It's just a shame that the gameplay doesn't evolve in kind. "Show, don't tell," is the adage that screenwriters live by, and Brothers adapts it to the interactive realm beautifully.īrothers settles into a very gentle rhythm early on and never really deviates from it The younger and more mischievous of the pair will peer inside, lean back and let fly with a big gob of spit into the inky depths.
If the older brother interacts with an old well, he'll examine it and be done. Everyone speaks in a nonsense language not dissimilar to The Sims' expressive burbling, so this really is a game where actions speak louder than words. Particularly impressive is how the game lets the personality of the brothers emerge through movement. To begin with, the tone is light and fun, encouraging you to explore and fool around. From the bucolic charm of the boys' home village to the farmland beyond, and on through mountains, forests, caves, rivers and snow, you guide them both to their destiny. The brothers are sent to retrieve the only thing that will cure their ailing father, and it's this journey that forms the basis of the rest of the game. They all involve quirky optional interactions as you travel along.Īnd what follows is a quest that could be pulled from Grimm's Fairy Tales. Cleverly, none of the game's Achievements come from the main story. It's like rubbing your head and patting your stomach, but it forces you to immediately grasp the idea that you'll need to work together to survive what follows. It takes some getting used to, and introducing it by forcing the player to co-ordinate both brothers while pushing and pulling a cart is a pretty bold move. You control both brothers at the same time, with the left stick and trigger moving the elder brother and making him interact with objects, while the same controls on the right manipulate the younger of the two. This task also introduces us to the game's most eye-catching innovation: it's a single-player co-op game. We see them lose their mother in the opening scene, and then skip forward to them wheeling their sick father to the local doctor. Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons puts the player in control of two nameless siblings, living by the sea in a quaint and gently fantastical kingdom.
It's also a moment that's very difficult to talk about, as it comes very close to the end of Starbreeze's compact adventure, and its details are tangled in potential spoilers. It's one of those moments, the ones you'll remember in years to come, a moment of revelation where you suddenly see how various threads of the game have woven together. There's one moment that stands out above all the others, though. Brothers is a game of moments: moments of quiet beauty, moments of joyful levity, moments of cloying dread.
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