The Haunted Hoard: Fran Bow (PC)

Fran Bow is a game that features blood-caked walls in a mental institution, a child’s head exploding, and the sight of a rather grisly murder, and yet, despite so gleefully depicting such dark situations… it has an absolutely precious protagonist in the form of its title character.

Fran Bow Dagenhart is an unfortunate soul who witnesses the horrific murder of her parents and must be treated for the trauma, but the pills given to treat her instead inadvertently help her unlock a state of hyperreality where she can see the dimensions adjacent to reality. However, despite being able to glimpse the dark other worlds and their often horrific versions of her reality by just popping a red pill, Fran remains plucky and trusting, maintaining a sense of wonder and fancy throughout her adventure. She’s a ten year old girl who has thoughts like one, finding objects in the environment and trying to concoct a reason for them being there, even when they’re fantastical creatures or dark shadows. Her world view isn’t solid enough to dismiss these as completely other, and her wild imagination means she’ll more willingly believe strange outcomes to situations. When she comes across something serious like the reports on her own trauma, she’ll struggle to understand such complexities, but even when speaking with the unusual creatures of the other world, she’ll approach them with a degree of naive fairness when the player would quite easily recognize them as potentially dangerous or utterly abnormal. Her charming world view makes it a delight to see how she might describe any item in the environment, this point and click adventure providing plenty of objects for the player to click on to get a glimpse at her adorable understanding of the world.

Fran Bow’s world isn’t quite so delightful though, and her optimism isn’t air tight. She has been legitimately affected by her parent’s death, and over the course of her journey to escape the asylum, find her cat, and head home to live with her aunt, she’ll often struggle with her psychological maladies. It can be heart-breaking to see this child so full of wonder stumble and cry, but she does pick herself up and keep moving, meeting a wide cast of characters along the way who both tie into the game’s character focused puzzles and the evolving plot. While Fran Bow’s journey begins in the mental institution with other kids like her, the pills she can take to enter another world start introducing her to more unusual creatures, the worlds growing even stranger when she makes her escape. Giant talking insects, strangely casual demonic creatures, sinister conjoined sisters, and a supposed imaginary friend from Fran’s past all have an uneasy air around them that makes their goals in working with Fran suspect, but to make her way home she’ll need to unlock the mysteries of the other worlds, this often requiring cooperation with these abnormal characters.

The adventure in Fran Brow heads to many different locations, most chapters having one large area to explore where you’ll need to solve puzzles to make progress. Many puzzles will tie into the two versions of the world Fran can see, the player often finding items in one world that are required to solve a problem in the other. Not every puzzle is as simple as getting the right items to the right place however, with some puzzles even having multiple solutions that are dependent on giving the right answers in dialogue trees or performing actions in the proper order to complete the task. Many areas keep their additions to your inventory somewhat limited to prevent confusion, although the detailed backgrounds can sometimes make finding what is needed a bit difficult. One example of this has to be the house of the conjoined sisters, their kitchen featuring many shelves of items as well as a well-decorated interior, and since the main puzzle in that area is a multi-step cooking ritual, scrounging for items isn’t always a completely straightforward affair.

Speaking of the backgrounds though, Fran Bow’s art style is definitely another one of its main appeals. Everything is gorgeously drawn and stylistic, whether it be more realistic locations like a real world neighborhood or the more surreal spots in the other worlds such as the horrific twists on reality or the oddly serene world in the clouds found at the game’s midpoint. Seeing the next screen is often a treat before you even begin to consider its gameplay importance, and while Fran and other humans can look a little odd at times, the monsters and original creatures of the game feature some strange yet intriguing designs. While I was reticent to compare it to a more demented version of Alice in Wonderland, the game essentially makes the comparison itself, that same concept of a hazy reality adjacent to our world that Alice experienced featured here where the fantasies are often grim despite sometimes being silly or completely benign despite appearances.

