Frank and Drake

I sat down with Frank and Drake expecting a moody point-and-click and ended up spending most of a night in Oriole City, genuinely reluctant to put it down. The setup is deceptively simple: Frank manages a run-down apartment block during the day, struggling with amnesia and a growing sense that the building's residents know more about him than they let on. Drake moves in that same evening, allergic to sunlight, operating entirely after dark, leaving sticky notes on the fridge as his only line of communication with his new housemate. Two people sharing a life they can never share directly. It is a quiet, strange, carefully constructed premise, and Appnormals Team earns every bit of it. The structure runs across six days, alternating between Frank's daytime errands and Drake's nocturnal wanderings through Oriole City. At the start of each section, you pick one of two possible paths for each character: maybe Frank visits a struggling family in the building instead of setting up Drake's room, or Drake communes with restless spirits rather than heading to his diner shift. These choices cascade. They determine what ends up on the sticky note that passes between the two men at the end of each shift, which shapes the bond between them, which in turn locks or unlocks options further down the six endings the game tracks. The developer confirmed over 8,000 rotoscoped frames drawn by hand to cover more than 200 locations and 40 minigames across the full run, and that labor shows. A first path takes roughly five to seven hours; seeing everything pushes toward fifteen to twenty. That is a meaningful commitment for a game this size, and it is honest about asking for it. The rotoscoping is the first thing critics and players land on, and they are right to. Each character is hand-drawn over filmed footage, which gives the animation a weight that standard sprite work rarely achieves. Frank personifies the objects he clicks on, holding quiet conversations with them that reveal his fractured inner world. Drake narrates with dry quips. The same alleyway at noon and at midnight feels genuinely different, not just in lighting but in texture and mood. The soundtrack works in tandem: Frank's sections lean into somber, pensive tones while Drake's shifts carry a more jaunty, lo-fi warmth. The soundscape is intentional and worth listening to rather than skimming past. Not everything lands with equal weight. Some puzzles, which range from cracking a safe to navigating a stealth segment around a zoo, can feel opaque when the game's internal logic is not telegraphed clearly enough. A maze sequence in particular drew complaints across multiple reviews for stalling the pacing at the worst moment. The branching system also does not allow you to jump directly to a choice point after finishing a run; you restart from the beginning each time, which frustrates players specifically looking to chase endings efficiently. A handful of minor technical hitches, including occasional freezes and touchy cursor controls, surfaced in reviews at launch. These are real friction points. They do not undo the experience, but they are worth knowing about before you commit to multiple playthroughs. For the right player, none of that is a dealbreaker. If you respond to environmental storytelling, to games that trust you to assemble meaning from fragments across sessions, to the particular atmosphere of a city at the edge of something supernatural, Frank and Drake has a specific and genuine pull. It knows what it is. It knows when to be quiet. That restraint, in a medium that often mistakes volume for depth, is rarer than it should be.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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