Fran learns with the help of certain pills to consciously switch between reality and parallel world. She then decides to break out of the asylum, find her cat and solve the death of her parents. With the support of the other children in the institution, Fran manages to escape.
On her journey, however, reality and parallel world become more and more blurred because Fran takes the pills (she only finds out later that the pills are in truth duotines and were only misleadingly wrongly labeled). As a result, Fran has more and more difficulties in making the right decision and understanding her world. After finding Mr. Midnight, she keeps running into Remor, a demonic creature with a goat head who is an antagonist in the game. At first Remor intimidates little Fran with subliminal threats, later he threatens her directly and even hurts her physically and mentally several times. When Fran falls into a deep ravine on her way home, she falls into a vegetative state . In this state, Fran is reborn as a kind of tree man in Ithersta.
Ithersta is a plant kingdom full of talking insects and tubers. She represents the human will to survive and life itself. The king of Ithersta, Ziar, takes pity on Fran and the doctor of Ithersta, Palontras, nurses the girl back to health. Both help the girl to return to reality. Fran wakes up again and this time meets Itward, an animated skeleton in a tuxedo , jacket and top hat. Itward introduces herself to the girl as a childhood friend. Apparently Fran had made it up herself; but she had forgotten that because of the medication. Fortunately, Itward is not resentful, but helps Fran on her further escape. All three travel in Itward's “wonder flying machine” to Fran's actual place of residence, but crash (in reality Fran had stolen a bicycle from somewhere and crashed into a tree stump with it). At her parents' house, Dr. Deern them. Fran drives in Dr. Deerns car with. Dr. Deern finally explains to Fran what is actually going on with her:
As a young child, Fran fell victim to perfidious experiments. The head of the institution, Dr. Oswald Harrison is obsessed with the exploration and manipulation of multiple personalities and the soul-psychological duality in twins . He is also very fascinated by the "other realities" that Fran can see with and without the pills. Fran herself apparently suffers from a split personality and the pills make the two selves in Fran switch places. The Duotine tablets cause the "dark Fran" to wake up. In this state, Fran does nasty things, maybe she killed her parents herself (but the game always leaves this question of detail open). Alternatively, her aunt Grace had killed her parents, and there are vague references to this as well. Aunt Grace and Fran's mother Lucia had been twins themselves, which explains why Dr. Oswald and Aunt Grace knew each other and why Aunt Grace could so easily visit Fran in a closed institution. Grace and Lucia were also from Dr. Oswald has been examined and treated. However, with Fran's birth, Lucia had finished the treatments and Dr. Oswald is strictly forbidden to experiment on her daughter. Apparently Dr. Oswald offended. So he somehow made sure that Fran's parents perished and that he could keep Fran in his institution.
Fran finally manages to get into Dr. To get to Oswald's office and confront him. Aunt Grace is also present and her nasty comments about the death of Fran's parents make the girl so angry that Fran actually tries to strangle her aunt with her bare hands. Dr. Oswald finally draws a pistol and shoots Fran. Itward then appears and attacks Grace and Dr. Oswald. Palontras also appears and carries Fran away. The game ends here.
Game principle and technology
Fran Bow is a point-and-click adventure . From Sprites composite characters act before hand-drawn, some animated scenes. The player can use the mouse to move his character through the locations and use the mouse buttons to initiate actions that allow the character to interact with his environment. Fran Bow can find objects and apply them to the environment or other objects and communicate with NPCs . As the story progresses, more locations will be unlocked. Some mini-games integrated into the game plot require motor skills, but can be skipped. Occasionally the player slips into the role of the cat Mr. Midnight in order to solve some puzzles. A special feature of the game is the change between two levels of consciousness and different seasons. When Fran switches to the parallel world, the arrangement of the rooms, NPCs and objects is the same, the game world is therefore mirrored, but all objects are transformed into gloomy modifications. Manipulation of objects and interactions with NPCs in the parallel world have a direct effect on the real world, which results in numerous possibilities for puzzles in the game. The same principle is used in a modified form in the Ithersta fantasy world: the time of year can be set using a machine, which opens up different options for action with the environment and NPCs. For budget reasons, the game has no voice output, only subtitles in different languages.
