On a rainy day in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, a little girl is on her way home from school. Along her way she comes across bulletins with several reports of children gone missing while a stranger in the foreground is watching her closely. Moments later she descends a few stairs leading to a murky alleyway where a shadowed person suddenly steps in her way, preventing her from going further. She turns around scared as another shady guy creeps up behind her. The first guy grabs her and covers her mouth. Everything goes black.
When the girl wakes up she finds herself alone, confined in a cell. There are several scribbles on the walls pleading for mommy and daddy and describing various atrocities done to the writers. From the cell door window a strange person wearing a hooded jacket is seen watching a surveillance monitor. Then by some chance a small crack appears in the rear wall...
Fragile is a realistic horror adventure developed by Beer Night Studio in 2020.
The underground depths of Ulaanbaatar contain examples of:
- Air-Vent Passageway: At one point, the girl and her boy companion have to crawl through a duct. It's considerably easier for them since they're both small children.
- Ambiguous Situation: While it's clear that the various monsters the girl sees are hallucinations and they are actually humans (except for the Gollum-boy), it's unclear what exactly the headless monsters are in reality, as they seem to be unaware of the girl's presence unless they bump into her. The final mass of bodies with shooting tentacles is even more ambiguous.
- Bad People Abuse Animals: The mine overseer have a guard dog. He's not above smacking it with a shovel if he gets an idea that the dog is making a pointless ruckus.
- Bittersweet Ending: The good ending. Yes, it is all but said that the girl has suffered major PTSD from this tragedy that will haunt her, but she has now been reunited with her father at long last.
- Body Horror: Be it the butchers with sewn-up faces, the headless HumanoidAbominations with maws open on their chests with rib-teeth or the multi-limbed atrocity with multiple extensive tongues that chases you on your way up, this game is chock-full of this stuff.
- Body of Bodies: In the game's finale a strange mass with multiple limbs is chasing the girl on her way up. Said monster literlly looks like several human bodies sewn together.
- Camera Abuse: Played with. The cracking screen represents the girl's deterring mental state due to the exposure to several atrocities taking place in the game. See Interface Screw below.
- Chase Scene: There are two sequences, one when the girl is being chased by the two "surgeons" and in another by a gang of headless HumanoidAbominations with chest-maws which later turns into a multi-limbed mass of bodies.
- Chase-Scene Obstacle Course: Various chunks of furniture and debris obstruct the girls path during the chases. These are dealt with in the QTE fashion. In the final chase she has to climb up a sizable pile of crates.
- Chekhov's Gunman: Remember the boy whose face is seen on the front of the Missing posters at the beginning of the game? You end up finding him in person in a cell, and once you free him, he aids you on your mission to escape.
- Controllable Helplessness: At one point the girl is recaptured and Strapped to an Operating Table. The scene is viewed from her own eyes. You can struggle all you want but there's no way to break out of the situation by yourself. The help comes from the disfigured gollum-like boy the girl befriended on her way out of her cell.
- Crapsack World: Air pollution and child abductions are common in Ulaanbaatar.
- Dies Wide Open: The unnamed boy dies this way. When the girl sees him like this, she assumes that he is still alive, until she sees his exposed organs.
- Downer Ending: The bad ending is definitely this. The girl has just accidentally killed her father, and now with no mother or father, she is now an orphan. And with all the psychological trauma she suffered throughout the game, this is definitely the final nail in the coffin for her turmoil.
- Drowning My Sorrows: In the final mental sequence the girl's dad is seen mourning over the loss of his wife with several empty bottles around him and his daughter desperately tugging at his shirt to get him off the floor.
- Dull Eyes of Unhappiness: The girl has them 99% of the time. The remaining one percent is where her eyes are bulging wide open in fear.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: To get the good ending you have to pay attention to the flasbacks and then take a hint at the final confrontation. That is the Sun pin appearing on the girl's father's suit in the flashback, which clues you in on the final monster's true nature.
- Empathic Environment: In the good ending, as the girl and her father share a big hug, the rain and gloomy clouds disappear to reveal a sunny sky, reflecting the relief of reuniting with a loved one.
- Flashback: The girl has several of her happier past times when her family was still intact.
- From Bad to Worse: Your wife dies, you resort to cope with it with the help of alcohol and then on one rainy day your little daughter goes missing on her way home from school.
