The Stack

After Fran leaves Ithersta, things become weirdly normal for a while. Just for a while, before the final plunge into unreality. We’ve had disturbing visions of ghosts and demons, and we’ve had a full-on fantasy world, and now, at the end, we get Ditkoesque surrealism, with strangely-connected floating platforms hosting odd creatures with odd obsessions. Fran isn’t afraid of them; her capacity to feel fear has long since burnt out. Indeed, one of the more frightening beings from earlier, a very tall skeleton in a top hat, turns out to be a friend and ally. The game does an excellent job of keeping this ambiguous, too, making it seem like he’s betrayed us once we’ve come to trust him. But once Fran has been through that, she can even accept help from her doctor from the hospital. There’s a sudden emphasis on keys and unlocking in the final chapter, and it’s clearly a sign that Fran is making breakthroughs.

The thing is, though, a completely surreal environment isn’t nearly as jarring and uncanny as an only slightly weird one. And that’s what we get in the lead-up to the ending. Fran somehow makes it back to her house, as has been her goal for the last couple of chapters. It’s an ordinary house, on an ordinary street, and the break in the unreality makes us suddenly uneasy about her unrealistic expectations. Fran just escaped from a madhouse. Her parents are dead. Things aren’t going to go back to normal just because she’s in the right place, but Fran doesn’t seem to realize this.

And then… things start to get rather silly. There’s a conspiracy of sorts going on. We got some inkling of this back in the hospital, where you could find indications that the labels on the magic pills had been deliberately switched, but when we start to learn the details of what was going on, it just doesn’t seem plausible, even though five minutes ago a skeleton in a top hat threw us a birthday party. The doctor from the hospital caught wind of the truth, and is investigating, and as part of his investigation, he invites Fran to help him dig up her parents’ graves — not because there’s anything in particular that he’s looking for, but just because he feels that showing an insane little girl the corpses of her parents would be a good idea somehow. Later, Fran’s aunt matter-of-factly claims, to all appearances expecting to be believed, that Fran’s parents were murdered by the cat. (Even Fran isn’t crazy enough to buy that.) Probably none of this would bother me if the Great Wizard back in Ithersta was doing it, but in the mundane world, it stands out.

There’s a lot we have to accept by the end that we didn’t have to accept in the very beginning: that Fran is special, that her otherworlds are objectively real, that the grown-ups in her life are plotting against her. That returning to her fantasy world is a positive development, and not just a retreat from reality. But I’m here for that. I’m going to recommend this game. The puzzles are nothing to write home about, and I have some reservations about its depiction of mental illness, but it’s got style, and it’s got heart. If character motivations get weird towards the end, it’s because it’s not really trying to be realistic, even in the reality scenes. Rather, it’s trying to depict a feeling, or a series of feelings, a progression from helplessness and victimization to empowerment, from horror to peace.

I said that Fran Bow reminded me a little of Alice in Wonderland, but in chapter 3, it takes a sharp turn towards Oz. Fran has lost her horror pills, rendering the dark world inaccessible; instead, we find ourselves in the magical land of Ithersta, a brightly-lit, extremely whimsical fantasy world populated mainly by carrot people. Fran has been reunited with her cat by now, so, like Dorothy, her new goal is to return home. And to do this, she needs to enlist the aid of a Great Wizard.

Ithersta is a place of safety and healing. Fran reaches it simply by needing it to be there. When she arrives, she’s transformed into a tree, and unable to do anything for herself — you temporarily play as the cat until you can get tree-Fran to a healer, who at least restores her to humanoid shape, although she’s still made of wood and knows that this is a temporary form that she’ll have to abandon to become fully human again. This whole chapter is, to my mind, the most clearly metaphorical part of the game I’ve seen so far.

