Additionally, a small portion of Fran Bow consists of minigames situated within the broader narrative that present more complex logical challenges.

Set in 1944, the game tells the story of Fran, a ten-year-old girl struggling with mental illness after witnessing the murder of her parents.

The pills cause vivid hallucinations of a phantasmagoric parallel universe, filling Oswald Asylum with smears of blood, mysterious messages, grisly torture, human subject research in psychiatry and neurology, and otherworldly shadow beings, along with the culprit behind her misery, an evil creature named Remor, who supposedly killed her parents.

Midnight trapped together in a haunted house that belongs to conjoined twins named Clara and Mia Buhalmet, who claim to have kidnapped the pair to force Fran to complete a ritual that would separate them.

She awakens to discover that she has been transformed into a tree in a brighter world called Ithersta, a land where vegetables, insects, pine cones, and roots live in harmony.

Throughout the game, Fran and other characters grapple with psychological trauma, survive the abuse of parents and doctors, and learn what it means to live amongst many types of beings and spirits.

[14] Joel Couture, in an article for Gamasutra, used Fran Bow to discuss the merits of an ambiguous ending; Figueroa responded that she preferred to "give the answers in a metaphorical way", allowing players to interpret those signals through their own experiences.

Fran Bow in The Sorrowvirus: A Faceless Short Story holds no canonical connection to its parent title and is instead a guest-star in a separate video game universe.