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. Perhaps now, piecing the engine together, you can think of the plane.Fran Bow made me smile more than any other game I've played this year. And as with all art, all entertainment, you’re left to hope the experience was worth it. You’ve taken apart, with the designer’s instructions, your mental engine. Because with game as guide, with map discarded, you’re off the tracks, your train of thought derailed. It shows you the fragility of its world and leaves you scrambling. But to its daring credit, it reminds you of all that you’ve left behind. It allows you to throw away some hours to play a game. It lets you forsake context to play with logic, driven as you are by its abstracted aims. It depicts both the danger and the joys of interactive media’s immersive trip. “Fran Bow,” as a case study, is quite intriguing. The game ends with you unsure, asking questions that have no answers. And so it’s back to psychological horror it’s the other shoe dropping. You’ve had quite the journey, but now struggle for resolution. And so with context shattered yet again, you are an orphan, a walking loose end. You’re out of pills, the doctor’s found you, you were just beyond the asylum’s walls. Your imaginary friend now guides you home. You’re getting trapped in your own mind.Īnd so you must transition back. As you read of endless worlds in another language, you must confront how little you really know. The path here has been seductive-sure, new ways of thinking are always fun-but now the context you have formed no longer serves you. You stumble upon a cryptic journal, and it’s horrifying. There’s no boredom, there’s no grind and there’s no hassle, as each conclusion itself feels like magic. Your actions still have logic, but new consequence. It’s like a great short story with you as the driver. Your point-and-clicks feel powerful, you shift the seasons on your watch and father time now attends to your mood and reason. You’re concerned with attending a club filled with bugs and with watching a grasshopper dance. You fashion your own doors.Īnd so you’re in wonderland-in this game, called Ithersta-and your troubles have become only joys. And so you harness, with creative glee, your refreshed logic. You reunite with your cat and feel like a witch yourself. You escape the confines of their dainty, devious house. But only because you have been so thrown, only because you wield new tools, can you flip the script, change the potion, dare to leave. Now you’ve been given, by the witches, a recipe-and in completing it they know you’ll be sacrificed. In the quest to find your cat, you’ve been learning-of new locks and new keys, new paths from A’s to B’s-and you’re certainly shaken, but have begun to understand your new logic. Having escaped the asylum, you’re now in the house of witches. To detach yourself from the world is a necessity, for through divination alone do you open doors. You drug yourself, when you’re stuck, and see demons. And so you must click on objects to hear your own thoughts. Your dubiously-prescribed pills muddle reality. You’re a traumatized young girl in an asylum. It takes the simplest of steps-the path from A to B, the lock and key, the pressing of one button to proceed-but then confuses all context, harshes clarity and forces us to cling to its stylized logic. In doing so, it illustrates precisely the above-the effects of reimagining exhausted patterns of logical thought. “Fran Bow” by Killmonday Games takes a point-and-click adventure and adds psychosis. But what if we could urge ourselves to renew the threads of thinking? To dress up before the gala, pregame the party of association? If one could for a time relieve themselves of all the practical foundations, and believe that a key in hand alone is something of great power, then perhaps they’d be driven to lands of logic yet unfound, as thought itself-the task would seem recharged. We cross our rooms less and less, we dread the thought. For those of us, however, who are on our thousandth drawer, and whose keys in hand seem heavy, mass-produced-the steps of thought, the legs of action, seem to slump, unused. In the time when housed linens must cover cabinet’s curiosity, when beneath isn’t barren bottom, but priceless artifact. Or at least that’s what one thinks when they’re a child in this world-when the uncovering, the exploration, is less dreary. A mechanism, a promise and so one goes to turn the bolt-expectant to find, in this drawer, answers. There’s a key in the corner and a locked drawer center stage.
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