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Steam Greenlights Neverending Nightmares, Fran Bow, Fotonica
Steam Greenlit 37 games and software titles today, and this batch has a distinctly eerie vibe that we'll attribute to our proximity to Halloween. Games include the crowdfunded insane asylum adventure Fran Bow, the similarly psychological Neverending Nightmares, the grim platformer Blood of the Werewolf, along with CastleMinerZ, The Fifth Day, Montague's Mount, Neighbors from Hell Compilation, Nightmares from the Deep: The Cursed Heart, (un)Lucky7 and Underhell. It's a lot of hells and bad dreams. There are more creep-neutral games in the mix, including Fotonica, The Fall, Hot Tin Roof, JULIA Enhanced Edition and RimWorld. See? Nice, friendly sounding games. We can't promise these ones are all rainbows and daisies, though. This marks the second round of Greenlight games for the month, with the first one hitting on October 2.
Crowdfund Bookie, August 25 - 31: Fran Bow, Revolution 60
The Crowdfund Bookie crunches data from select successful Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns that ended during the week and produces pretty charts for you to look at. It was a quiet week in crowdfunding, as the Indiegogo project for Fran Bow and the Kickstarter projects for Revolution 60, SOS Saga and Shiden ended. Fran Bow earned the most money this week ($28,320), and also had the most backers of the projects, with 1,100 people funding the game. The highest average pledge per person went to Revolution 60 ($32.47), a narrative-focused game that is described as "Heavy Rain meets Mass Effect." Check out the results for the week and our fancy charts after the break.
Fran Bow finally has something to smile about: $20K on Indiegogo
Fran Bow is a psychological thriller and adorable adventure rolled into one point-and-click package, and it just passed its funding goal of $20,000 on Indiegogo with seven days remaining. Fran, the young girl in the game, witnesses the brutal murder of her parents and slips into insanity, ending up in a children's mental institution. She must work out how to escape and stay (mostly) sane by solving puzzles in the asylum. One game mechanic is the ability to pop pills to see another layer of the world that can potentially aid in the riddles, regardless of how horrifying those new visions may be. Fran Bow comes from Killmonday, a husband-and-wife development team (Isak and Natalia) based in Sweden. The story itself derives from Natalia's personal struggles as a child, as she explains in a blog post on the Killmonday site. Fran Bow is due out in July 2014 for PC, Mac, Linux, Windows 8, Android and iOS, and with the successful funding, it may come to more platforms (Wii U or Ouya) later on. Smile, Fran. Things are looking up.
Fran Bow tells the tortured tale of a girl having a rough time
A "rough time" might be putting it lightly for poor Fran Bow – she stumbles upon the brutally dismembered corpses of her parents, runs into the forest with her precious black cat, passes out and wakes up in a dysfunctional mental institution for children: Oswald Asylum. Fran Bow is a psychological, horror point-and-click that offers players the ability to self-medicate as a mechanic, popping pills to uncover a "terrible hidden world" that might help Fran escape the hospital. The two developers at Killmonday, Isak Martinsson and Natalia Figueroa, are seeking $20,000 on Indiegogo to finish up the game for its planned 2014 launch on PC, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS, and maybe Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8. Martinsson and Figueroa have been working on Fran Bow for seven months already and are just about done with the second of five chapters, their page says. It's also on Steam Greenlight. So far Fran Bow looks like a classic story of personal hell and redemption, with vibes of Alice in Wonderland and Sucker Punch, sprinkled with a few extra shakes of the pill bottle.