- Graceful Loser: The Gollum-boy is this. Even if he loses, he'll be happy to have played with someone and even helps the girl. Oddly enough, he's not a graceful winner, since he'll kill the girl if he wins.
- Guide Dang It!: If you miss the stealth hint on the final monster the moon pin the father was wearing on his collar and opt to shoot it, it is revealed that it's the girl's trauma induced hallucination and she
accidentally shot her dad to death. - Harmful to Minors: The game is basically about small children being abducted and exploited in various ways, icluding sex slavery and involuntary organ donation.
- Heroic Sacrifice: When the girl ends up Strapped to an Operating Table the gollum-boy comes to her rescue assaulting the "doctor" but also taking a severe beating. When she approaches him he gives her one last encouraging smile before his eyes go dull and he succumbs to his injuries.
- Humans Are the Real Monsters: The entire game is about how wicked people abducting and exploiting little children. Being unable to cope with this reality, the girl begins imagining them as literal monsters.
- Human Traffickers: The basic premise of the game is organized crime groups abducting children of the streets of third-world countries and exploiting them.
- Im Dying Please Take My Macguffin: As he is dying, the Gollum-boy gives the girl a gun in order to protect herself. This plays a big role in the climax, and in the case of the bad ending, makes him an Unwitting Instigator of Doom.
- Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: If the girl is caught in the mining area, she will at first be impales from the back by a metal spear, to which the stunned girl touched it in disbelief. She is then impaled by TWO other spears before finally dying. And this is shown in first-person angle!
- Interface Screw: The screen begins to crack as the girl has to witness more and more atrocities being committed by the human antagonists.
- Shattered Sanity: In the end. Girl's thoughts get clouded to the point of the screen cracking completly, symbolizing that her Sanity, has reached it's bounds.
- It's Probably Nothing: Halfway through the game a guard dog prevents the kids from going further. What they need to do is alert the dog and quickly hide, multiple times. The miner overseeing the dog will assume that the dog is making a pointless ruckus and after it repeating three times will just smack the dog with a shovel letting the kids proceed.
- Killed Offscreen: What happens to the unnamed escaped boy who tags along with you for a large portion of the game. He is dragged out of the vent and unconsciously along a hall by a guard. Next time you see him, his corpse has been cut open and is being examined.
- Meaningful Background Event: Or, in this case, Meaningful Foreground Event. As the girl is walking home, a man close to the screen has his head looking her way. And as she passes, his head whips around the other way to continue seeing her, meaning that she is being tracked and about to be abducted.
- Multiple Endings: There are two, one where the girl shoots the final monster which is shortly revealed to be a trauma-induced hallucination and she realizes she killed her own dad and the other where she holds fire and is happily reunited with her father.
- No Name Given: Neither the little girl protagonist or any other characters are given any name in the game proper.
- Playing with Syringes: The ultimate fate of the boy you bust out of a cell and he accompanies you for a while. When crawling out of the Air-Vent Passageway he gets recaptured moments later and is seen Strapped to an Operating Table as two "doctors" extract his organs for profit.
- Rule of Symbolism: In the bad ending, after the girl realizes that she shot and killed her father, the moon pin in her hair falls off the stunned girl and hits the ground, showing that she lost her last remaining relative, as well as her sanity.
- Sanity Slippage: As the girl is exposed to more and more terrific events she begins to lose her grasp on reality. Probably because she can't comprehend humans commiting such vile acts.
- Self-Made Orphan: In the bad ending.
- Silence Is Golden: No dialogue is spoken throughout most of the game. Even when a character is demanding something, a speech bubble with a picture appears alongside him or her to indicate what he or she wants. That is until the ending, to indicate the utter shock value
- Stealth-Based Game: Since the girl cannot put up much of a fight against her captors most of the time she's required to sneak past them undetected.
- The Guards Must Be Crazy: Most of them are not, and are actually good at their job. However, one at the desk plays this straight by being fast asleep for the most part, and there is also one at the mines with the dog.
- Through the Eyes of Madness: Not long after beginning her escape endeavor the human antagonists gradually begin to be replaced by atrocious monsters. It is a clear sign that all the macabre the girl went through has taken its toll on her sanity.
- Was Once a Man: Several artifacts and pictures indicate that the Gollum-like boy was a decent person with a loving family.
