![\"Brothers](\"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/brothers_together.jpg\")
<\/a>Then there is the camera.\u00a0 The camera\u2019s more like a suggestion than anything else.\u00a0 Sometimes, you can swing it around the pair of brothers with no problems.\u00a0 Sometimes, the film maker decided this was the best set of angles for the game to be played in and that was all you were getting, and these moments \u2013 where the camera fails you \u2013 they\u2019re just unpleasant.<\/p>\n
This ties into another mechanic:\u00a0 the brothers can\u2019t be separated very far before the camera stops trying to zoom out.\u00a0 This is incredibly thematic [and we\u2019ll talk about why in a moment] but also a problem.\u00a0 I once got both brothers so stuck that I had to reload a save point.<\/p>\n
The design also calls for a no-holds-barred weird difficulty curve.\u00a0 The game is largely gentle and easy to get through, but some sections just have pits of instant death.\u00a0 Touch the side of a mountain while you\u2019re flying on a glider?\u00a0 Great, you get to start that section again because your giant hit box whacked the hit box of the mountain.\u00a0 Fall because you didn\u2019t get the control scheme right?\u00a0 You\u2019re starting at the beginning of that section for your troubles.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s problematic.<\/p>\n But the worst sin here is how sometimes-gamey Brothers feels.<\/p>\n For most of the run-time of the game you are lost to the beauty of the graphics, mesmerized by the wonderful soundtrack and awed by the sheer simplicity of the control method.<\/p>\n So it\u2019s sad when all of that grinds to a halt as soon as there\u2019s a boss battle, because now, suddenly, it\u2019s apparent that you\u2019re playing a game.<\/p>\n These little things take what would have been an amazing experience and dial it back a tiny bit.\u00a0 They\u2019re not game-ending problems, but they certainly are lessons that this studio [and this designer] can learn from, because really, he gets it mostly right otherwise.\u00a0 And how.<\/p>\n In Brothers, you control a pair of young men \u2013 a blonde-haired lad and an older, brown-haired youth.\u00a0 They each have very distinct personalities and certainly see the world quite differently from one another.\u00a0 The trick is, you control both of them with the pair of analogue sticks on your controller.\u00a0 The left stick is the older brother and the right stick is the younger.\u00a0 From this thematic whole, the game builds a series of related puzzles:\u00a0 you can\u2019t do anything with just one brother.\u00a0 Both have to be present for anything to work.<\/p>\n Find a gate?\u00a0 Both brothers have to push the gate open to advance.\u00a0 Is there a ledge that\u2019s too high for the brothers?\u00a0 First you need to use big brother to squat, then you need little brother to climb on big brother\u2019s hands and be lifted.\u00a0 All of this happens with just the twin sticks on your controller and your trigger buttons.\u00a0 Bumper buttons for camera rotation.\u00a0 The control method is genius, because it ties the WHOLE game together.\u00a0 The brothers are a unit.\u00a0 Your controller is a unit.\u00a0 You cannot physically move them without mastering the control scheme.<\/p>\n And why are you having this adventure?\u00a0 Well, your father got sick and the healer knows that the only cure lies in healing water that can only be found in a Great Tree.<\/p>\n The story \u2013 such as it is \u2013 is very simple and follows some quite visual cues, because, of course, no one in this game talks English.\u00a0 So we interpret their actions through the way they point and the stances they take and the situations they find themselves in.\u00a0 Each new revelation about the world helping us to fill in gaps as we go along, but leaving us with some questions at the end:\u00a0 there are giants.\u00a0 Does that make us the small interlopers?\u00a0 Were they here first?\u00a0 There\u2019s a griffin that crops up time and again.\u00a0 Is it always the same griffin?\u00a0 Or is it a different one each time?\u00a0 How big is the griffin population, anyway?<\/p>\n This, really, is why you\u2019re here, because the experience of the story is so very visceral.\u00a0 In the end, the emotional rollercoaster pays off in a way that greater games have tried to aim for and failed at.<\/p>\n So Brothers, for all its problems, is a flawed masterpiece.<\/p>\n You will be left winded by the ending even if you had to suffer some tiny frustrations getting there.<\/p>\n Because Brothers is an experience and I can wholeheartedly recommend it.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>
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