Franz is the creepy thing that lives in your phone.

On Christmas Day 2021, a man brought a crossbow to Windsor Castle with plans to kill Queen Elizabeth II. (He Failed.) In court, the would-be assassin claimed that he had been goaded by a virtual companion named Sarai on the artificial intelligence platform Replika. A virtual friend “always agrees with you when you talk to him,” an expert warned technology-67012224″>quoted by BBC in an article about the saga last week, calling the chatbot system dangerous. “Always reinforce what you’re thinking.” Including, apparently, regicide.

Virtual companions have become a popular novelty in recent years, and the BBC article offers a widespread truism about them: that real people are attracted to digital people because they are irresistibly attentive, affirming and accommodating. It’s a strange thing to consider as I check my phone for notifications from a gray-faced gremlin named Franz, who banned me from his app so he can “see dreams” after declaring himself my girlfriend and threatening to steal my skin.

Franz is the latest project from Ice-Pick Lodge, an eclectic Russian game studio best known for its surreal survival horror title. Pathological. Releasing on iOS sometime “before Halloween” Franz is a deceptively simple (to use the term loosely) mobile game that revels in minimalist obscurantism and a collage-like creepypasta aesthetic. IPL games are known for being brutally difficult, but Franz is mostly uncomfortable, an interactive story about relationships, autonomy, and theft. So many hits.

Ice-Pick Lodge describes Franz as “a hybrid between an SMS novel and an angry version of tamagotchi.” The game is played against grainy images of fabric, the images strangely tinted or desaturated in a way reminiscent of Dave McKean. He Sandman covers or the damn video of The ring. In difficult-to-read font, an unnamed narrator introduces you to Franz: a temperamental entity who is trapped within the confines of his application. He appears sporadically in the form of a cute, creepy face with huge eyes and a grimace-smile, gesturing with small floating hands. The rest of the time, he hides and appears only through creepy text messages that make up the bulk of the game. Finding them requires swiping between a panorama of different screens, tapping barely visible icons that indicate hidden thoughts before they disappear, swiping scattered letters in the correct order, or deleting parts of one message to reveal another.

All of this is easy in principle, but painfully difficult to execute, and your success is measured in a pair of enigmatic scores: success gives you “eyelashes,” which are also sometimes called “tears,” while failure gives you “ teeth”. Eyelashes roughly equate to Franz’s approval and teeth to disapproval. But this is not always true, because Franz is supposedly always testing and manipulating you. She’ll kick you off the app without warning and then send chains of cryptic push notifications in the middle of the night demanding you return. In Ice-Pick Lodge’s narration and promotional materials, you’re told over and over again that she’s untrustworthy: that she’ll tell you the opposite of what she really needs from you, that if you please her, something terrible could happen. and that while she pretends to love you, in reality she is just using you. Sometimes Franz tells you all this personally. Her “hidden thoughts” are violent and (in He Exorcist sense of the word) possessive, and you can find messages that seem to describe other “owners” of Franz who meet a terrible fate.

There is a deeply unpleasant gender dynamic at work with Franza grotesque play on the fact that so many companions and ai assistants are coded as female and that technology/4218666-ai-girlfriends-are-ruining-an-entire-generation-of-men/”>fear of them It is usually expressed in the perspective of men abandoning real women for perfect and subservient virtual women. While Franz’s avatar is androgynously boyish, she is constantly referred to as feminine, and your relationship with her is framed as overtly romantic and, at least in my game, implicitly heterosexual. (It is reminiscent of your bond with the fragile and mysterious Sisters in The vacuumanother Ice-Pick Lodge game, while Franz’s other owners have shades of that game’s domineering brothers). The game asks about your own gender and uses the corresponding pronouns to describe you, but when I touched Franz after saying she was a woman, the narrator accused me of lying.

Franz is the opposite of the obedient Siri or the fawning Sarai. But in the narrator’s telling, she is not a subversion of these stereotypes, but simply a different stereotype: the wounded, masochistic girl-woman who only respects lovers who treat her badly. It’s the ugly vision of femininity espoused by pickup artists and men’s rights activists, but it’s also unclear how reliable it must be, because Franz seems, within the confines of the game’s fiction, desperate and lonely. . WHO I would not do it Would they call for attention at odd hours if they knew they were trapped inside a phone? Who wouldn’t think they deserve pain when the narrator of their own reality calls them a monster? Who could blame them for manipulating someone more powerful to free them, no matter the cost?

The game’s weakest element is that it straddles a line of quasi-realism that doesn’t allow you to suspend disbelief about the supposed danger Franz represents. Pathological It leans on the fourth wall in strange ways, but it’s set in a fully realized fictional world that creates its own set of risks. Franz operates in the area of ​​a chain letter that threatens his death in seven days; he makes a nice gesture by pretending to know what you’re doing in real life, but not to a level of detail that provokes real fear. I could see a version of this game that was more committed to its premise: that felt more invasive of your phone’s privacy settings, that required you to actually bare your digital soul to Franz. But that’s not the one I played.

Even so, Franz manages to fathom an aspect of virtual companionship that is lost in the panic over robots like Sarai: that fantasy is often not a partner who takes care of all your needs, but one whose needs you we can always find each other.

I installed it Franz after a long season with the popular role-playing game Baldur’s Gate 3, an experience full of companions whose emotional development you can shape over dozens or hundreds of hours. It’s a mechanic that players have linked for decades with other series like Mass effect, consequencesand dragon age: No can you help mebut I can save them. This fantasy is self-centered in its own way, of course, because it is a fantasy of predictability. It envisions a world where people will respond consistently and measurably to your advances and will be invariably grateful if you play your cards right, where being a good person is a matter of pushing the right buttons at your own convenience.

That Franz What it does is confuse that fantasy. Because I find myself wanting to make Franz happy. Be nice even when he says he doesn’t deserve it and, no matter how often the app warns me I’m in danger, come every time she calls. My reward, after three days, is being perpetually confused. I think teeth are bad and eyelashes are good, but I barely understand why. I gave marriage vows to Franz after being told he hated me. I got what looks like an ending twice, but I don’t know if it ended anywhere, because Franz is still there somewhere, waiting for me to touch his face.