Fran Bow
Worth it · Narrative · 2015
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $14.99, a BANGER if it drops to $13.27.
- Length
- 7.6h
- Value
- $1.97/hr
- Reviews
- 97% positive
Watch this gameOne email when it is worth buying. Your call on what that means.
Get one email when Fran Bow is worth buying.
One email per game. Unsubscribe in a click.
Minimum on the Steam store: 2 GB of memory, 5 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Fran Bow is a creepy adventure game that tells the story of Fran, a young girl struggling with a mental disorder and an unfair destiny.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
October 2018 is where it bottomed out, at $3.74. It has been discounted 64 times in the 11 years tracked here, typically at 70 percent off, with about 8 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 13 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 8 weeks. The math puts its BANGER price at $13.27. The record reaches that level 64 times.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 1 percent on value. It is pricier than 82 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 99 percent. Among the games that feel like it, The Cat Lady ($8.99, scores 84) beats it on value, while it beats Little Misfortune ($19.99, scores 59).
The press gave it 70; the people who bought it give it 97 percent. A 27-point gap in the buyer's favour.
Steam's global achievement data puts 42 percent of players at this game's ending achievement. The median game this site can measure sits at 8. Of the 650 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 9 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written April 2020 to September 2026. That is fewer refunded reviewers than 8 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 1,677 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 1,085 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 88 percent of the 839 reviews written there were positive, against 97 percent overall, and those are 4 percent of everything written about it.
Valve rates it Steam Deck Verified, and at 7.6 hours it is short enough to finish on one.
The drop-off
63% start to 42% finishPeople genuinely stick with this one. Steam global achievements
Players
80 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
this game was the awesomest and i was violently mesmerized by it. Fran is so lovable and the premise and her mental state, not to mention her curiosity, really make you adore her. The gameplay and puzzles were (though sometimes difficult for the likes of me) so much fun. Killmonday keeps making unsettling, lovable games vigorous with an unmeasurable love for the craft and I am excited for their next game beyond...
LOVE this game. I will always recommend it to others. The characters were so well created and the plot is extremely beautiful, creepy and full circle. I wish I could have memory loss over this game, so I could experience it for the first time again.
Probably one of my favorite games I've ever played. The puzzles were challenging enough without being TOO hard to figure out (except for one but, besides the point), so they were really fun to figure out. I liked how much exploring and interacting with characters you had to do to progress. I love any game that makes me bond to the characters so much, with this game did. I loved interacting with the creatures we...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
Fran Bow scores 83/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/362680/fran-bowThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 13, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.