The Android version is divided into individual applications per chapter, which must be purchased individually.
Production notes
Natalia Figueroa, who lives in Sweden and is a native of Chile, originally worked as a director and published the short film Säg farväl Isabell in 2010 . Under the impression that she could no longer translate stories satisfactorily using cinematic means, she turned to the medium of video games together with her co-author and husband Isak Martinsson, who composed the score for Fran Bow . The development of Fran Bow began in 2012. The game was partly funded by a crowdfunding campaign on the Indiegogo platform , which was supposed to raise US $ 20,000 in July 2013. Ultimately, $ 28,300 was achieved. A publication is planned for July 2014. The two developers had to live on the income generated until the game was released, which was supported by an inheritance from Martinsson. The game was released in August 2015 via download platforms such as Gog.com or Steam . In the first month after the game was released, Killmonday Games sold approximately 10,000 copies.
Some of the background motifs of the game are based on experiences of the author Natalia Figueroa in her childhood. According to Figueroa, other influences include musicals from the 1940s, Kafka , Poe and the surrealist horror film Eraserhead .
The versions for PCs were released in August 2015. The Android version followed in February 2016, the iOS version in March.
reception
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Fran Bow scores 70 out of 100 points on Metacritic from six aggregated ratings . The trade magazine Adventure-Treff slightly criticized the open end of the game and stated that the game was by no means suitable for children due to the excessive use of Gore elements, despite the appearance that is basically reminiscent of a children's book . The magazine praised the game's story, character drawing and puzzles, but criticized the German translation and the graphics, which sometimes looked “as if they were created as part of an LSD experiment in kindergarten”. AdventureGamers highlighted the discrepancy between Fran Bow's child-oriented perception of the game world and the "adult" issues such as loss of loved ones, loss of reality, self-harm and pedophilia and noted that the classification of what of Fran Bow's experiences was real and what was only in theirs Head done, left to the personal interpretation of the player. The magazine praised the memorable characters, the creepy atmosphere and the playing time of the game, but criticized some logic gaps in the plot and warned that the same and the visual presentation could be too gloomy for some players. Rock, Paper, Shotgun conceptually saw a reference to Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz and, in terms of setting, similarities to the 1988 Rainbird game Weird Dreams . Reviewer Adam Smith expresses admiration for the game character Fran Bow's ability to analyze and reflect and the numerous successful allegorical NPCs that embodied abstract concepts such as death or trauma. He criticized various loose ends in the plot that would not be resolved over the course of the game. Joel Couture stated in an essay on Gamasutra that the open ending was a necessary decision in the design process, as a closed act would have destroyed the player's immersion and left them unsatisfied. The overall picture that the player makes of Fran Bow is decisively shaped by the interpretation of the player after the open end.
Web links
- Official website
- Fran Bow at MobyGames (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ IMDB.com: Säg farväl Isabell. Retrieved June 12, 2016 .
- ↑ a b AdventureCorner.de: Interview with Killmonday. Retrieved June 12, 2016 .
- ↑ Indiegogo.com: Fran Bow: A Very Creepy Point & Click Adventure. Retrieved June 2, 2016 .
- ^ Killmonday blog: Fran Bow and the Mortem Post ( Memento from April 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ RockPaperShotgun.com: Interview: Killmonday On Fran Bow, Mental Health, Beauty. Retrieved June 3, 2016 .
- ^ A b AdventureGamers.com: Fran Bow. Retrieved June 12, 2016 .
- ↑ a b Adventure-Treff.de: Fran Bow. Retrieved June 12, 2016 .
- ^ A b Metacritic.com: Fran Bow. Retrieved June 12, 2016 .
- ↑ RockPaperShotgun.com: Fran Bow Is A Worthy Heir To Wonderland. Retrieved June 11, 2016 .
- ↑ Gamasutra.com: Fran Bow and the appeal of the ambiguous ending. Retrieved June 12, 2016 .