Fran Bow. Fran Bow is a recently released point & click adventure game with a dark setting. Fair warning, I'm probably going to VASTLY overuse the word dark in this review.

The gameplay is of course fairly standard point & click. You click on things. You pick up things. You combine things. You use those things. Blah blah blah. You know the deal. Fran Bow adds a bit of a twist by allowing (and requiring) you to switch between two different realms to solve puzzles, each realm (usually) having a piece of the solution to whatever puzzle you're on. On top of that, Fran Bow occasionally tosses levels at you that are NOT point & click in style. Those levels include a stealth section, a Frogger level, and a autorun jump over the obstacle level among others.

As with any point & click adventure game, the puzzles are the bread and butter of the gameplay. Most of the puzzles are logical (at least within the game's universe) and not too mentally taxing, however there are three or four puzzles that range from annoying to "OH COME ON?!?!". One example being a puzzle that utilizes a mechanic in a different way than you're used to, in fact it's used in a way that you NEVER told about, and you can only figure it out via lots and lots of trial and error or ye olde walkthrough. Another example being necessary dialogue options being locked based on your inventory at the time and the game not giving a head's up about it.

The writing is generally really great in my opinion, save for the overuse of the word "dear". The game really enjoys the word "dear". As you might've guessed it's a very dark game and it covers a lot of dark topics, however it often does so in as much of an "innocent" light as possible. An example would be a character who self harms, the character and Fran refer to the blood as "red milk" (I believe the whole line is something like "Please make the red milk stop".

You might also say that much of the writing for both the story and dialogue is of the "cutesy disturbed" or "creepy cute" style, as Fran often makes comical light of death, mutilation and other things, however the game does know when to play it straight and it does a good job of doing so when needed.

The characters are all very well written, save for the big bad sadly enough. While most of the characters are fleshed out, the big bad is rarely talked about and when it is mentioned it's usually fairly simplistic stuff. I get "why" the character is bad and all that, the game just never gives you much motivation to care about it despite what it has done. Beyond the big bad, I would call several of the characters memorable, even side characters that were there for ten or fifteen minutes. As with any horror game, there are some thinly veiled shoutouts to legends like The Shining, Nightmare on Elm Street, and the character design of one character who is reminiscent of a certain Nightmare Before Christmas character.

The overall storyline is hit and miss. Most of it is solid but there are two parts that kinda drag it down, the first being a loooong lore dump area about 2/3rds into the game and the very ending, unfortunately. The lore dump area is (surprise!) full of lore, some of which is just not interesting and feels like padding, whereas the ending feels very VERY rushed and very sloppy.

Graphically it's a beautiful game. The art direction is stellar (if you're into that style at least), everything is really high quality, from the character models to the drawings to the animations, it's all very impressive.

Sound wise, the music gets a bit repetitive and some of it is fairly boring. The sounds effects are all decent enough though

Overall I really enjoyed Fran Bow despite its flaws and would recommend it, I bought it at full price and I don't regret it. A friendly word of advice, don't be afraid to check a walkthrough if you get stuck, due to the nature of some of its puzzles.