Killmonday’s Fran Bow
The trauma of guilt and gear
Fran Bow is a story driven point-and-click puzzle game developed by Natalia and Isak Martinsson, and tells a rather dark and disturbing tale, so reader discretion is advised.
If you are unfamiliar, the game tells the story of Fran Bow, a young girl who has been put in the Oswald Asylum, which specializes in dealing with children suffering from Trauma. In Fran Bow’s case this comes in the form of the murder of her parents. Fran Bow’s main goal is to try and find her cat, Mr. Midnight, who disappeared the night of her parents murder. Much of the game centers around trying to find Mr. Midnight, as well as finding out the truth of what happened to Fran Bow’s parents. A major component to both the gameplay and story, introduced in chapter 1 (so, very minor spoilers), is a pill called Duotine, which supposedly empowers the subconscious, causing hallucinations. Throughout the game, the player (and by extension, Fran) use these pills in order to find items, solve puzzles, learn more about each of the characters, and eventually escape the asylum in chapter 1.
Without getting into spoilers (yet), Fran Bow presents the player with an important conundrum, the pills are explicitly stated to cause hallucinations, meaning that what Fran sees shouldn’t be real while she’s taking them, and yet there are important things that we only see occur with the pills including relevant backstory that is later confirmed by dialogue without the pills. This question of “how much of what I’m seeing is real?” is never explicitly stated, as Fran Bow herself ends up taking everything at face value, reasoning that because the creatures she’s seeing are able to affect objects that other people can confirm are being moved, those creatures must be real and the Duotine is simply allowing her to see them.
SPOILER WARNING: Unfortunately, there isn’t much else to say without getting into spoilers, but I will go ahead and give you my recommendation of the game right here. The game only costs $15 on Steam, can run on basically any computer, and is fairly short with extremely well written characters, and a distinct art style that manages to make everything clear while still giving it a roughness to fit the tone of the story. But if you’ve already played the game or don’t really care about spoilers then keep reading.
Probably the most memorable part of this game is simply the uncertainty of the question: Was any of this for real, or not? The story is itself presented through the eyes of Fran Bow akin to an unreliable narrator who would answer that question with: Yes, it was all for real. From this point of view we get a lot of lore about different layers of realities and normally invisible beings including cover character Remor, the Prince of Darkness who killed Fran Bow’s parents because he was in conspiracy with the psychiatrist Oswald to perform experiments on twins, which included Fran’s parents. I promise it makes more sense while you’re playing the game.
But there is quite a bit of evidence for the latter answer, that most of what we see isn’t real, and that Fran is in fact hallucinating, with her hallucinations made stronger by the usage of Duotine. The first and last thirds of the game have very clear and real settings, the first third initially taking place in Oswald’s Asylum and the woods outside. The last third then takes place in the neighborhood that Fran’s aunt Grace lives in, before being taken into Grace’s house, and then back to Oswald’s Asylum (although at this point, the lines between reality and hallucination are blurring a lot).
The story then changes from a somewhat fantastical yet still deeply disturbing story to something even more disturbing, especially in the final act. Over the course of the story, we are introduced to the main antagonist Remor (or rather, the most present antagonist as Oswald himself could also be considered the true main antagonist) who is changed from a creepy Prince of Darkness that feeds on negative emotions to a personal representation of Fran’s guilt. In the final chapter, and in the final scene Remor appears in, it is revealed to both Fran and the audience by Remor that Fran was the one who killed her parents. The game presents this (through Fran Bow’s perspective) to be only partially true, and that Remor had possessed Fran to kill her parents and that it wasn’t actually her fault.
Ironically enough, despite such an important question as to the legitimacy of what we see play out in the game, Dr. Oswald actually doesn’t change all that much, at least he possibly doesn’t. Within both framing’s, he is antagonistic. At face value he’s an evil mastermind of sorts, performing experiments on twins and actively trying to hurt Fran in order to further those same experiments all for his own selfish desires of knowledge at the expense of so many innocent lives. But if you accept that Fran is an unreliable narrator, we still see that Dr. Oswald could very well still be a monster whose method of treating children with Trauma causes far more harm than good. When we see the Asylum, even before taking the Duotine, it isn’t in the best of condition, the staff generally don’t seem to care about the children they’re supposed to be looking after, only putting in the minimum effort of feeding them and making sure they stay in specific areas. And in the final scenes we do see that aunt Grace and Dr. Oswald clearly want to do something to Fran on a surgery table, but what they say (or rather, what Fran Bow hears) is all related to what we’ve already accepted as a hallucination, meaning we can’t quite take their words at face value, meaning we need to consider their actions as well.
