The Haunted Hoard: Dr. Franken (Game Boy)
While it’s fairly common for a video game protagonist to find themselves rescuing their love interest, Dr. Franken on Game Boy applies a rather morbid twist to the trope. Before the events of the game, the male lead’s girlfriend Bitsy is dismembered and her pieces scattered across the castle of the deceased Dr. Frankenbone. Presumably, she is much like the hero Franky herself, stitched together from parts of the dead and brought to life similar to Frankenstein’s monster, this platformer mostly leaning into light-hearted horror despite how odd it can feel to scoop up the torso of your beloved as part of a rescue mission.
Franky himself is also supposedly a victim in the game’s setup. Dr. Frankenbone had a range of creations that defied death, but with him gone, the other creations grow jealous of how cheerful Franky and Bitsy are together and disassemble the happy couple in the night, Franky only getting his height knocked down to three feet rather than having his body strewn across the castle. Skeletons, spirits, and even simple things like rats all seem intent on keeping the pair truly apart, but if you can manage to find every piece of Bitsy, you can help literally bring them back together.
Despite being diminished in size, Franky thankfully packs a fairly potent tool in helping him navigate the castle. Presumably since he was animated once with lightning, he can now also fire bolts of electricity in front of him with ease, most creatures in the castle either immediately defeated by a blast or completely immune. This essentially means most of the danger you encounter will be either something you can swiftly wipe out or a monster you’ll have to figure out how to safely leap past, and while there are certainly some large imposing creatures, regular rats scurrying around are perhaps the most dangerous. Tiny and fast despite patrolling set areas, compared to most creatures they feel like true nuisances, especially since they’re one of the few creatures that can be a touch unfair as they can be right where you enter a room for immediately dealt damage. Franky thankfully has a fairly huge health bar, albeit one you need to pause to look at, and small things like rats don’t damage him nearly as much as huge monsters that are properly poised to be obstacles. Health isn’t even too rare, many pick-ups found throughout the castle and there’s even a charging room on floor 4 that allows you to completely refill your life whenever you need to. You technically only have a single life to finish the game with, but passwords can be pulled up at most any time to preserve some progress and make rebuilding Bitsy a more manageable end goal.
Dr. Franken does sound like it has the pieces of manageable platforming adventure, but very quickly you’ll realize that while a lot of elements are tipped in your favor, one that isn’t is the very basic act of movement. Franky has a pretty awful jump. It goes a little higher upwards if you’re standing in place and carries you farther with a running start, but the small rooms of Frankenbone’s castle routinely are designed to make necessary navigation annoying and touchy. You might need to stand on something like a barrel to leap to a higher platform, but the barrel top has less solid ground than it appears, making it hard to line up the jump. Other times you’ll need to land on an incredibly tiny spot or be forced to perform multiple difficult jumps in a row, and in rooms with things like the rats, you have the constant irritation of potentially dropping down and taking damage while trying to line up what looks like a simple jump. Franky’s jumps are rigid and yet precision is often necessary, a powerful recipe for frustration formed and only worsened by how much ground you’ll actually have to cover to clear Dr. Franken.
Frankenbone’s castle has a daunting 230 rooms, and while most of them nearly fit on a single screen, the seven story castle is indeed complex and contains many routes that will require a chain of excellent jumping to properly navigate. You do have a map, albeit an imperfect one since there are some floors so large it can’t actually show everything and you lack the means to more freely view every part of the map. The map will not do much beyond indicate your current position, every room presented as a single square no matter its shape or contents and the early question marks meant to get you going on where to look dry up early on. Many rooms can be exited from a range of directions, not only left and right but also up and down to change floors as well as forward or backwards. There are areas of floors you can only access by taking stairs or falling through holes despite not being able to view the map well enough to set things up so easily, but while sections can be a bit maze-like, the only truly labyrinthine area is the bottom floor which aims to be deliberately confusing. You can start to get some sense for the layout of the castle’s more commonly tread areas even when a fair few rooms are essentially identical, but you will still probably be popping open your map repeatedly, meaning you’ll likely see play constantly interrupted by consulting pause screens for your current position and health.
Navigation is more important than just trying to get where Bitsy’s parts are hidden too, because not every area in the castle is immediately open for traversal. Locked doors and gates frequently bar progress to important areas, so you’ll need to find keys or other important tools around the castle, often without clear guidance that they even exist or what their function is. A rope or wrench feel like they’d have reasonable uses, but it’s a bit harder to puzzle out why you’re picking up a helmet or book, especially since the moment you do so, the area it’s meant for is altered without even notifying you what happened. You just have to notice an area has changed as you walk on through, leading to some potential meandering if you don’t realize what opportunity was just made available by a find. On the other hand, many keys are at least labeled such as the ones for the cellar or top floor’s towers, and there is some excitement when you are actually able to piece together how you can now progress. There are definitely regions of the castle that are more tolerable and tame than others so you’re not rubbing up again relentless issues with the jumping and enemy placement, some of the early exploration even a bit satisfying as you keep finding useful things only for that to dry up once you are left scrounging for some area of the castle where there’s still something to do.
THE VERDICT: Confusing exploration complicated by an awful jump, Dr. Franken’s early thrills of finding vital items around Frankenbone’s castle wither away as you contend with the scope of your work. Navigation is already a nuisance thanks to Franky’s poor movement ability, but with often little direction on where to head or how items relate to your work, Dr. Franken can boil down to bumbling about hoping you’ll find a room with something worthwhile. The health pick-ups and password system at least mean you eventually push through it, but if you put down Dr. Franken for a bit, it’s only going to make traversing the sometimes repetitive halls of the castle even harder to figure out.
And so, I give Dr. Franken for Game Boy…
A TERRIBLE rating. It’s actually fairly fortunate that Franky’s abilities never improve over the adventure, since otherwise when you find something important in a room like a piece of Bitsy or a helpful tool, you can at least be assured that there’s some way you can grab it. It will often involve contending with the game’s awful approach to platforming though, Franky’s jump already rough and rigid but then the areas he needs to stand on require spot-on leaps and an understanding of the game’s odd approach to what parts of a structure are solid or not. There are thankfully few occasions where a drop is incredibly dangerous, even though the little bits of damage can add up or you might have to repeat an aggravating sequence of tight jumps to get back to where you were after. Dr. Franken being generous with health makes things more feasible and bearable, and there are even times where it allows you to look at a situation with a ton of danger and just barrel through knowing you can potentially recover after, a far better solution than actually trying to avoid the game’s worse enemy clusters. Still, when Dr. Franken begins and you’re picking up items left and right, it does feel like there’s some hope for the game, but that disappears as crucial collectibles are found further afield and in places where you might not have had a good reason to check. Making Franky’s movement cleaner would actually be the biggest boon to the experience though. Navigating the entire castle could be done more quickly and safely if Franky didn’t handle so poorly, and while a better map and ideas like on-screen health would improve the experience too, if you’re making a game about exploring a huge space, getting the fundamental movement down first feels vital to making players actually want to stick with the adventure.
Dr. Franken’s ambitious design could work, but it feels like the game struggled to implement its big ideas like the large map while still failing the simple stuff like Franky’s own movement. Some guard rails like abundant health keep the exploration from being agonizing, but it rarely feels like your successes are well-earned here. You often just happen to find an item or eventually shove your way through an annoying jumping challenge, Dr. Franken in need of a greater focus on the player feeling like they’re succeeding to make rebuilding Bitsy something the player will actually be invested in.