Frank and Drake : A Successful Gothic and Modern Reinterpretation?
I’ve always loved works – video games, novels, series – that dare to re-adapt the great classics. I make no secret of my love for American McGee’s Alice and Alice: Madness Returns, which revisit Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland in a very dark way; nor of my love for Don’t Nod’s Vampyr which, despite its technical shortcomings, charmed me by offering the chance to play as a vampire in the early 20th century, with some nice nods to Dracula. But if Appnormals Team’s Frank and Drake caught my eye, it was first and foremost because of its graphic cover. It distinctly combines two characters in two moods – day and night – with a hand-drawn look that’s not so common in video games. And when I saw that it was a “modern gothic novel” set in our own time, with two roommates sharing the same apartment without ever crossing paths, my curiosity was well and truly piqued.
Night and Day
Oriole City: an urban, modern city with a certain Hispanic influence – Appnormals Team is a studio based in Barcelona. The walls are covered in surreal graffiti, while litter is strewn here and there. Frank’s walk home takes us through various streets and places: a port, bright neon stores, soulless concrete buildings… The city is not without charm, with its bridges, its bookshop and library, even its cemetery, but there’s a discrepancy between the working-class feel of some areas and the quasi-high-tech aspect of other, much wealthier and imposing neighborhoods.
Oriole City looks like any modern city, but its heroes seem to come from another era. Bald, with a mysterious tattoo on his neck, Frank is a typical young man who’s had amnesia for a year. He has been found by the residents of his apartment building – of which he has become janitor – but has no memory of his past life. As he writes in his diary, he’s been living for 52 weeks in total ignorance of himself, trying to make the most of it as a new opportunity. Yet his existence remains difficult, as he suffers from chronic fatigue and weakness. He’s on a quest to find himself and his place in the world.
When the adventure begins – on Day 1 of the seven-day, seven-night plot – he learns that he’ll have to deal with a new roommate, Drake. Drake is a pale-skinned, long-haired young man who wears sunglasses all the time. It soon becomes clear that he’s older than he looks, is particularly sensitive to light, works during nights in a bar, gets his blood from donation supplies… and talks to ghosts. Drake is only playable at night, while daytime is reserved for Frank. The two roommates have only one means of communication: post-it notes left on the fridge.
Two rooms, two atmospheres. With his lack of memories, Frank exudes something very stoic, right down to the expressions on his often withdrawn face. There’s a hardness about him that’s hard to explain at first, a deep fatigue that makes him disillusioned, with a sometimes blasé, sometimes innocent view of the world around him. No longer knowing who he is, he composes from day to day, deprived of any foundations that would indicate his personality and character. No family, no friends, just acquaintances, and little by little, mysterious flashbacks that lead him to investigate his past, following the receipt of a suspicious letter. Everything is completely new to him, as if he’s undergoing a rebirth. As we make decisions as players, we can turn him into a Good Samaritan, making him more selfish, more detached from people, or on the contrary, bring him closer to others by helping them.
More solitary and enigmatic, Drake intrigues. He’s also much more composed and nonchalant in his gestures, appreciating each night for what it has to offer, playing a melancholy ballad on his harmonica. It’s as if he’s accustomed to living discreetly in the shadows, yet still holds a certain fascination for the world around him. Although he knows who he is, his long past haunts him – as much as ghosts do. He hangs out in cemeteries, sees supernatural things, resolves not to form lasting bonds, avoiding leaving any trace in history and everyday life… because if his secret were discovered, he’d become a fairground curiosity.
Frank and Drake are, right down to their first names, tributes to 19th-century classics, renewing themselves to revisit the Gothic with today’s taste. Drake obviously evokes Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But you have to go further into the story to realize that Frank’s strange destiny stems from Mary Shelley’s science-fiction novel Frankenstein. Gothic manors and castles, laboratories with forbidden experiments have given way to a modern city lit up with lights: a new technology company, a cemetery next to the city, skyscraper rooftops on which the characters look up to observe distant stars and nature. And yet, in its own way, the game also conjures up the expected locations of a Gothic novel: an abandoned family home, a labyrinth, an underground passage, a bridge lost in the middle of nowhere, haunted apartments.
Diaries, puzzles and supernatural
Places and characters aren’t the only way to pay homage to the Gothic genre. Our two protagonists write diaries in very different styles: while each has its share of diary entries, Frank jots down his to-do-list, his state of health, the weather and his missions for the day, embellishing them with drawings. Drake, on the other hand, includes quotations from overheard conversations and philosophical references. In truth, he writes his diary to his long-deceased mother, with whom he has been unable to make peace. Frank is analytical and observant, with a certain cynical irony, while Drake has a penchant for nostalgia and snippets of other people’s lives – lives in which he never fits in.
To communicate, Frank and Drake leave each other post-it notes on the fridge. These may indicate, to each other’s day or night, a new direction to take on their respective investigations, but also enable them to develop a relationship, ranging from distance to friendship, with varying degrees of intensity. If these post-it notes are reminiscent of Alice Kuipers’ children’s novel Ne t’inquiète pas pour moi, where a mother and daughter communicate in this way, they are also an echo of the epistolary novel dear to the Gothic novel, where characters tell the story through diaries, letters and newspaper articles – another means used in the game to reveal certain key elements. Moreover, the concept of sharing an apartment by day and night, and communicating via post-it notes, is also reminiscent of British writer Beth O’Leary’s romance The Flatshare: the heroes occupy the apartment (and the one bed) alternately, leaving messages for each other. But Frank and Drake is far from a romantic comedy, leaning more towards the supernatural and the enigmatic.
