Might be my screen but the last 2 screenshots could be out of World of Warcraft.
I thought the game looked amazing in daylight / dawn scenes (and nothing like WoW)!
From the amount of screenshots posted to my Steam community feed I knew I had to play this and damn, how good does this game look. Unbelievable, I’ll echo most of the comments here, great control scheme and puzzles, great minimalistic story and most of all great pacing. Just finished it last night and still thinking about it.
The giants’ battlegrounds had me gaping the whole time:
Giant
qt3 question> how do I create spoiler tags for posts? I want to wrap the image inside that so it doesn’t take up so much space.
*edit> spoiler added!
[spoiler=obligatory spoiler title] spoiler text [///spoiler]
With only one / instead of three.
But I’m not sure if images inside spoilers are hidden!
sharaleos post here hides images inside spoilers, which is the effect I wanted. I’mma try that.
edit> it worked thanks!
Yeah, I loved the design of the giant level as well and had the same reaction you did. It was made better for the fact the the game does not try to explain what a happened, instead just letting the player ponder whatever circumstances may have led to the destruction as they wander through it. Same for a few of the other environments.
Agreed on the giants. Wish I knew what secret fairy dust they sprinkle over the presentation of the world to make all these things seem to fit nicely together and not be jarring or eclectic. Maybe it’s the pace at which they introduce the fantasy elements?
Completed the game just now, so I could consider it for my GOTY selection.
This game did almost nothing for me. I found it trying too hard concerning the story and the puzzles/action sequences where too simple and on rails for my taste. It wasn’t bad or anything but it won’t go on my game of the year list.
Oh and I encountered a few glitches, one even required me to restart a whole chapter (guard key).
I had a glitch that required a chapter restart too (giant/blood level for me).
I’m glad that the GotY awards made me aware of this game, which I never would have played or even known about otherwise. Loved it, and do think it continues the trend of smaller games actually expanding what games are capable of being – the fact that the control scheme (and your experience coming to terms with it) plays so cleverly into the game’s core themes is really wonderful. As someone above said, it does feel like more of a poem than a conventional narrative.
I also really enjoyed the glimpses we got of the world - a lot of developers could learn from how effectively the world was developed with just snippets of representative content - in a way it reminds me of Bungie’s Myth that way - so few games do as well despite producing a lot more background content, usually dryly delivered.
I bit the bullet and played through this one tonight and you guys were right, it was definitely worth my time - guess that’s kind of an understatement considering it wasn’t really all that much of a time investment. I am a sucker for a big blockbuster game as much as anyone, but I absolutely love that there are fantastic little games like this out there too. This was a really great example of what felt like a guerrilla or punk operation - get in, get out, leave 'em wanting more. And I could have played more, but I appreciate that this game is as tight as it is.
I never really did fully wrap my brain around the control scheme such that it felt comfortable, but it’s true that that wasn’t really important very often. They only time I got thoroughly confused was when the older brother, controlled with the left stick, ended up on screen to the right of the younger brother who is controlled with the right one. I just had to stop what I was doing and rearrange their position. I like a game that plays by its own rules but doesn’t necessarily tell you what they are. And I like when I get the occasional random turn in the story (you folks that have played know what I mean, I’ll say no more). So yeah, good on you guys for piling on the praise here so that I reconsidered playing it. Definitely worth it.
Nifty factoid uncovered by Soren Johnson (on Twitter): the language in Brothers is Lebanese.
Just finished it, and while I did have my doubts in the first hour or so, after that it got better and better and I’m very very impressed now. I can probably echo all of the praise above, (most certainly about the Giants!!!) but one of the things that impressed me most was the fact that there’s just nothing in there that isn’t needed. The makers could probably easily have made it twice as long, simply by extending the puzzels a bit. But the fact that they didn’t, makes this game extremely well paced and ‘thight’ (for lack of a better word, in Dutch it would be ‘strak’). You get the feeling that everything you do is really a part of the journey, not just filling, and I absolutely loved that.
The ending makes me somewhat reluctant to play it again right away, but I have no doubt I will do so in the future. Great game!
I feel like I’ve fallen into a Twilight Zone or Outer Limits episode with PC games that were designed for controllers. I see the “Big Brother / Little Brother” buttons, but can only hit and hold down the Space key and no other input has any effect on the game. Some control general menu features work before the game actually begins, but after the first graveyard video the only keyboard/mouse input that is accepted is the Space key.
The entire theme of the game, let alone the mechanics, is dependent upon you playing with a controller, so you really should.
Yeah, through trial and error I finally figured out what keys and key combinations will actually be recognized by the game, but the kb control scheme is so wacky that it appears to be unplayable that way, so I’ll have to go dig up my long lost 360 controller.
