Fran Bow

The gameplay consists of a third-person point-and-click adventure. There are bloody eyeballs on both sides of the screen, which take Fran into different rooms in their respective directions when clicked. Sometimes, clicking an object can result in the protagonist commenting on it, with multiple descriptions for the same item. Some items will be sent to her inventory.

Collected objects can be interacted with in three ways: used, examined or combined. Fran can also talk to certain characters, occasionally with the option of choosing between different dialogue options.

The story takes place in 1944, over the course of five chapters. It centers around Fran, a ten-year-old girl with a happy family. One day, a monster appears and she finds her parents brutally dismembered. The girl flees from her house, only to collapse in the nearby woods and be brought into Oswald Asylum.

Now she has to deal with her mental condition, as well as being separated from her black cat, and only friend, Mr. Midnight.

Fran Bow was developed by Swedish studio Killmonday Games, composed of Natalia Martinsson (née Figueroa) and Isak Martinsson.

According to Natalia, the initial goal for the Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign was 20,000 dollars. However, despite obtaining 28,000 dollars, the team realized it was still not enough to comfortably develop the game. It forced them to be very mindful of their spending, an experience she called "illuminating". When the resources were almost exhausted, Isak's grandfather passed away and some of the inherited money was dedicated to the project. She describes the later portion of development as especially stressful.

Fran Bow sold 10,000 copies in its first month. The game received a score of 70/100 on review aggregation website Metacritic, indicating a mixed response. Adam Smith, writing at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, gave the game a positive review, describing it as a game that "sits alongside Wonderland and Oz – imaginative, strange, unsettling, intelligent and charged with a rare and beautiful sense of hope". Smith felt, however, that some plot threads were not satisfactorily concluded. Joel Couture, in an article for Gamasutra, used Fran Bow to discuss the merits of an ambiguous ending; Figueroa responded that she preferred to "give the answers in a metaphorical way", allowing players to interpret those signals through their own experiences.