Fran Bow/Little Misfortune Game Theory -- Written as a Fake MatPat (and Super Long, Sorry)

[black screen, MatPat V.O.]

"If you are reading this, maybe it's because you are looking for answers, maybe you can see things that others can't or you can feel what others avoid. You can listen to the silence... And become one with everything."

[pause] [cut to MatPat looking at a pinboard of Fran Bow/Little Misfortune lore]

MatPat: Okay, but where do the living pinecones come in?!

[Game Theory intro plays]

Hellooooo Internet! Welcome to Game Theory, the show that answers the question -- how many times can a game horrify you?

[compilation of MatPat and Steph being shocked by moments in Little Misfortune]

Today we're looking at Little Misfortune, the second game from KillMonday Games, the creators of Fran Bow. If you haven't heard about Fran Bow, it's a psychological horror game that took Youtube by storm in 2015, and it's one of the weirdest games we have EVER played on the channel. If you haven't seen the playthrough I would highly recommend you scoot over to the GTLive archives before watching this video, and then watch our Little Misfortune playthrough, because there is a LOT to talk about here. Fran Bow was a trip, so when we started Little Misfortune, we were prepared to be confused and terrified, and the tone of the game STILL caught us off guard. Seriously, in the first ten minutes we learn that our protagonist's parents are alcoholics, her father hits her mother, he threw a rock at Misfortune and she made it into a toy called Stony, complete with her blood on it; her mother wanted to abort her; Misfortune once had glass in her foot for days after breaking a vase -- This kid has a rough life. Oh, and she has a crush on a fox. We also kill a dog and take some drugs in front of a hamster, uh, Adult Club, and this is all in the first act of the game.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Little Misfortune is a game about a girl named Misfortune who suddenly hears a voice in her head, "Mr. Voice", who tells us, the player, that she is going to die this very day. However, somehow Misfortune hears Mr. Voice say this, and from there, he talks mainly to her, only talking to the player during loading screens where evidently she can't hear him.

With me so far? Good.

Mr. Voice wants to play a "game" with Misfortune, promising her Eternal Happiness if she does what he says, and he leads her out of the house and across the street, where the rest of the game takes place. ( This is important for later.) As Misfortune makes her way to the city, listening to the voice "in her head", she also sees Benjamin, the fox that she has a crush on, and he seems to be... summoning a monster? At least, according to Mr. Voice, who makes it very clear that foxes are evil and awful and we should either kill them immediately or run from them. Yeah, okay Mr. Voice In My Head, I'll get right on that, not suspicious at all.

As the game goes on, Mr. Voice gets more and more ominous, and Benjamin the Fox looks more and more like the actual person we should be listening to. We learn that children have been going missing in the city, but Mr. Voice tells us that they'll probably turn up soon. Hmmm. Benjamin keeps leaving posters all over town saying "Hide your children". Hmmmmmmm. We have a ghost friend named Hiro and keep seeing ghost kids around town. [alarm goes off] You know what? I think Mr. Voice might not be the best of influences!

The real plot of the game involves these missing children and by the middle of the game we learn that the monster, Morgo, is luring children to their deaths by convincing them to play a game with him. Well THAT sounds awfully familiar.

Yep, Mr. Voice is the bad guy, Benjamin the Fox is our protector, and the good ending of the game involves us becoming Lady Misfortune and crossing in to the afterlife.

Okay, I can hear you yelling from here, Mat, I have no idea what the heck you're talking about, are you having a stroke? So let's start from the very beginning. (I hear it's a very good place to start.)

This is where things get complicated, so, buckle up buttercups, we're going back to Fran Bow school.

