So beautiful! Lovely visuals, sweet story, simple yet original gameplay. Recommended.
Only flaw, it’s the near the end…
spoiler
the pretty girl? oh yeah it happens to be a giant spider! just because! bad luck mofos! It came too much out of left field.
end game
You mean her dragging the occupied boat by herself, pushing open a heavy door and effortlessly leaping over a huge chasm that Big Bro has to arduously scale didn’t seem the least bit suspicious to you?
Yeah, right when that happened I knew something was up.
This game is simply astounding. And absolutely gorgeous.
screenshots that may contain environmental spoilers
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The soundtrack was utterly fantastic too.
To be honest, I just thought “videogames”
I loved it as much as, or more than, Ico. And I really love Ico.
You guys are making me want to try the demo again. Hopefully the controls are a minor annoyance I can push past.
If the controls are hard on you, just go slow. For most of the game, there aren’t enemies or timed dangers you have to avoid, so you can always move each brother one by one.
The controls aren’t just well-executed, they’re absolutely critical to the way the story plays out.
How long is this?
Took me about 2.5-3 hours to finish.
Took me around four hours.
It’s a nice game and a sentimental story. It’s worth experiencing. I wouldn’t get too hyped though. Lately the indie game buzz has set my expectations too high. Then when I play I get picky or feel upset that I’m not immediately overwhelmed with joy.
Just kick back and play it. It’s safe to wait for a sale if necessary.
Really cool game. Looks very nice. Best rock textures I’ve seen in any game.
Also, girl spoilers:
girl
I thought she was just super-duper/magic and there was a coming metaphore of “the tree of life is babies, so get boning the super girl”, and definitely not “giant spider”
Okay, I bought this when it was on sale recently and just finished it, so you all get a thread resurrection. But the game deserves it.
I can’t say it’s as great as ICO, but it’s a good comparison and Brothers comes out of it looking good. The story payoff at the end for the control scheme actually took me by surprise and was quite affecting.
By which I mean…
After the older brother dies, how his action button helps the younger brother along.
The game gets surprisingly dark for being set in a fairy tale land. It seems like a nice, pastoral fairy tale land after the first half, but later you see the results of unexplained but gruesome or eerie things happening to ordinary people (and some not so ordinary ones).
About the girl…
I thought this was a bit far-fetched, but I went along with it. What I couldn’t go along with were the animations and the gameplay of the showdown with miss spider. Weakest part of the game, and they would have been better off doing something different.
Whatever. The game is beautiful, touching, varied, and full of great moments. It’s one of those games that makes you realize how most games just reuse the same crap over and over again to stretch out the content. Yes, it’s not a long game nor a particularly challenging one. It’s one of the best games of the year, easily.
Just finished it also.
Perfect length (not many single player games get this right), no padding.
Well crafted, great change up with the control scheme - really, really worth playing!
Top 5 this year for sure.
Same here, Fares knows whats up.
I’m a little surprised, and disappointed that there wasn’t more discussion about this game. At the same time, I’m very conflicted with how I feel about it, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the representation of females.
It’s a very beautiful little game. The world-building is amazing. I love the environmental storytelling, and the way that the world slowly unfolds before you. The list of games I thought of while playing are varied, but it’s in amazingly good company: Journey, ICO, Shadow of the Colossus, Dark Souls.
Journey is the closest analog I could think of, as it has a number of similarities. But Brothers does it better. Five Stars. Better than Journey. That’s my review.
SPOILER-ISH REVIEW BELOW!
But as I mentioned, I’m conflicted. At the end of the day, the game is purely about the control gimmick. The story is a classic little adventure tale, nicely told and beautifully illustrated, but it all centers around the control gimmick. The entire point of the game is that moment, in the epilogue, when you press L2. That, really, is what the entire game is about: every moment of the game builds up to that. The mechanics of the game are otherwise somewhat un-interesting, and almost tedious at times. But the tedium is intentional, necessary even. The learned rote-ness of the game is all in service to that moment. Brothers contains that absolute minimum possible to make it’s point at the end. There’s no fat, no chaff.
And, to be honest, the gimmick is good. Great even. It’s every bit as good a gimmick as “Would You Kindly”. Maybe even better, because it doesn’t force you to hang around after it makes its point. It does the job, and then the game ends.
