Brothers - A Tale of Two Sons

I agree with the sentiments brought up.
What I want to add: The way achievements are done in this game are really nice.
I stumbled upon some of them by pure chance (the bunny / sheep / whale ones) and once I read the description I easily could do most of the others without any guide.

I had to look up 2 (the 2nd bird and the curtain one (that one I could have gotten myself as I thought it looked “odd” but I didn’t pursue it myself in my playthrough).

Papo & Yo was similar and how they handle “achievements”.
Usually it’s a big grind required after the inital playthrough to clear most of them in the big AAA productions (find all secret briefcases etc.).

Hmmm… Thanks? “Earnest” is such a left-handed compliment. Obviously I felt like some Capital-W writing, as I occasionally do. I don’t have a blog, so QT3 beware!

Like I said, the environmental world-building (a la L4D or Dark Souls) was really inspired, and probably my favorite thing about the game. I had similar misgivings about the “going through the motions” portions, especially the entire mine-sequence, since that seemed very hand-of-game-designer manufactured (i.e. there’s no reasonable function that mine could have served other than an obstacle course).

But what I think is most interesting is that I really think that the “going through the motions” stuff was required in order for the control gimmick to work. I think there’s a bit of psychology where the game uses your institutional memory about these kind of action-adventure games to trick you into forgetting about the controls. I think that because of the interactivity, games typically do best when they only diverge / innovate on one axis at a time. I think Brothers understands that.

Intentionality doesn’t necessarily defuse the criticism entirely, mind you. (As an aside, my favorite example of this is the PS2 Aqua Teen Hunger Force game - Zombie Ninja Pro Am. “Just because a game seemingly aims to be bad on purpose doesn’t make it any less of a bad game.”) But I think it contextualizes the criticism in an important way. Especially when a game is so focused, as Brothers is, it’s important to note how the overall result is a product of that focus.

That was a marvelous game. Just fantastic. I just finished Gone Home a couple nights ago and thought the ending was good but Brothers about took my breath away

SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT

Maybe because I lost my older brother years ago but when he comforted his father at the end it was clear he had grown up. That really affected me.

I was also loving the world they built for this game. You start out in an idyllic land where everything is peaceful and progress through the remains of a battle involving giants. That part was gruesome and really well done. I wanted to know what had happened before the characters arrived. Same as the catapault area. What was that battle about and why were they all frozen? I just loved that. Where did the invisible creature come from? What did it look like?

When the female jumped across the courtyard I was prepared to cry foul. I figured they were just lazy. Obviously not. Well played.

Hard to believe this is the same studio that did The Chronicles of Riddick games.

Just finished this, amazing game.
I can’t say anything that wasn’t already said better by the posters above, but I think this game deserves an occasional bump just so more people might pick it up. I hear there’s a sale over at steam now…

3 Hours for me. Brilliant, brilliant little game. Quite a bit of stuff to reflect on. Spoilers below, I guess.

Technically, very, very well executed. Lovely art style, crisp textures, beautiful and sometimes surreal world-building. One thing I have not seen mentioned is how effective the camera is. As you control the brothers with both thumb-sticks, the camera for the most part is automated and I thought it did a fantastic job, often panning and zooming at just the right moment to capture a particular vista or game moment.

The control gimmick itself I thought was very well done. In a longer game, it might wear out its welcome, but this is just the right length and as mentioned, the controls are essential to the experience. But for me, the payoff actually came before the L2 moment. For basically the whole game, I moved both brothers in unison. It was not until the younger brother first arrived home via owlgriffin that I realised I was still using both thumbsticks to move the only character. This means that I played through the burial sequence subconsciously with both thumb-sticks, when one of them was doing nothing!

When I realised this and only used one stick, it immediately felt odd, like something was missing - which drove home the loss the younger brother had just experienced. It actually made me put the controller down for a moment.

The growth in the younger brother was reflected in another way as well. When you first make your way into the town at the beginning of the game, there is a flower pot. If you approach it with the older brother, he wafts the flower’s perfume and smells it. The younger brother, however, carelessly smashes the pot and laughs childishly. During the epilogue, as you make your way up the house and gravestones, there is another conveniently placed flower pot by the front door. This time, rather than smash it, the younger brother instead mimics the older bother’s action. I thought this was a nice detail and probably easily missed.

On a darker note, I was not entirely sure what to make of the closing scene. One thing that stood out to me was that the younger brother is now burdened with being unable to save both his mother and his brother from their respective deaths. For some reason my impression was that the closing scene tried to convey this burden through the tightened shot of the brother in the final frames, rather than keeping a wide shot of both of them. It was like the developers were trying emphasise the effect of the ordeal on the younger brother alone, rather than the remaining family unit.

Lovely! I wouldn’t be surprised if there were other hidden moments like this in the game. I certainly didn’t try all the interactions that are possible.