But in order to do that, we need to first discuss how Mr. Midnight fits into all this. His role as Fran Bow’s only remaining companion is vital, as anyone going through trauma needs to have someone present to be able to help them and therapy pets are a real thing. Psychologically speaking, Mr. Midnight is Fran Bow’s last connection to both her parents and to the happy life she had before their death, so she makes it her utmost priority to find him even when no one is willing to help her (except for Dr. Deern, who is the only character who we see make a genuine effort to help Fran Bow, but I’ll discuss him more later). Mr. Midnight is found in Chapter 2 in the game (which takes place in the woods) before they are separated again. In the final chapter we see Grace take a bird cage with a black cat inside of it (that Fran Bow initially thinks is Mr. Midnight) and throws it over the void, killing him. Of course, the void is part of Fran’s hallucinations (under our current framing of the game’s story) but this action could also be Aunt Grace throwing the cage out the window. This could be seen as aunt Grace attempting either to force Fran Bow to move on by destroying the last connection she has to a time when her parents were alive, or it could even be seen as sheer hatred that Grace feels toward Fran for killing her sister. Either way, this causes Fran to attack Grace and attempt to strangle her, to which Oswald responds by pulling out a gun and shooting Fran. In the game, Fran is saved by Itward, another character that even Fran says was her imaginary friend growing up, and Palontras (a big, flying, green, furry axolotl), who then reveals to Fran the ‘real’ Mr. Midnight. Itward pushes Grace and Oswald off screen, possibly killing them, while Dr. Deern is sent back to Earth with his memory erased and Palontras takes Fran on her back to Ithersta. Under our current framing of ‘yes, these are all hallucinations’, then these would all be Fran Bow’s dying mind conjuring up a happy ending for herself from her hallucinations. A (surprisingly dangerous) child who barely understood what was happening, trying to navigate a mind that lied to her at every turn, only to be killed for what she thought was avenging her just murdered companion.
Centering this back on Oswald however, this framing really doesn’t provide much about him. The only time we actually see him is when Fran is hallucinating so strongly that what he says can’t be taken at face value, but we can speculate in two general directions, one that strangely fits with Fran’s perspective, and the other entirely benign. To briefly explore the latter of those two options, Oswald and Grace could have set up the ‘Mr. Midnight in a bird cage’ scenario using, not a real cat, but a doll or plushie and relied on Fran’s hallucinatory state of mind to make her believe it was Mr. Midnight. Seeing that the Duotine had only caused Fran to run away and not helped her at all, this could have been a well intentioned desperate act to try and bring Fran back to reality, (since Dr. Deern trying to help her earlier clearly didn’t work) but then needing to shoot her to save Grace’s life. A tragedy in itself really.
But there is also the possibility that Oswald really was a monster, performing experiments on the children under his care, possibly even similar to what the game presents to us. It’s entirely possible that Fran herself was subjected to these but, like the memory of killing her parents, these were suppressed, and only came through as projections of things she learned about happening to other people (these same projections could also be explained as simple fears of what might happen to her in the Asylum in the relatively more benign interpretation). It’s an unfortunate truth that Asylums do not have a positive reputation, and have been known in the real world to cause a lot of harm in attempts to “cure” their wards, and so it could be the same situation in the game.
Another, another interpretation of the game's events also comes from how Fran’s parents died. Remor could easily be a manifestation of guilt and Fran could literally have been her parents' murderer, but we only ever get confirmation of this at the end of the game, where Fran’s mental state is at the most unstable, from Remor who is a manifestation of Fran’s guilt. It’s entirely plausible that Fran didn’t literally kill her parents but still feels guilty about it, as can happen in any traumatic scenario. Even when it isn’t their fault, people can and do still blame themselves, and so too could Fran Bow just be blaming herself despite not having actually done it.
Unfortunately, this is all just speculation, and no matter how much evidence there is for a bit of speculation, it’s hard to ever be sure that it’s true. So then I’d like to ask, instead of “What seems more plausible?”, “What does it feel like the game wants to tell us, and which interpretation best fits that message?” The very last lines in the game, from Fran Bow, read “I still don’t know many things… But one thing I do know… That between guilt and fear… I choose happiness” These lines are odd, for such a dark and depressing story, these last lines are strangely optimistic. Should we then take everything the game has shown as at face value then, was it always real and the theories of hallucination an effort in futility? I don’t actually quite think so, but rather that these lines reveal a deeper meaning, not necessarily an interpretation of the story, but an overall message about trauma.
Looking at the ending of the game, it’s an oft seen scenario of the main characters friends coming in to save the day at the eleventh hour, but when taking this simple story setup (which is usually reserved for the climax rather than the ending) in tandem with those last lines and the games focus on Trauma, I believe that the game is presenting a deeper meaning about how to address trauma. Essentially, it presents the case that medication, surgery, and putting people in an asylum isn’t the way to address trauma, but rather having people who are willing to be there for them and to help them make the choice of happiness. The wording of those last lines are important, happiness is between guilt and fear, the fear and guilt, and by extension the trauma as a whole, don’t actually go away, but rather Fran finds a way to live happily anyway with the help of her friends. What could such a message mean for the message the story presents? I don’t think it actually matters all that much. However you interpret the literal events happening on screen, the message remains the same, either through simple failings on the part her aunt and Oswald himself or the active maliciousness of people who would experiment on the people they should be taking care of, the set up of the asylum failed to help her, but what succeeded wasn’t medication, or locking her away, but just having friends who could be there for her and help her find happiness.
END OF SPOILERS
By the time you’ve finished the game, you’re going to be left with a choice of how to interpret it. Are the things Fran Bow’s seen real, or not? Personally, I’m not sure which side of the fence I’m on, but I believe that both sides are entirely valid, and that’s part of what makes this game great. The fact that such a story could be presented in such a way where you just can’t be 100% certain either way and so much is left up to interpretation is honestly, beautiful. Should you play this game yourself? Only if you can handle the pretty dark topics it covers. If you’re someone who has dealt with trauma, especially as a kid, and don’t want to experience that again, then this game might not be for you. If you’re someone who can’t handle disturbing imagery, or anything involving insane asylums then this might not be for you either. But if you can handle those topics, or if you’re brave enough to try, then I think it’s worth it.
What a crazy and sad game! Thanks for the analysis 👍🏻