Fran Bow
Fran Bow is a creepy adventure game that tells the story of Fran, a young girl struggling with a mental disorder and an unfair destiny.
Fran Bow is a psychological horror, story rich and point & click game
developed and published by Killmonday Games AB.
Released on August 27th 2015 is available on Windows, MacOS and Linux
in 6 languages: English, German, Spanish - Spain, Russian, French and Portuguese - Brazil.
It has received 18,181 reviews of which 17,679 were positive and 502 were negative resulting in an impressive rating of 9.5 out of 10. 😍
The game is currently priced at 14.99€ on Steam.
The Steam community has classified Fran Bow into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
Get an in-depth look at Fran Bow through various videos and screenshots.
Requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- OS: 7+
- Processor: 1.7 GHz Dual Core
- Memory: 2 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260, ATI Radeon 4870 HD, or equivalent card with at least 512 MB VRAM
- Storage: 5 GB available space
- Sound Card: DirectX Compatible Sound Card
MacOS
- OS: Game Maker Legacy: 10.11 through 10.14 only - Fran Bow: 10.15 (MacOS Catalina) and above 64-bit OS
- Processor: Intel Core Duo
- Memory: 2 GB RAM
- Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 4850, NVIDIA GeForce GT 120, or equivalent card with at least 512 MB VRAM
- Storage: 5 GB available space
- Additional Notes: For Macs still running the 32-bit MacOS (MacOS 10.11 through 10.14), select the Legacy Fran Bow choice when running the game. For Macs running a 64-bit OS (MacOS 10.15 Catalina and above), select the Fran Bow choice to run the game.
Linux
- OS: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
- Processor: 1.7 GHz Dual Core
- Memory: 2 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260, ATI Radeon 4870 HD, or equivalent card with at least 512 MB VRAM
- Storage: 5 GB available space
Reviews
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
This game has been in the corner of my mind since 2015, when I first watched a YouTuber play it. I love this game and it holds a special place in my heart and has been one of my biggest inspirations. Thank you to the developers for making this amazing game. I really do recommend this game if you are thinking of getting it.
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fran is just like me fr. i would also do absolutely anything to find my cat, even if it meant losing my mind in the process
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While recognizing the artistic qualities of Fran Bow, I strongly suspect that a significant part of its popularity is caused by its timing. It caught the last train of that trend in the earlier 10's when the first little children who grew up with gadgets found a taste for horror. Why tell creepy stories to each other before bedtime, if you can google interactable ones? Knock-Knock, Sally Face, Five Nights at Freddy's — all of these titles are both creepy and conventionally cute. You can enjoy watching a funny little girl overcoming obstacles just as well as the cutest demon ever killing her parents and everyone she loves. There is an inherent drive to dark stories in children and younger teenagers, so it's no wonder these tales gather such massive fandoms. But at the same time, Fran Bow is surprisingly, absurdly strong at storytelling. No comparison to Jeff the Killer creepypasta or the vague premise of Slenderman whatsoever. This twisted way of being family-friendly, both engaging and relatable (to some extent) for younger audiences and interesting for adults to think about, this level of keeping the mystery, evading the answers, provoking wild theories and consciously gaslighting the player, was only ever reached by Rule of Rose, from what I've seen (only here the artist was given more than two crayons, brown and green. And red crayons were in abundance). The narrative is calculated and directed very meticulously, and the kitty jumping into the window only to never come back is almost as touching as Betty disappearing from the camera view for good right before Rita opens the blue box in Mulholland Drive (but more, because it's a kitty). In fact, trying to answer the question "What is real?" is so hard here that you can't help thinking about our usual manner of interpreting psychological horror. "What did this symbol mean for the plot? Wasn't that occasionally a manifestation of the subdued desires and fears of the protagonist? Also, do you realize why the Yume Nikki girl sits in her room and sees creatures of prolonged shapes? What has happened in reality?" — in which one? Silent Hill kinda did a self-ironic secret "dog's dream" ending, but Fran Bow is much more complex in this. Good luck trying to tell when the pills show us the "reality" and when "illness" (and what was even that swapping subplot), what is the ontological status of a kitty in which moment, who and how has killed the parents and why