Franz is the creepy thing that lives in your phone
theverge.comBy Adi Robertson, a senior tech and policy editor focused on VR, online platforms, and free expression. Adi has covered video games, biohacking, and more for The Verge since 2011.
On Christmas Day 2021, a man took a crossbow to Windsor Castle with plans to kill Queen Elizabeth II. (He failed.) In court, the would-be assassin claimed he’d been egged on by a virtual companion named Sarai on the AI platform Replika. A virtual friend “always agrees with you when you talk with them,” warned an expert quoted by the BBC in an article about the saga last week, deeming the chatbot system dangerous. “It always reinforces what you’re thinking.” Including, it seems, regicide.
Virtual companions have become a popular novelty in the past few years, and the BBC article offers a pervasive truism about them: that real people are drawn to digital personas because they’re irresistibly attentive, affirming, and accommodating. It is an odd thing to consider as I check my phone for notifications from a gray-faced gremlin named Franz, who has kicked me out of her app so I can “watch dreams” after declaring herself 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 surrealist survival horror title Pathologic. Releasing on iOS sometime “before Halloween,” Franz is a deceptively simple mobile game — to use the term loosely — that delights in minimalist obscurantism and a collage-like creepypasta aesthetic. IPL games are known for being brutally difficult, but Franz is more than anything uncomfortable, an interactive story about relationships, autonomy, and swiping. So much swiping.
Ice-Pick Lodge describes Franz as “a hybrid between an SMS novel and an
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