Edit: I’m also noticing that the little brother keeps running even when I let go of the keys. None of my keys are stuck or anything, so this is a little off-topic but it reminds me of an issue with Batman: Arkham Origins where the camera spins and spins upon game start, even though I’m not touching any of the controls. It’s almost like my system thinks there’s a controller connected even though no controller has ever touched this W8 build. No other USB devices are connected and I’ve swapped mouse/keyboards to no avail. Guess I’ll find out more when I manage to find and connect an actual controller.
The Steam page for the game does say that a controller is required to play.
Luckily this game was actually designed for a controller, so the lack of keyboard support isn’t the result of a bad porting job like it is with many other titles. The game description actually says a controller is required so I’m surprised it even works.
Yeah, that was my bad, based on having read numerous anecdotal reports about playing it successfully with a mouse/keyboard, which appears to be pretty much anomalous. These days PC games rarely seem to exclude that setup so I wasn’t in the mindset to look for requirements on the Steam description in the first place, as I should have been I suppose. But I’m perfectly happy playing any non-FPS game with a controller, so it’s all good.
Well, that nifty moment at the end just slayed me, and it made my wife tear up when I told her about it later that night. I’ve become a real Weepy McWeeperson in my dotage but I do think it was brilliantly designed and executed.
Just finished this game thanks to Playstation plus being so awesome and having this game for free right now. So I’ve heard great things about this game and then seeing it in the QT3 GOTY list really pushed this to the top of the queue. I’m a father of 2 boys (9, and 12) so this really resonated with me. My younger son actually played it through completely first (since kids seem to have all the time in the world to play games) with big brother watching most of it. He so wanted to spoil it for me but I made him keep silent. So I started it Sunday night at midnight and couldn’t put it down and played it all the way through until 3am. What an amazing game. I had a great discussion about it with my son talking about all the different parts of the game, the ending, the themes. It’s got a nice soundtrack too.
Note: There will be spoilers. But there have been plenty of spoilers in this thread already.
Got this off PS+, and was really looking forward to it based on the almost universal praise. But it almost feels like I wasn’t playing the same game as you all. The game wasn’t really doing anything for me, and I thought about stopping a couple times (halfway through the mine, after three failed attempts at hang-gliding). In the end I plowed through since it was supposed to be short, and since there was supposed to be a real payoff of some kind at the end. It wasn’t entirely time wasted – most of the level designs were amazing both graphically and thematically. Especially the battlefield of dead giants.
But the gameplay was weak, the storytelling was even weaker, and the supposed payoff was so weak that I completely missed its relevance.
First, gameplay. What I was kind of expecting was a puzzle game with really tight controls, where you really need to learn to coordinate these two independent actors at the same time. A bit like learning to play the drums. Instead the controls were this mushy pile of unreliable garbage, frustrating exactly in the wrong way. For me playing was basically a loop of:
- Unskippable cinematic
- A snail-paced saunter to the next completely obvious puzzle.
- One of:
- Yell in rage while trying to figure out the pixel-perfect spot to stand on to trigger the action to trivially “solve” the “puzzle”
- Figure out what kind of unprompted quicktime event you’re supposed to perform.
- Keep both triggers pressed for uncomfortably long amounts of time
Especially that last point was inexcusable to my mind. Maybe things are different with the XBox controller, but on a PS3 controller the triggers are so bad that practically no game puts the really important stuff there. Brothers not only put what’s effectively the only relevant control there, but also didn’t add a configuration option to use the shoulder buttons instead.
As for the story, it says something that whenever more of the story got rammed down my throat, I still really wished I could get back to the gameplay. Deaths of fictional characters can be affecting, but only if some emotional connection has been created with the viewer/reader/player. Here the big brother was mainly a soulless, characterless and featureless bag of bits. I don’t really understand which events or actions during the game were supposed to have built up some kind of connection with the characters. Even what was probably supposed to be the climactic scene, a gripping act of having to bury the brother was mostly just frustration on how slow the walking and burial animations were.
I completely missed the supposed huge payoff. I didn’t automatically press LT to swim. There was also no epiphany of “oh, the little brother is all grown up now and can take care of himself”, or anything like that. In fact I don’t even remember ever pressing LT to swim in the first place, but thought that the big brother always swam automatically, and you needed to keep RT pressed to have the little brother hang on. Certainly neither my muscle memory nor real memory suggested LT as the obvious or even relevant thing to do. After 5 minutes I assumed it was either another control glitch or I was missing some land-based path, and consulted a walkthrough.
Based on what some people have written about the game this is supposed to be the moment in the game that absolves all its sins, justifies to wonky controls as brilliant foreshadowing, is a masterpiece of game design, etc. And I’m just not getting it at all. I didn’t even realize that the act of pressing the wrong button was supposed to be the high point of the game until I read up on spoilery discussions.