Since toggling between different worlds is a fundamental part of the game, we soon acquire a substitute for the pills: a clockwork device that lets us change the season. (“Time is just an infinite layered reality”, explain the locals.) Suddenly, we have four versions of every room instead of just two! There’s less of a contrast between them than there was with the pills, though, except perhaps in the Winter scenes, where snow covers the bright flowers and the rustic country market lies empty. This is the only time of year when the Great Wizard’s cave is accessible. It’s also the only time that the shadow creatures are seen in Ithersta.

So, for all the air of comfort, we’re not out of the woods yet. There’s still an edge to things, and it has a lot to do with forgetting. The Wizard himself has forgotten everything he knew, and needs you to fetch him things to help him remember. Elsewhere, an unreadable plaque is described as saying “what everyone learn[s] in the precise moment of birth. But we forget its meaning within the first seven minutes alive… So, we have to spend our entire life… trying to understand it.” And the theme of a great truth that needs to be discovered keeps coming up. The entire questionably-real, comparatively-paradisical environment is telling Fran that there’s something she’s forgotten, something important that she needs to know before she can wake up.

The keynote at Narrascope was delivered by Natalia Martinsson, who described how her point-and-click adventure Fran Bow was inspired by her own experiences with trauma. Fran Bow has been installed on my laptop for some time, but I never seemed to be in the mood for it. It’s a troubling game, grotesque and gruesome. But now, I’ve been inspired to make a go of it. I’m currently in the middle of the second chapter of five.

Fran Bow is a severely traumatized ten-year-old girl in a stereotypically awful mental hospital, which she spends the first chapter of the game escaping, with the aid of some magical pills. She’s first given the pills in the intro sequence, but they give her nightmarish hallucinations, so her doctor immediately orders that she never be given them again. However, in the hallucination, she hears her beloved cat, Mr. Midnight, telling her to seek the pills out again, and so she does. The hallucinations essentially form an alternate reality, Silent Hill-style: it’s the same rooms, but there’s blood and dead animals all over the place, and shadowy monsters roam about. Sometimes Fran is strangely oblivious about this given that it’s her hallucination, referring to clearly dead creatures as “asleep” and the like. Other times, she is not. Her manner is a little Alice-in-Wonderland-ish, a mixture of childish whimsy and insistent precision, which makes me think a little of American McGee’s Alice, which similarly had grotesque loony bin scenes. But those were constructed entirely out of trope. Fran Bow‘s treatment of the same theme is more heartfelt, I think, although I can’t know what I would have thought without having heard the author speak on the matter.

You can toggle between the two worlds at will, and sometimes the nightmare world has hints for real-world puzzles, usually scrawled on the wall in blood. I suppose it’s sort of shamanic, the use of hallucinogens to access the spirit realms and learn secrets of importance. In this realm, other patients at the hospital tend to have black shadow-creatures holding them, presumably manifestations of their mental illness. A couple of times, I’ve heard people say things like “You can see them, can’t you?”. The pills are, at the very least, enhancing your perceptions, showing you things that are in some sense objectively real. But more than that: there are puzzles based on bringing objects from the spirit world back to the real world with you. In the second chapter, the lines get blurred even more: there’s a couple of monstrous insects that really belong in the spirit world, but which you encounter in the real world. Maybe none of the adventure is real. Maybe Fran is still in her room in the hospital, tripping throughout.

At a different panel at Narrascope, it was pointed out how Black Mirror: Bandersnatch had a possible sub-plot about the main character going off his meds in order to regain control of himself. The consensus among the panelists was that this was a terrible lesson to teach people about psychiatric medications. Fran Bow leans in the opposite direction, but it’s still kind of the same: Fran doesn’t trust her doctor — in fact, she pretty much hates him — and so she enthusiastically takes pills that he doesn’t want her to have, and they turn out to be vitally important to her progress through the game, which I’m at the moment assuming is positive for her psychological recovery and growth. If “Go off your meds” is a bad message, surely “Take meds your doctor specifically forbids” is even worse? But I suppose it’s saved by its unrealism, as well as the sheer unpleasantness of Fran’s otherworld. Doing what Fran does outside of a game is such a clearly and obviously bad idea as to deter imitation in itself. At least, I hope so.