There is, however, a rather gratuitous use of its horror elements at times. Some sights in Fran Bow feel gratuitous and without meaning or at best surface level in their metaphorical representation. Sure, the sleazy guard’s station in the other world containing chopped up pigs is an easily understood metaphor, and the shadowy beings lurking over people that represent mental disorders are fitting and effective, but other places it can seem like blood and death are being applied simply to remind you that the other world is bad, especially when the screen might be mostly empty in the normal world counterpart. Perhaps a bit worse than some directionless horror imagery though is a story that doesn’t really find its ending, the game hastening to wrap up once it starts pitching rapid fire reveals near the end of the plot. The goat-horned demon that pursues you throughout your adventure as the main antagonistic force gets very little resolution, but there is an argument to be made that much of the adventure is meant to be interpreted for hidden meanings rather than viewed for just its literal presentation. Still, Fran Bow’s adventure does have a sort of uneven approach to story telling in general, the player getting a journal at one point that dumps a lot of the details about hyperreality on the player all at once right before a long chapter where you linger in a dimension that’s drastically different in tone and design from the rest of the game. Sure, this heavenly diversion at the midpoint has some importance and will remember to present brief flashes of horrific imagery to not completely break away from the game’s core style, but it can feel like the plot takes a back seat as you have to dive into the area’s puzzles and the problems of the local cast.

Thankfully, the puzzles of this midpoint chapter are some of the best to make up for it, involving freely changing the seasons to perform tasks across a fluid timeline of the area. Fran Bow can get creative with its puzzle designs because they so often involve multiple variables you can manipulate and steps to complete especially thanks to the pills that let you view two versions of most every location, but sometimes it injects minigames that are simply serviceable. Outrunning a troll takes on the form of a little jumping minigame, a Frogger inspired diversion helps you cross a body of water, and a maze game is how you free yourself from the asylum at the game’s start. None of these are really able to enhance or detract from the game in any way, but they’re also present enough that they warrant some mention despite their mediocrity.

THE VERDICT: Fran Bow stars a precious protagonist in an incredibly dark situation, but this horror-fantasy point-and-click provides plenty to enjoy with its lovely art style, wild imagination, and clever multi-step puzzles that often involve swapping between reality and the more surreal hyperreality. The plot is a bit rickety and oddly paced, not even providing too much of a strong conclusion, but that won’t hurt the exploration of the strange situations the game carries you through. Certainly gratuitous at times and containing ho-hum minigame diversions, Fran Bow is still worth a look because of the care put into the visuals, inventory puzzles, and a heroine that’s hard not to be charmed by.

And so, I give Fran Bow for PC…

A GOOD rating. Despite engaging in what I can only call moderate gore where blood is used in high amounts without much viscera, Fran Bow is a game that is likely to delight its player while also offering those dark visions of a corrupted world. Fran really carries a lot of the experience with her wonderful outlook on the world. She’s a sympathetic protagonist with simple goals and a personality that can draw fun observations out of even the most mundane of environmental objects, and seeing her reactions to it all makes her all the more charming. The world presented to her has plenty to bask in as well, from the more beautiful sights of the heavenly dimension to the macabre but creative creatures of hyperreality, Fran Bow is one of those games where you’ll want to see what’s next because the game keeps making that rewarding, but it feels like it came at the cost of a strong central narrative here. The inventory puzzles and character-derived tasks are certainly interesting enough to carry the gameplay portion of most areas, but the story comes and goes in strange ways, and the player is left with an understanding of it that’s probably just as thin as Fran’s interpretation would be. This does leave room for theories and interpretation, but the groundwork of facts is a tad flimsy to really feed that angle well. With time spent on little diversions like the minigames too, Fran Bow’s potential stops short despite plenty of elements that do work.

This point and click adventure engages the player’s curiosity, delights the eyes, and tugs at the player’s heart and mind in equal measure, but not so strongly that it achieves true excellence. Fran Bow is a collection of creative ideas strung along in a tour but not quite cohesive enough to be impactful. Most of its components are still good though, meaning your adventure with Fran is a mostly enjoyable mix of delightful and dark ideas.