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Frankenstein

by Dave Morris and inkle

Horror, Literary
2012

Web Site

(based on 6 ratings)
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About the Story

This unique literary app places you in conversation with Frankenstein himself as his story unfolds. He will be your guide, and you his advisor. Console, counsel or condemn him: the choice is yours.

Written by best-selling author Dave Morris, designed and developed for iOS by inkle and published by award-winning publisher, Profile Books, Frankenstein is a whole new way of experiencing Mary Shelley’s classic tale of terror, tragedy and revenge.


Game Details

Editorial Reviews

Kirkus Reviews
The writing from Dr. Frankenstein’s perspective can be purple and dramatically mordant at times, but Morris pushes the story forward with pleasant efficiency, condensing Shelley’s prose without stripping it of its flavor. (The original novel is included in the app, though without the bells and whistles.)

Some narrative weakness aside, a brilliantly designed app; the current benchmark for high-quality storytelling via tablet.
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The Guardian / The Observer
First impressions were good. Frankenstein is lovely to look at: tastefully designed and illustrated with old anatomical drawings. It's when you start reading that things go downhill. What Morris has done is dismember Mary Shelley's novel and sew it into a digital version of a Choose Your Own Adventure story. In doing so, he has created a monster.
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The Chimerist
Whatever interactive fiction is (and we’re still figuring that out) it suffers from all the problems of traditional fiction and then some. The vast majority of novels and short stories aren’t much good, but when a branching fiction — along the lines of the old “Choose Your Own Adventure” children’s books — fails to engage, the first impulse is to blame the form rather than the content. Let “Frankenstein,” just released by Inkle Studios and Profile Books, serve as a reproach to that reflex. The app is a creative, subtle and sensitive adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic novella, and it has singlehandedly renewed this critic’s hopes for interactive fiction.
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Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling
Morris has breathed new life into an old monster, to make it attractive, to render it accessible and modern; to take away the long overwrought narration and replace it with more vivid and immediate scenes; to open up the story to a more richly motivated Henri, Justine, Elizabeth; to engage the reader insistently and interactively with its central questions; and of course to bestow on it the glamor of being an app.
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PC Gamer
This is easily one of the most stylish attempts at bringing interactive fiction to portable devices so far.
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Jay Is Games
How can you take the emotional impact of a structured narrative and allow the player to interact? Can it be done without destroying the heart of either medium? Frankenstein takes a guided stab at the heart of those questions. It's more of a book than a game, but you can't deny the interactivity it presents, all without the heavy cost of losing a substantial story.
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Frankenstein on IFDB

Recommended Lists

Frankenstein appears in the following Recommended Lists:

2020 Alternative Top 100 by Denk
(Created 24-Jul-2020) The purpose of this list is not to compete with the IFDB Top 100 but to provide an alternative view, which makes sense for some games. Philosophy: 1. If a game only has 5-star ratings, it is because the game hasn't...

2023 Alternative Top 100 by Denk
(18sep2023) This is an alternative to other rating based lists with pros and cons in that it allows for games with fewer ratings (5 ratings required) to reach the top of the list which obviously makes their place on the list quite...

Polls

The following polls include votes for Frankenstein:

Games that are adaptations of conventional (not CYOA) books by ChrisM
I'm interested in games that are straightforward adaptations of conventional books (probably novels, but I'd be interested to know if there are any non-fiction book adaptations). The ones that I know of are The Famous Five and The...




This is version 7 of this page, edited by Emily Boegheim on 19 August 2013 at 3:03am. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page