(Fanart by yami-izumi on deviantART)
I could have expected this
acclaimed ‘art game’ to get dark, really. It starts with a child at his
mother’s grave, thinking about watching her drown and being unable to help her.
But hey, plenty of Disney films have that sort of death scene and mourning
afterwards. After the twee first hour or so of this, I was totally unprepared
for just how dark things would get. It’s less the larger events, the traumas
and the losses, and more the details. No young Disney hero has to choose
whether or not to save a grieving father from hanging himself, cause the dead
bodies of giants to hack one another’s limbs off so they can get past or bathe
in blood to interrupt a cult from sacrificing a young woman. As to that
oft-seen trope where a boy becomes tempted sexually, is implied to lose his
childhood and then immediately pay a dear price for it…well, there’s a lot
psychoanalysts can say about it, I’m sure.
But I was left deeply
impressed by Brothers. It is indeed an art game in the same vein as Journey,
short in overall length but unhurried, deeply influenced by fantasy writing,
mature in presentation and emotionally heavy-hitting. Telling the story of two
boys in a world of mythology that draws many comparisons to Fable but
with a more Scandinavian twist to it – trolls and all – it intentionally starts
with low-key puzzles like chasing off a village bully by setting free a silly
little yappy dog and transitions through an episode of wolves and graveyards to
the far darker themes of the later chapters…though always with touches of
light, usually revolving around making animals happy. One of the good things
about trophies and achievements is that a game like this, full of sweet little
touches, can guide you to seeing the scenes put in just for fun, and several of
them are very rewarding – and one pretty heart-wrenching. If you’ve seen it,
I’m pretty certain you know which I mean.
The brothers themselves,
despite have Sim-like speech, grow well over the course of the game. The
earnest one learns to be a bit less blinkered (though perhaps to his peril) and
the younger one, who starts out incredibly obnoxious even for a ‘prankster’,
has to mature very fast. The game itself is a pleasure, with simple controls
facilitating some ingenious puzzles, all of which are easily figured out but
often raise a smile with their cleverness. I wasn’t stuck once, but had to
pause to think – and admittedly had to go back for several trophies. And though
it seems like the only way to die at first is to fall from a great height or to
get attacked by something and fall over, but there are some moderately brutal
death scenes here, especially when you first meet the girl and have to escape a
mysterious threat. Gameplay-wise, there were several puzzles that reminded me of
the co-op in Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, but mostly it
reminded me of the old PC puzzle game Gobliiins, another European game
with a medieval setting and lots of creatures from mythology wherein a single
player controls multiple characters so that when they interact they get through
puzzles. This is over 20 years later, though, and things can be done on a more
epic scale – and the grandiose view is something this game does very well.
I would like to have seen
multiple possible endings, though I guess that if there was a statement to be
made, the writer wanted to keep it consistent. Besides, this sort of
downloadable game is generally considered a single unified playing experience
that may be brief but is affecting. It certainly is that, and I will watch with
interest for any sort of follow-up, and beyond a doubt play it through again
sometime that I want to be a little moved.
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