A touching story and a unique concept make Brothers well worth checking out
On top of being a thoroughly enjoyable and charming experience, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons feels like a demo for an interesting concept: single-player co-op. A concept that may sound too messy to work, but an excellent control scheme allows it to work. A highlight of this year’s somewhat smaller “Summer of Arcade” line-up Brothers offers a touching story delivered in a very unique way for only $15, almost sounds too good to be true.
The whole concept of this game is that you control two characters referred to only as “big brother” and “little brother”. Each brother is controlled with a different joystick (the Steam version is plastered with warnings of a recommended controller and you shouldn't take that lightly) as you progress through puzzle and platforming segments that, obviously, involve simultaneous actions. Brother’s story is a short but touching tale of two brothers who take it upon themselves to find the cure for their father’s life-threatening sickness. In a very Lord of the Rings fashion the desired location is a really fucking long way away and the only way to get there is to walk. Aside from the unique control scheme, what gives Brothers its own charm is that nobody speaks any intelligible dialogue, or at least not English (may well be Japanese..?). So the interaction between the two brothers is done through primitive caveman-like grunting and pointing. Although it may sound quite odd at first that there isn't any dialogue and you’re probably thinking that you're not going to have a clue what anyone is trying to say. Thankfully, you’d be wrong. The game does a pretty great job of making things clear, which pretty much comes down to the game never giving you a situation that you can’t figure out yourself.
As previously mentioned the aim of Brothers is to get to the apparently extremely rare cure for your father, so the aim of gameplay is simply to make progress. Which, in this case, is barred by two-man puzzles and plenty of platforming. Oh, and a freaky spider-lady thing. The focus of all aspects of gameplay is on using both characters for everything, be it pulling levers, evading rowdy dogs, or just getting across some deep water. The gameplay is relatively simple, with most of the puzzles simply requiring two levers to be pulled or one brother using his own personal traits (little brother is small and able to fit through small gaps, for example, whilst big brother is stronger and capable of pulling bigger lever). In some parts the real puzzle isn’t so much the what as much as the how, for example how exactly are you going to manoeuvre this unusually large pipe around these tight corners? There are some really fun and creative sections that have you pilot a hand glider using the weight of each brother to control its angle and direction or row a boat controlling each paddle separately. Its segments like these that make me say that Brothers provides an excellent demo for an interesting and incredibly fun concept that I hope is used in other games.
The world of Brothers is strikingly gorgeous, with art style trumping technical feats here. Sweeping valleys offer beautiful panoramic views that show off how great this game looks. Its colourful and lively art style offers clean designs for some outstanding environments. The high quality sound design of Brothers also deserves mentioning: the dialogue (real or not) has a quirky charm that suits the art style and the soundtrack is a spectacular feat. Unfortunately, however, I did run into a couple of game-breaking bugs and experienced a few crashes. The game ran at a consistent 60 fps with the frame rate occasionally dipping below 30, and although the game does have fairly low minimum requirements it seems a little lazy that the only graphics options available are resolution, V-sync, and brightness. This aspect of the PC port, along with the controls, certainly feels a little lazy and I definitely would have liked to have seen more than the bare minimum settings.
I cannot stress this enough: use a god damn controller, you’ll need one. As it turns out controlling multiple people with a keyboard becomes an extremely clumsy affair when you throw in trying to interact with things at the same time. If you don’t have a controller then I’d honestly hesitate to buy this on PC because the clumsiness of the controls does actually significantly take away from the experience.
Overall, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is an incredible must-play, yet unfortunately short, experience that exercises an interesting and well-executed concept. The PC port is let down by a few issues but Brothers is still one of the best games I’ve played this year.