When we start Fran Bow, Fran's parents have been killed, and she's in a mental institution. We have these special pills called Duotine that let us see things other people can't see -- dark creatures, dead things, you know, full on Sixth Sense mode. From there we see lots, and lots, and LOTS of crazy supernatural things, someone of which make it easy to suspect that Fran is just hallucinating the entire game and is in the mental institution the entire time. And while some things may be metaphors for mental illness, the important thing to take away from Fran Bow is that in the world of the game, a lot of these supernatural things are REAL. There are whole other dimensions of beings and creatures, and the game doesn't exactly lay out the entire lore for us.

That's honestly good, because it would put us out of a job.

What we're really going to look into today is, who ARE Fran Bow and Misfortune? I mean, come on, nobody names their kid Misfortune, not even people as horrible as her parents. And both girls end up playing some kind of role in whatever hierarchy is behind this universe.

In the third act of Fran Bow, we find a journal from 1908 belonging to a 92 year old man named Leon Castillo. Leon serves as the biggest lore dump in the game, and hoo boy, it is a doozy.

[enter clip of Mat and Steph complaining about the amount of reading]

Leon's journal starts off with a message from him, written in 1908, with the quote from the beginning of this video. "If you are reading this, maybe t's because you are looking for answers, maybe you can see things that others can't or you can feel what others avoid. You can listen to the silence... And become one with everything."

The rest of the journal is from the years before this message, from the beginning of him starting to see things, to his journey through the Five Realities. Through Leon we learn about a lot of the creatures we see during the course of Fran Bow, and it's our first signal that Fran isn't the only person that can see special things. It isn't all in her head. This extends to Misfortune as well -- there seems to be something special about these three people, that they are being led into these other Realities that normal people don't know about. Leon seems to be led into the world by the monster Remor, who also happens to be the monster that chases Fran throughout the course of the game. Fran seems to have been involved in these other realms of existence since birth, as she grew up with the "imaginary" friend Itward, a tall spindly creature who has apparently been watching over her since birth. Misfortune can already see things by the time we meet her as well, as she's already developed a crush on her Protector, Benjamin the Fox, who nobody else can see, and then she is tricked by the monster Morgo to her death.

Yeah, spoiler alert, Little Misfortune ends with Misfortune dying. Actually, it also starts with her dying. Remember earlier when I mentioned that Mr. Voice tricks Misfortune into crossing the road outside and off to the rest of the game? Yeah, she gets hit by a car and is apparently in the spirit realm for the rest of the game, as Morgo wants her soul.

So who are these higher up people who are designating these people as being special? After all, Fran Bow turns into the Keeper of the Key and Misfortune, after spending the entire game calling herself a "little lady", is welcomed through some dark gates by apparently Death, who calls her "Lady Misfortune", and states that they've been WAITING for her.

Now, at first you think that this has something to do with Morgo -- he got her killed, after all. He's been leading kids to their deaths for a while now, from the number of missing posters we find around town. But we learn during the course of the game that Misfortune has had a Protector assigned to her specifically to deal with Morgo. Somebody is clearly keeping an eye on her, especially if by the time we get to the end of the game, they're expecting her to show up.

And there's something even more obvious in the beginning of the game that lets us know Misfortune is special. When we first hear Mr. Voice, he is talking directly to us, the viewer, as a narrator would.

[cut to the opening narration of Mr. Voice]

Except Misfortune, somehow, hears what he's saying. And he's clearly surprised, insinuating that this is the first time this has happened. We assume that usually he talks directly to the children, luring them to their deaths so he can play with their souls. But Misfortune is special.

So why is she special? For that matter, why is Fran Bow?

