She has a remarkable capacity to learn though and the Death at the game's beginning is not the same as the Death at the game's mid-point or end. Death, in Fran Bow, is a thing of tooth, claws, bone and blood. Fran's 'enemy' isn't her own mind – it is death, and specifically the death of her parents, and it is death that she considers to be “the cause of all the mischief”.Ĭarroll saw The Red Queen as “the concentrated essence of all governesses” rather than an “aimless fury” like Wonderland's Queen of Hearts. She is able to face down nightmarish creatures in the same way that Alice dismisses The Red Queen through the Looking Glass. As Fran develops, her ability to confront horrors with a sense of polite wonder rather than fleeing from them comes to define her. As the story develops, it swiftly moves away from the use of illness as a vehicle for shocks and scares, although if you only played the demo you might think that's the game's entire raison d'etre. Fran Bow is about grief, and learning to process feelings and events. I had doubts about the game's treatment of mental illness and chemical treatment as a gateway to insight and terrible wonders, but a couple of hours into the game they were laid to bed. That machinery is in the form of exposed muscle, bone and organs, as well as ethereal entities that may be spirit vampires or perhaps representations of emotional and mental collapse. Perspectives are foreshortened and confused so that even mundane objects seem weird, and that's before Fran swallows one of the pills from her infinite supply, allowing her to see the machinery of the world. It's more like 1980s oddity Weird Dreams than anything in the retro adventure revival. Not just imaginative but beautifully detailed, the early scenes are claustrophobic, dingy and dripping with gore.
Note: there are comments about theme and plot that you may consider to be spoilers - nothing specific is mentioned, except in one minor case that is flagged up later in the article. But that initial setting and the dark tone are just a small slice of a story that spans worlds and perfectly captures the beautiful, delightful nonsense of Alice's Adventures, an inspiration that is imprinted on the game.Įxtending Alice's curiosity to pitch black MORBID curiosity leads to an intelligent, melancholy and eventually hopeful journey toward an acceptance and understanding of death.
Fran Bow opens with a gory murder scene and then traps its young protagonist in a creepy institution for (criminally?) insane children. That might come as a surprise if all you've seen of the game is a couple of screenshots featuring gore and dead kids. Fran Bow made me smile more than any other game I've played this year.
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