Frank and Drake

As Mary Shelley said in her famous novel Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus: "We are bound by tenuous bonds to prosperity or ruin". You could say that the artists at Appnormals Team would have taken this phrase as a guide for Frank and Drake, their latest adventure, which they define as a dual cinematic narrative. That's what Frank and Drake is all about, a point and click adventure in which we play as two very particular roommates. A neo-gothic suburban fantasy packed with lights and shadows.

Frank's Day and Drake's Night

Our adventure begins as Frank, the young caretaker of a building moving in a pastel world, surrounded by the cheerful colours of the day. Frank works repairing the damages of his building while he deals with a secret. A secret even for him, as he suffers from amnesia. One day, just like any other, he receives a letter telling him that he is going to have a new roommate: Drake.

Drake's world is the nightlife. As we mentioned Frankenstein earlier, you can imagine the vampire reference in Drake's case. He is an alternative young man who spends his days working in a bar while he surfs the neon seas. A world of darkness seasoned with his existential insights. Due to a medical condition, Drake is unable to see the light of day, so he will only live in the silence of the nights, communicating with Frank through post-it messages on the fridge.

This is how the Appnormals friends' original narrative proposal is born, in which both characters must untangle the mess of their lives as they go deep into the labyrinth. Frank must unravel his past, while Drake tries to figure out where he belongs in the future. Everything is presented through a magnificent artwork that portrays the characters with rotoscope drawing over a real image and distinguishes both worlds as the main characters see them.

• You could be interested in: Frank and Drake debuts as "a dual story" "with more than 8,000 rotoscoped frames".

Much more than "a real cinematic narrative".

If there is one thing that shines brightly in Frank and Drake's adventure, it's its narrative. While both characters' stories sometimes drift between clichés and expected twists and turns, the way the studio tells us about the duo's lives is unsurpassable. Frank and Drake is a very personal and reflective adventure, which is why so many of the lines of text in the game will be the thoughts of the protagonists.

To express these reflections, the world bends and folds in our favour to introduce us in an organic and highly imaginative way to each one of our thoughts. In addition, the day of both protagonists will always come to an end with an opening of the diary. As we write our conclusions in the notebook, we will not only be reviewing our day, but also making a declaration of intentions for the next day... and for our partner.

Actions taken during the day will be reflected in the message on the fridge for our partner. And that message is all that they have to get to know each other, so what they say in it can affect the rest of the game. In fact, even though it is presented as a point and click puzzle game, the truth is that Frank and Drake bases 80% of its gameplay on the decision system. Each day when we wake up we will have more than one path to take and we will have to pick and choose carefully, as one route overrides the other. If we choose to take a specific path, we will find out one aspect of this whole neo-gothic fantasy story, without knowing many other things. This is why the restart options offered by Frank and Drake are so important, allowing us to reach any of the six possible endings.

Also, this decision system will have an influence not only on the course of our story, but especially on our relationship with our roommate. If you leave a post-it for your roommate asking him to do the dishes and he doesn't, you'll probably get angry, but he might think you're being annoying for asking him to do it. And while this relationship has no real consequences on the game (it doesn't end because you two don't get along), it will have a real consequence on story events.

A dual, but also unequal, experience

As Bram Stoker would say, "we learn from failures, not from successes". And in Frank and Drake's case, while it's by no means a failure, there are certain aspects that don't quite work. We've tested this adventure on Nintendo Switch and the performance has been a bit uneven. Whilst for the most part the scene runs smoothly and in fact extremely fluid, we also experienced frame rate drops in the diary scenes. Moreover, it even froze in a loading screen, requiring us to reset the game and losing some of our progress.

Perhaps the PC version is better optimised, especially when it comes to movement. While exploration is minimal, all of our actions work through a cursor that we control with the joystick. A method that works perfectly for most of the game, but becomes clunky and inaccurate in puzzles. Still, we didn't find any challenging puzzles, with these being more of a mechanical procedure to find information and progress through the adventure.

Finally, while the narrative is exquisite, the story is sometimes slow and of little interest, and we only understand what has happened when we see it reflected in the diary at the end of the day. On such occasions it can cause the player to become disconnected from the plot.

Overall, Frank and Drake is a beautiful story with its secrets and moments, and masterfully drawn and looking better on a big screen than on a portable one.