During the course of Fran Bow, we learn a few facts about her family and background, and not all of it seems to make sense. In fact, even the opening cut scene is unclear. We know that Fran seems to have a happy life with her parents and cat, Mr. Midnight, and her Aunt Grace visits on occasion. But then late one night, something or someone murders Fran's parents, cutting them into pieces. In her grief or her shock, Fran runs into the woods with Mr. Midnight, and eventually falls or lies down to sleep, and the cat hides from two people who come across Fran and pick her up. She then wakes up in the institution, and it's immediately unclear who brought her there, and whether anybody else knows that she's there. Her Aunt Grace knows, which puts us at ease a little, but by the end of the game, a darker truth is revealed to us. Grace and Fran's mother, Lucia, were twins, a fact that you might not notice until the game's finale. As children, Grace and Lucia were experimented on by Dr. Oswald Harrison, the founder of the asylum Fran spends time in. He is obsessed with studying twins and people who can see the Ultrareality, like Fran, and it seems that Lucia was scared that Fran would be taken by Oswald like she was; maybe Lucia knew that Fran could see the Ultrareality; maybe Lucia could herself and it was passed down; maybe she just knew that Oswald was obsessed with her and her sister and it had nothing to do with the Ultrareality. The point here is that she did her best to hide herself and her family from Dr. Oswald -- not knowing that her sister, Grace, was working with him secretly. Grace and Dr. Oswald used their relationship with the Ultrareality to summon the Prince of Darkness, Remor, the main antagonist for most of the Fran Bow game, and Remor is the one that killed Fran's parents, though whether he did it himself or possessed Fran to do it is unclear. The latter is more likely. I believe that people were aware that the murders were going to take place the night it did, and were watching the house carefully. Fran, either thinking she would be blamed or scared out of her mind, runs out of the house, and somebody working for the mental asylum follows her in the woods and brings her to the asylum. Dr. Oswald needs her brain to experiment on, and that's why the plot of the game happens and why Remor continues to chase her.

So from all of this it becomes a question of whether Fran was born with the ability to see the Ultrareality, or whether it was the effects of experimentation on her mother which influenced Fran. Well, if we go back to Misfortune, she was never experimented on. It's fairly clear that Misfortune has always been in a world of her own, and has always been able to see other things, like her ghost friend and Benjamin. But what about Leon Castillo? He didn't start seeing things until his seventies and eighties, according to his journal. So he wasn't born with the ability to see into the Ultrareality. How did he get it? Well, Leon turned out to be working with Oswald when Grace and Lucia were children, so maybe he gained it through working with Oswald's research into the Ultrareality. That's a fair assumption to make, right?

Wrong again! I know, lots of twists and turns. It's just that between Fran Bow and Little Misfortune, there is a lot of lore, and a lot of interpreting to do. Deciding how much of the lore is hallucinated by Fran and how much of it is legitimate is completely up to the person playing the game, so there are a lot of options when trying to figure out what in the Ultrareality is going on in this game's universe.

So let's go back to Leon's book, the first time we're introduced to Leon. You know, the really, REALLY long book that I'm sure a lot of people stopped reading halfway through and told their viewers to look up instead. Well, if you look at the book a little more closely, there's a page with a bunch of masks on one side, some with maybe blood on them (it's unclear), and on the other page is a quote from Leon: '"I found myself hunting the truth but finding the unexpected. I found what my senses couldn't show me. I found the truth that relays silently, in the unknown" -Leon Castillo. One of the thousand.'

Now this page doesn't look particularly enticing -- compared to the rest of the journal, which is full of drawings of creatures and diagrams and descriptions of the other Realities. This page, let's be honest, looks boring. But it holds what I believe is one of the biggest lore drops of the entire journal. See that little line at the end there? "One of the thousand." What does this mean? Well I think that this means that 1,000 people have been given the ability to see into the Ultrareality. Someone has been planning this. But why? Why bring humans into this kind of alternate dimension that seems to have a harsh impact on the mental capacity?

Well, tune in to next week's episode to find out, because there is sooo much more to talk about with these two games. What exactly is in the other Realities? Who sent Benjamin to specifically protect Misfortune? Why does sprinkling glitter on certain objects make Misfortune's heart beat stronger? Does this tie in with Duotine, the medication that Fran was given that gave her wild visions of the other realities? Are we making all of this up and both girls have been mentally ill the entire time?

I don't think so, but that's just a theory. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa Game Theory! Thanks for watching.