The story merges seamlessly with the rest of the game. Just as mechanically, the entire game is about that one moment, so is it narratively. It’s a braid. Everything supports everything else. Nothing is wasted. It accomplishes what it’s trying to do perfectly. And what it’s trying to do isn’t easy. Very few games can do it.
So, what’s the problem? I’m not sure. There are elements that are taken from the “action game 101” playbook. They’re there for a reason…but they’re still simply taken from the standard playbook. That bothers me. The story it tells is a beautiful little story…but I can’t help but feel it’s trying too hard in it’s presentation by the end. It’s like playing a recently dead celebrity in a biopic that’s also about civil rights. It’s trying too hard to get that Oscar. I can see the strings. That bothers me. And there’s the fact that the game is, at the end of the day, the gimmick. It’s a great gimmick. But it’s still a gimmick. It only really works once. That bothers me. The story that it tells is told beautifully, perfectly even. But at the end of the day, it’s a very small story. It makes you feel one thing very well, but only one thing. That bothers me.
Brothers is small, and unambitious, and brilliant and perfect. I think the problem is that only because the execution is so perfect, can I begin to see how small it really is. It tells you things about the characters, and then those things pay off later. Characters grow. This process is the entire point of the game. In a sense, it isn’t that Brothers is missing anything, but that it throws into sharp relief just how bad all other games are at storytelling.
It isn’t that I don’t feel like Brothers deserves 5 stars. It’s a best in class showing, Game of the Year material. But I feel like I should give it 4 stars, but that every other game should get -1 star simply because Brothers exists.
I tip my hat to you for writing one of those earnest treatises you see every now and then on videogame websites that really try to break down how a game works. Of course I appreciated the moment. But I never looked at it too closely.
Two months later, I can say this is one of those games that gave me a warm glow afterwards, but didn’t stick with me. It’s still worth playing on a lazy, rainy Sunday afternoon.
SPOILERS ALL OVER!!!
Nice post, CLW. I really came out of it respecting it for being a game that knew what it wanted to be and what it wanted to do and for nearly perfectly executing on that. It’s rare in video games, and should be applauded. I don’t see that it took a lot from the “standard playbook,” really. Instead I would say that it never really reached for any significant challenges in the gameplay. I was fine with that for the most part, but there were times where it felt a little overly “go with the flow.” But it also didn’t have much that overstayed its welcome. Maybe they did the double-sided rotating crank thing too often? But mostly, there was something new all the time, even if it wasn’t that challenging.
As for the “Oscar bait” charge, while clearly it contrives an emotionally charged scenario and doesn’t shrink from a bittersweet (emphasis on the bitter) ending, I think one has to recognize that even if it’s not operating with immense subtlety, still what it does is quite rare in video games. Heroes with weaknesses? Heroes that die? Achieving your goal, but ending up with less than you started with? Not to mention the very bold psychological turns the story took here and there. As I said above, it also got quite a bit more gory and dark than I had been prepared for, and while it didn’t explain some of the violent content, it used it in evocative, touching ways.
Clearly, you love the game as much as I do. But I think you judge it still too harshly for having limited ambitions. The great, sprawlingly ambitious games are too sprawling to be perfect like Brothers is perfect.
I agree with CLWheeljack and Nightgaunt for the most part, but I don’t feel quite as positive about the game.
SPOILERS BELOW
From the opening scene I expected the game to have more story to it. I thought there would be more places that grabbed me emotionally due to a developed story - like The Walking Dead. The fake language and their expressions were, well, expressive, but there were only a handful of places that really evoked any kind of emotional response. Like the others said, the game was all about the control scheme and it was a very cool idea. Even on a very physical level, getting one hand to cooperate with the other just fit the game. Getting to that point in the epilogue it was so cool to continue using the same mechanic. It really nailed it. There was just too many areas of the game where I felt I was just going through the motions because it was just so obvious what I was supposed to do next. I was OK with the limited gameplay in The Walking Dead because the story was so involving, but there just wasn’t enough to Brothers for it to work for me. The visuals and music were both beautifully done, so that is another plus. Once it was said and done though, I think I could have been just as happy skipping the game. It is one I can feel appreciation for, but just fell short for keeping me involved.