The game is inspired by both visual novels and old-fashioned point-and-clicks. Would you like some laborious puzzles where you have to try and try again before understanding their meaning? You’ll be served, even if some of the puzzles are quite original and fit logically into the story (linking “constellations” based on the hobbo code learned by Drake, tinkering and mechanics for Frank…). Gameplay is fairly weak in this respect, as we’re content to direct the characters, solve puzzles and choose different dialogues to move forward. But where the game really shines is in its story. Frank and Drake each have a personal story to rediscover, family secrets to unravel, an investigation to carry out into the hidden face of Oriole City and its shenanigans. So many mysteries mixing science and the supernatural, specters and genetics, immortality and sometimes redemption. An interesting cocktail, rarely told in this form in video games.
If you’re a fan of narrative titles, you’ll quickly get hooked, especially as your decisions have a series of twists and turns… Which leaves room for no less than six different endings to be figured out and solved. But there in lies the problem for Frank and Drake: in addition to the sometimes far-fetched puzzles and uneven pace, despite its short lifespan (3h for each run), the decisions sometimes seem illogical. It was very frustrating, on a first run, to see the two characters being very distant, and yet have an ending where they become friends, and above all have an incomprehensible resolution because too many plot elements were missing. Of course, the studio warns at the start of the game that you need several endings to get all the pieces of the puzzle – and the story did clear up with two more runs. But at first glance, some of the mechanics seem to lack logic and can leave you wanting more.
A whole atmosphere
And yet, despite its shortcomings, I kept replaying the game, at least until I’d reached the three endings. Because you can feel that the title has been lovingly crafted by a small team, with a nice homage to the Gothic classics, and that it has a very special touch. Because we sense that he wanted to tell a personal story: the details of everyday life, intimate themes, the diversity of our identities, sometimes marginal and outside the box, the intersecting existence of individuals who barely know each other before coming together, like the people we meet every day.
With its rotoscoped graphics, which take real-life shots frame by frame and then translate them into animation, Frank and Drake offers a fluidity that’s very pleasing to the eye, and introduces a real atmosphere of its own. The characters are embodied in the colors and drawings, with that nod of the head, that way of lying down, that singular gaze, which convey an emotion, an attitude, a character. This is how Drake appears both nonchalant and chill, or how Frank makes us feel all his weariness and distrust, in a warm and close way that makes us want to appreciate them and travel with them. The settings are all the more charming: the lights seem alive, the details appear here and there, giving the impression of moving through an illustrated novel with palpable reality. This style also allows for a rich graphic identity, giving the heroes’ diaries a distinct identity, and simply offering them a personal tone according to day or night.
The rather dull brown and gray colors reflect Frank’s days, centered around the monotony of a daily routine and tasks to be done, the better to guide him through his amnesia. His diary is reminiscent of a logbook, combining notes on external influences (weather, tasks, energy) and evocations of rare memories. The accompanying music also evokes his character, with a lo-fi, urban, metallic and harsh style that bears witness to his loneliness in this big city, his perdition in his life and his faltering health, both physical and mental.
Drake, on the other hand, has a jazzier sound, one readily associated with the night world of bars and clubs, but also a certain melancholy mystery, looking to the past. Such musicality places him irredeemably outside the ranks of humanity, like the parasite he wishes he were no longer. Drake’s character is much more inward-looking, as revealed in his diary, where he writes quotations from works of art, snatches of overheard conversations, little reflections on humanity… Drake is pursued by his memories, by the weight of his life, no longer knowing how to live or how to really belong to a community from which he is marginalized. The care taken with the heroes’ writing is fully apparent, as is their way of being, reflected in graphics that are both colorful and vibrant.
For these characters each have a different story and quest, which certainly intersect and separate depending on the choices they make. But they are united by similar desires: to find their place in life, to make peace with their past and their ghosts. To find a real connection with those around them. Drake and Frank are trapped in an immense solitude, lined with mysteries, in a noisy, bright city where corruption hides well. But along the way, the two can grow closer, help each other, and choose a new existence marked by care for others.
Frank and Drake, beyond its supernatural intrigue, speaks very well of the difficulty of forging bonds with others, the weight of grief, the place of art in our lives. And, quite simply, about our daily lives, the streets we know by heart from walking them, the neighbors we know on the surface but whose habits we notice have changed, the multiple possibilities we feel as we cross the lanes at night under the stars, what awaits us at the turn of a park or a building, and the memories these familiar places conjure up.
Find out more about Appnormals Team:
James Troughton. The Gamer. Interview: Frank & Drake Creative Director Wants To “Portray The Issues Of Identity”. Published October 22, 2021. Available: https://www.thegamer.com/frank-and-drake-interview/
Meren Plath. Todas gamers. Entrevista a Iñaki Díaz. Published 08/23/2023. Available: https://todasgamers.com/2023/08/23/entrevista-a-inaki-diaz/
Romina Correa Barcelo, concept artist. Artstation. Portfolio. Available : https://www.artstation.com/romainne
Carmen Iglesias, 2D artist. Artstation. Portfolio. Available : https://www.artstation.com/carmeniglesiasilustracion