(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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