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(Note the Home/Hell sign )

A short but fairly accurate explanation of what kind of game Fran Bow is, is that it is a hybrid between Edna & Harvey: The Breakout, The Cat Lady and Alice in Wonderland ... on a bad acid trip!

The game starts with our protagonist Fran in a mental institution, where she has been placed after she witnessed the violent murder of her parents. As you can imagine she isn’t too happy about being here, and all she wants is to go back home to her Auntie Grace and find her cat Mr. Midnight.

The doctor puts Fran on some new experimental drugs, and suddenly Fran starts seeing all sorts of disturbing images / hallucinating / seeing things and beings from another realm / see things and people metaphorically (pick your own favourite explanation). Two of the first creatures she sees being a goat shadow monster, that is determined to keep her at the asylum and sabotage her every step, and a cat on a unicycle equally determined to help her and encourage her to escape and find Mr. Midnight .. after that things start to get a bit weird.

These pills however aren’t just there as a story element, instead they play an important part of the whole puzzle design of the game in a rather ingenious way. All screens exists in two different versions, a drugged /disturbing version and a normal version, and you can switch between the two simply by clicking on the pill glass. In order to solve the different puzzles, you will need to experience the same screen in both versions, and you will often need to switch view several times. 

So lets for example (my fictive example) say that there is a door you need to get through, unfortunately there is also a guard guarding the door. Click on the pill glass and the guard disappears (or is replaced by a decapitated deer). The puzzle is however not that simple as the door also disappears and is replaced by a wall, but it will still allow you to make different preparations in this screen without being noticed by the guard, and hopefully these preparations will cause the guard to leave his post when you switch back to normal view.

In one of the chapters, they even expand and change this idea a bit, and gives you no less than four different views of the same screens. It serves a different story element, but the puzzle idea is still the same.

Apart from this the puzzles has a nice variety, with both standard inventory puzzles, environment manipulation puzzles, a few simple riddles, and a couple of small (and not too difficult) minigames like the classic Frogger game and a Pacman inspired maze. If I have one complaint puzzle-wize, then it is that there isn’t any hotspot highlighter, though it never resorts to outright pixel-hunting.

P.S. Despite some disturbing imagery, it is not really a horror game, just a weird and disturbing story.

P.P.S. Here is the screenshot I would have posted, if this wasn’t a puzzles special: 

On my must play list. Although, to be honest, if I stopped adding any games, casual or adventure, to my must play list today, and simply started working my way through the current list until it was done, I might finish them by 2019.

I just browsed several hundreds of post on Steam, regarding how the ending and everything in this game should be interpreted, what is real, what is hallucinations, what should be interpreted metaphorical etc. - And I don’t think that there were two people that interpreted everything the same way, or for that matter that there were one explanation that actually explained everything

Also found this interview with Natalia Figueroa one of the two developers of this game, where they talk about how to make an ambiguous ending work: Sticking the Landing: Fran Bow and the Appeal of the Ambiguous Ending

Interesting article. Reminds me, in a small way, of the Drawn Trilogy discussions. Did we interpret the ending correctly? Did we interpret it the way the designer intended? Did the designer have any intentions one way or the other?

Yeah I also found the article very interesting.

Your two first question are of course an open question, but as for the third, then I think that it is important for these kind of stories, that the developer themselves have a very clear picture of what the actual story is.

Without having this one interpretation in mind when creating the story, then there is I believe a high risk that it will cross the line between being ambiguous and just being outright confusing and inconsistent.

The ambiguity instead comes from allowing the players to connect the dots themselves instead of explaining everything, but also from making sure that things can be interpreted in different meaningful ways. At least that is how I think it works.

I already wanted to back this project on indiegogo, but I couldn’t get the payment through. It’s on top of my wishlist now, but I’ll most likely end up waiting for a discount because of a bunch of other top notch games that I already own.