does this little British (American? German?) girl dream of Indian gods, Escher and Finnish dictionary. Ideas grow from each other in your eyes, and that's actually quite logical that the game's iconography is so based on arboreal imagery; it's lively and vibrant roots, berries and leaves that make Fran Bow's promo materials stand out visually among all kinds of modern cruel tales in games; little girls, black cats, keys of all shapes and insects are used much more widely. The game itself actively grows and branches out during the playthrough, and there are less than two hours between the yellow walls of the ward and the eight realities whose names sound like Finnish mythology (but only if you, unlike me, were quick enough to trick the receptionist). This biological analogy, totally appropriate for a game about mental health, seems very curious to me regarding the whole New Weird's obsession with new worlds, the role of a human in them, the magic of physics, cacti people, and the boundaries between gothic — the fear of the past and the surreal — and weird — the fear of the way-too-real but not yet experienced. Speaking of: Fran Bow actually manages to turn Lovecraft inside out along the way. Yeah, new worlds might be weird, but are you sure that the unknown inhumane, say, the world of insects or living eyes, will be unbearably bad for us and the Frenzy bar will kill us? With its Eastern inspirations, Fran Bow might be a world game in the same sense in which Enigma is world music, which I think is very fitting for a game made by a couple of mixed Swedish-Latin American origins (hope I wasn't wrong here, but I know for sure Little Misfortune is Latina). The mechanic of seeing multiple worlds in one location highlights this message beautifully: between different experiences, there must be a language, be they caused by different origins or different mental composition (Laing's argument for working out a unique language to talk to a mental patient and understand them is basically what the player is constantly motivated to do here). Or actually even different age. As an older brother, I know two things perfectly: despite the game only being allowed for teenagers and older, it's not that twelve-year-old fans of Jeff the Killer don't know who Fran Bow is, as well as dozens of other horror titles, and it's not that Fran Bow is the most traumatic media they've most probably seen. It doesn't mean every child should immediately be introduced to Fran seeing her dead parents and cutting the beetlepig in half, but it's a perfect modern adaptation for something like The NeverEnding Story and the whole category of fantasy films about clever kids in a scary world (and it's unironically better and more wholesome than Time Bandits, for what it's worth). The way the characters aren't voiced (it's obviously for financial reasons but still) even reminded me of how I've read something about Dickens and his theatrical dialogues; they work the best if read by roles by the whole family. And Fran Bow is that as well! (One tough test for a let's player, I can say that). In our times, the world is scarier but also more open.
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Pros: + The art style is different, in a nice way. + It has a good balance of cute and dark themes. + The sound design is great. + The puzzles aren't hard; I didn't have to look anything up. + I loved being able to switch between realities. Switching between the seasons was my favorite. + As a bonus, it references many old games. (Frogger, Space Invaders, etc.) Cons: + You can only have one save file, which makes going back for missed achievements tedious. + Some of the puzzles were annoying in that I would figure them out before the game let me do them, and then I would get "stuck" until I gave up and tried to do what didn't work before. + The plot was a bit disappointing. By the end it felt rushed. A "We don't know how to end this, so here you go!" sort of thing. + Again, that ending????????????? Overall, I enjoyed playing this. I would not recommend it for plot, though.
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Story seems really making sense at some point and then you just notice that you cannot be sure of anything anymore and it's just really sad delusions masked with hopeful optimism. Really unsettling, but in very creeping way. It was fine until you just notice that what the heck just actually happened. There's no way to know what happens next. Quite traumatizing in its own way. I really love it. I don't know how to describe how bad it messes with your head and feelings.
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Last Updates
| Steam data | 19 November 2024 19:02 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 21 January 2025 17:15 |
| Steam price | 24 January 2025 04:47 |
| Steam reviews | 23 January 2025 12:06 |
Online players
82
Developer
Killmonday Games AB
Publisher
Killmonday Games AB
Release
27 Aug 2015
Platforms