Recent reviews by WATCH·IT

A great adventure/exploration game with a beautiful art style and a soudtrack you can't get out of your head - I can't recommend this enough.

Slapp recommend now, bro!

Since many choice-driven games are limited to making decisions from time to time and otherwise watching the story unfold (not that I mind this model, not at all), the questions arises: why not replace the image rendered by a game with an actual movie footage? This idea seems so trivial that it begs the question why Late Shift is the first such game I’ve came across.

LS is basically an interactive movie (literally) with branching storyline depending on choices you make. Decent story and actors, the game is quite fun and worth recommending as an interesting experience for people enjoying titles from Telltale Games and the like. Took about 1.5h to beat but there are 7 endings.

A work of art. Of dark and eerie kind, but still.

This is not a game for everyone. But if you enjoy deranged stories full of demons and gore, all kept in a distinctive, eye-catching visual style then this game is highly recommended.

And don’t be fooled by the fact that this game was developed by a small studio consisting of two (!) developers – both Fran Bow and its creators prove that a pair of heroes may challenge the entire world. And succeed.

To be clear: I am a fan of exceptional art design in games and I'm able to turn a blind eye to some flaws in mechanics or gameplay if the game keeps me entertained with its unique climate or artistic vision. And the climate is one of the best things in Fran Bow. Art style and dialogs written for 10 year old Fran are the strongest points of this game that maintain an impression of experiencing a really, really twisted fairytale. The music fits perfectly, scary and disturbing right when it needs to be.

Also the overall style of the game is really dark and combined with the pills mechanism creates an impressive duo. The backgrounds and animations are really well done and able to convey characters’ emotions pretty well. I enjoyed the level design and the creativity put to preserve diversity – you traverse both corridors and open spaces, some of them kept in gloomy tone, others drawn in a fairytale fashion. Not to mention most of them come in 2 (or even 4!) different variations you and Fran keep switching between.

Some of the devs’ ideas I’ve came across turned out to be really disturbing for me but having seen the trailer I knew what I was signing up for. In a nutshell – discretion advised.

Plot revolves around Fran facing a family tragedy and having to solve a mystery of a monstrous crime she is accused of committing. While the story may be predictable, it surely holds a handful of WTF moments only enhanced with the way a particular scene or character is drawn.

The story is not explained completely and personally I do not mind some space for your own interpretation. However, if you’re not into theories and speculations, you may find the story and its conclusion a bit disappointing.

As most point and click games, Fran Bow offers many puzzles that require you to search for items, combine them and use in an appropriate way. I find the riddles on a decent level with some requiring you to ponder a little longer. From time to time, the game offers some more interesting puzzles, like mechanisms or combination locks (though these are too easy to break in my opinion). There are also a couple of very simple mini-games here and there. One of them was boring, another one had irritating controls, but you can skip any of them – you just miss an achievement by doing so.

One of the key features of the game is switching between two (or more) realities to complete puzzles. This introduces many possibilities to combine actions made in different, complementary worlds to achieve your goal.

Yeah, a separate paragraph for cutscenes. They are just awesome.

Definitely not disappointed.

Great continuation of Episode 1, until a bit slow-paced. There are numerous references to the original game, you can see the effort of the developers made to tie both games and I praise Deck Nine for that. Discovering those references gave me a lot of fun but if you start with LiS franchise by playing this game the tempo of this episode may be bit sluggish for you. I hope that’s just a moment of silence before the storm.

Enjoyed the story and most of the dialogues. No bugs on Win7 x64.