This review contains spoilers, click expand to view.
Brothers is one of those games that gives the player a detailed visual feast but that leaves an essentially empty experience after finishing. Many reviewers have compared Brothers to the 2012 hit Journey, which is one of the reasons I was interested in playing this. However, barring use of a made-up language for the characters and some uncannily similar music scoring in the early parts of the game; I have to disagree and say that this is absolutely nothing like Journey in terms of story content, design, character, game play or even emotional response.
Based in a Brothers Grimm type of fairy story world; two brothers travel together encountering various creatures and people to find a magical cure for their father's illness. They sometimes help others, or at least interfere with others' lives, through side-quests but the gameplay is going to be a familiar linear experience for anyone used to platformers. There is no free-roaming exploration and for all the details fitted into some environments there is no opportunity to interact with anything that isn't specific to the story line trophies or puzzle-solving.
The puzzles themselves are pitched at a fairly basic level, with the main complexity coming from the control system for the two brothers and timing their individual button and stick movements. It's perfectly possible to get through the game with persistence rather than mastering the controls though.
Visually this is a rich, detailed and involving environment. It's not without some clunkiness in shaders, landscape and character design, but mostly it is a truly absorbing world going from homely villages to the wild mountains and far away ice lands. It really does feel like a gradually shifting and changing world. Which is why I've scored this as a five, because it's masterful in world building. I do think there is more than a little inspiration taken from other games though; Final Fantasy IX (The Ilfa tree, anyone?), Lord of the Rings (Mines of Moria) and Harry Potter-style gryphons, giants and castles.
The problems, for me, centre around how the story and characters are handled. It becomes especially disturbing from about the mid-point of the game, until then you have some fairly mild and stereotypical imagery. The turn towards pointless violence and meaningless cruelty is, presumably, meant to be a "modern" take on classic fairy stories. What it actually displays is a stunningly poor understanding of what fairy tales meant to people within their specific contexts. They often included a historically strong example of the morality of the time. In-game this story lacks any morality or commentary whatsoever, it's just violence and cruelty for the sake of moving the story along; until you get to the very end, where the apparent meaning is so undermining of the events that happened I thought the game was one nasty joke.
The choice of a made-up language, and exaggerated body language as cues, means that you have to guess what is going on at points. Everyone's interpretation will be different because there is almost zero discoverable backstory or explanation to the story, characters and their motivations.
***Spoilers start here****
There are so many tropes in this that if you were to make a drinking game out if you wouldn't be able to stand upright after twenty minutes. There's the mother who is dead through drowning before the story starts and the younger son who sees ghost mom and feels guilty he couldn't save her. The ill father who needs a magical McGuffin from the end of the world to get better. Older brother is the sensible, physically strong protector. Younger brother is the physically and mentally immature one. They care about each other. And that's all you find out.
The female characters consist of ghost mom, a troll that wears a dress, make-up, jewellery and who needs rescuing for no reason that is ever explained, despite being twice the size and strength of the two brothers put together. The big villain of the piece? Another "girl" who needs rescuing who turns out to be a were-spider. I called her as a villain a whole thirty minutes before it even reached the boss battle. She cheesily flirts with the older brother, ignores or shouts at the younger brother, shows sudden intelligence, agility, strength and a lack of empathy. Wow, she's the baddie. Who could've guessed?
Older brother dies of his wounds from the were-spider, so here comes over-long and intrusive scene as the music swells and you have nothing but a purely manipulative focus on his grief and sobbing as the younger brother tries to revive the elder and then buries him. In the end; all of this game seems to happen so the younger brother can overcome survivor guilt and, wait for it, face his fear of swimming with the help of two dead relatives! This is the height of storytelling in games as of 2013? If Brothers is supposed to be on a par with the truly innovative and brilliant Journey, then I'm Hideo Kojima!… Expand
Brothers: A Tale of Two SonsYour Score0 out of 10User Score