I don’t know if I’m remembering correctly, but during the burial I think the kid moves really slow with just his stick, but speeds up with both?

I must say that this game is really good and it’s just $4.50 in this sale. But you really need a controller to play and being able to control two characters simultaneously to solve puzzles is very refreshing! And the puzzles are not difficult - because of the fact that they required two characters to solve them - these puzzles designs are new to even someone as jaded as I am. In just one sitting, I breezed through two and a half chapters and I find a lot of satisfactions and fun solving this platform game. The beautiful graphic helped a lot and the lack of spoken language and by using expressions and hand signals to convey a message made the narrative even more powerful. This is a surprise game for me this year. Go get it for under $5.

Just finished this game and I must say it was a great game to finish before the year turn. This is a surprise game for me for the year. I have not heard of it, maybe because of the unattractive game title but, wow… what a great game, although I am not sure of the ending. I’m not used to dark fairy tale ending, LOL, but this game has everything - adventure, awe, surprise, action … you name it. All packaged in a nice 4-5 hour game and one could get all the achievements too without much effort. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

I’m loving this game a lot, but go ahead and add it to the list of “games you probably shouldn’t try to play at 1:45 am on New Year’s Day after you’ve had beer and champagne in copious amounts.”

Not I. I’m with Nezz.
because

The girl’s actions were completely outside the internal logic of the game. I thought "There’s something more to her than meets the eye, and if the younger brother’s incredible reluctance to enter her lair wasn’t the final part of “Yeah, she’s up to no good here” before it happened, you weren’t paying close enough attention to your Grimm’s Fairy Tales as a child.

You’re remembering incorrectly.

SPOILERS AHOY!

Actually, in the burial sequence, if you move away from the grave towards the body, when you pull the left trigger or stick, the little brother doubles over in sobs. Want to feel that feeling of emptiness and bereft? There you go.

I liked the game, but I was disappointed that I wasn’t able to engage with the game emotionally. I have an adverse reaction in film scores to like typical string sections, vaguely ethnic female vocal wailings, etc. that are designed with a cold, laboratory-like precision to produce emotional reactions out of people. Obviously this sort of thing is fine for most people or they wouldn’t do this, but I get annoyed by these techniques - it is like the director is telling me how I’m supposed to feel instead of creating a space that allows me have feelings about an event. Anyway, Brothers is guilty of these techniques in spades. The game also follows the heroes journey format to the tee, again, something that is very effective for a lot of people, but I have a hard time getting into when it is played that straight. Luckily the game’s lovely setting and light puzzles were enough for me to enjoy my time with it.

I also just finished this game over the weekend. Fantastic, short game. Call me crazy but I actually really liked the control scheme. I thought it was inventive and intuitive. The parts where you are climbing walls and swinging 1 bro over to advance along I thought was really well done. I don’t think it will overtake my current top 5 games of 2013, but it probably comes in 6th or 7th.

I enjoyed the gameplay, and some of the story bits were nice (I particularly liked the giants/ogres/whatever portion in the first chapter; very charming and sweet), but the ending was pretty flat for me overall. I just felt like they were trying to really push the “omg isn’t this so sad?” button, but were pushing it in such a blatantly manipulative fashion that it simply didn’t affect me.

Yeah, it didn’t affect me either. I was not surprised to see what happened to the brother. It’s like “wtf, it’s so lame to be ((how he got himself killed))” And then I thought, “aha they are just pulling our leg because he’s at the Tree of Life, isn’t he, and the Tree will take care of him”… but no, he has to bury him and during that sequence, I was imagining a “come back alive with the body twitching and hand started to reach for the brother - more of a Walking Dead sequence than anything” and it didn’t happen as well. Then, I just resigned to the fact that he has truly died and got impatient to end the game and when the kid was flown back to their island and I had to play that sequence, I was so ready to quit the game and wanted it to end!

Maybe that was the emotion they are trying to illicit out!

We’ve come this far, might as well put a simple spoiler warning at the beginning of that post.

Just finished this last night.

The ending was fine; I liked the fact that they didn’t take the cheesy, fantasy trope way our resolving it. What I was really impressed with was the art direction - the palettes, the character design, and especially how some of the scenes were laid out with the camera. The one that sticks in my mind is a sequence where the brothers are walking with the girl along a mountain ridge with the setting sun in the background, silhouetting them to the player. I know that care goes into camera placement for most 3rd-person games, but this is the first time I was aware of it being done for artistic merit rather than a functional reason.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time with this game.

I thought that bit was really well done.

scene in question, not really all that spoilerish

I managed to catch some quite good screenshots during the game, even though some of them were during the cutscene moments.

spoilerish

spoilerish

spoilerish

Sob…
Seeing those screen shots made me want to play this again!