One of our top editors, Eric Layman, first reviewed Brothers at launch. He was really impressed as you can his original review, which serves as a good read leading into my take on the re-release. Brothers is one of those games that probably wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for indie developers and the ability to make compelling experiences with a relatively small budget. As you’ll hear in the Director’s Commentary that is new to this re-release, Josef and the crew at Starbreeze, many of which were just interns or making their first game along with Josef, did not have a lot of money to work with.
The lack of a strong budget was not enough to limit their creativity, though. One of Brothers’ strongest merits is how few times the gameplay mechanics are repeated. A lot of what the brothers do as they traverse this mythical Nordic land in search for a magical elixir to cure their father is only performed once. Sure there are some elements like climbing vines or working levers that are done more than once, but a lot of the set pieces are one-off events. This continual innovation and creativity has the obvious effect of tempering repetition, a design flaw that Josef laments in his Commentary.
What I found so commendable about Brothers as I played through was the simplicity of the story and the gameplay was contrasted beautifully with a variety of emotions. The story begins with a brief cutscene in which we see the brothers’ mother drown in a boating accident just off the shore of the coastal village where they live. The younger brother is still haunted by this because he feels he was responsible for her death. His mourning is interrupted when the older brother calls to him, requesting his help in taking their father, who has fallen severely ill, to the village doctor.
With the father lying on his deathbed, the brothers have to work together to travel far into the neighboring mountains to retrieve an elixir to cure him. The crux of the story is that simple. It’s a testament to both the story-telling and the lack of a budget that the dialog shared between characters is not professionally voice-acted, or even intelligible. Josef describes it as an Arabic-inspired gibberish, since some of the words are Arabic. Yet, you need not understand specifically what they’re saying to fully appreciate the situation they’re in. Situations are often centered around having to work together to traverse a cliff side or escape a big troll, or a variety of other nature and Norse-mythology inspired encounters.
No matter the situation, it’s generally very intuitive and apparent what you’re supposed to do, but this is never presented in a condescending way towards players. The gameplay is similarly straight-forward, with a low bar set for difficulty as Brothers is meant to be more about the journey than the individual game-specific tasks. That said, there are some inconsistencies with the interaction system that can cause some minor immersion hiccups, or at worst, cause you to die during some high-up platforming. Fortunately, checkpoints are close by and load very quickly, and these issues are the exception, not the norm. Furthermore, some camera wrangling and getting accustomed to smoothly controlling the two brothers takes some coordination, but I saw it as more of something unique and slightly challenging than a detriment.
Where Brothers perhaps really shines is in the journey of the two as they proceed further into the story. There is a good mixture of humor, triumph, endearing teamwork, and some very sad moments as well. This is a fairy tale, but not everything is sunny and peaceful. It’s quite a journey, and I think perhaps especially for those of us that have siblings, you’re bound to become invested in these characters and their plight very early on. This emotional investment is “cashed in” at times to potentially great effect, creating some lasting memories that may inspire, induce sadness, or both.
Brothers is a solid game overall, but this re-release is a little bit disappointing. Note that, for what it’s worth, this is not listed as a Definitive or Ultimate Edition, rather it’s just the game with some bonus content added on that’s available from the start screen. There is no graphical upgrade from what I can tell, so the game looks decidedly last-gen in terms of raw technical graphics. But, the outstanding artwork still looks great, making this a visually stimulating and satisfying game despite the resolution and curiously blurry textures that appear at times. There is also a lot of minor clipping issues, but it’s nothing that you can’t forgive.
The extra content in this re-release is three-fold: a forty-three piece concept/art gallery with lots of sketches from Josef, the nineteen track score, and the director’s commentary which is about an hour long and well worth the time. The commentary track is actually a let’s play video of Josef playing through the game (with significant chunks cut out of course, hence the runtime). You see the game in full screen and hear Josef talking with captions, although his English is very good. This was the first time he had played the game in about a year he says, and offers a lot of interesting memories and insights into the development of it. He also shows you several Trophy locations and explains the “short short stories” behind these, bugs they had to deal with, ideas they had to cut out, and lots of other interesting info.
With that, let’s head to the summary…
