Franz

Franz is an experimental game, difficult to classify genre-wise. It was developed by Ice-Pick Lodge, an independent Russian studio known worldwide for the Pathologic series.

Plot

The game's protagonist is the titular Franz, a virtual female consciousness living in our device. We start off knowing nothing about her, but interacting with her lets us gradually get to know her.

Franz doesn't have an established personality, her behavior changing depending on how we interact with her. She can be nice and polite, but at any time she can get mad or try to provoke us to see our reaction. It's up to us whether we play by her rules, assert dominance or try and build a relationship based on mutual understanding (which gets difficult, as Franz can send us hundreds of notifications in the middle of the night whenever she feels lonely...).

The game is a commentary on toxic relationships and the difficulty of finding common ground with those close to us. The project is also meant to get the player to take a good look at their personality and values.

Mechanics

The gameplay of Franz consists of interacting with the titular character. We communicate with her through touch - tapping dialogue options and Franz herself, who's shown as an interactive doll - curiously, the game recognizes many different kinds of touch, even the force of pressure, reacting accordingly. Occasionally we'll also need to play through some mini-games, looking for hidden words, arranging dialogue from scattered letter, etc. Based on the frequency of communication, the speed at which we play and the specific of our touch, Franz tracks our emotions and adjusts her behavior accordingly, becoming more or less aggressive. Franz can also decide on her own when to contact us, often forcing us to take breaks; ranging from few minutes to few hours.

Technical aspects

Franz makes use of a dark, distrurbing artstyle primarily consisting of illustrations and text.