I honestly don't remember how long ago I bought this game. I just know I couldn't play it properly until I got a controller. I spent a little two much time trying to get my PS3 controller to work on my PC before I finally gave up and just went out and bought an Xbox controller that worked instantly.
I'm not sure what to label the game exactly, but its mostly a puzzle game with a bit of platforming and a bit of adventuring. It was developed by Star Breeze and published by 505 Games. Its original release saw it come out on the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360, but there actually should be a second push at the end of 2015 with the game coming out on the current generation of consoles as well as Andriod and iOS mobile devices. I picked the game up a while ago on my PC to play it through Steam as you might have guessed from what I was talking about earlier.
The game was pretty short so its difficult for me to break it apart and try and isolate its different parts and analyze them individually without losing something about the game itself. I guess the most easily removed part would be the sound design and graphics. The game to me looked pretty well done, the characters in the game both primary and secondary were rendered with some very nice detail and thanks to the developers choosing to go with a soft and rounded cartoony feel to the game instead of a realistic one the game will not only age well but it will also causes the game to have a nice cutesy feel about it until the blood and gore kick in. The sound design seemed OK to me, the music matched the food in the game and the sound effects were well done. But, I actually thought the game had just used gibberish noises for the language being spoken in the game which was apparently incorrect as after beating the game I found out the noises the two main characters weren't just making noises they were actually calling each other by name. With the two character being called Naia and Naiee, can you really blame for thinking it was just gibberish?
The story and the mechanics are hard to separate from one another though as the developers had woven them together quite well. As the game can only really be played correctly on a controller the experience was even crafted to match that method of input. Each brother, in their adventure to get medicine to help their father recover from illness, is controlled using a single analog stick and its matching button on the back of the controller. This made for a couple of awkward moments at the start but after a while it became second nature moving them around and pulling off action simultaneously. The two brothers having different personalities and ages were given different abilities based on that which made for some interesting puzzles and achievement hunting to get the right action to happen by using the right brother at the same time. This did mean though that some of the puzzles were almost instantly solvable at a glance as you could tell which brother would be able to pull that specific task off, but I didn't mind to much. What really hit home for me was a moment near the end of the game where the entire mechanics of the game were used to drive a very strong and emotional point home and that really capped the experience for me taking it from a great to a good experience in both a mechanical and narrative sense. I can't really mention anymore without ruining the game so I will leave it at that.
Brothers was I game I played without to many expectations. I actually played it since I assumed it would be an easy game to grab some achievements in and get my total percentage up. As I played it though its colorful world sucked me in and got me interested in what was going on. From there the manner in which the mechanics and story were interwoven just had me hooked and kept me going past those punches in the emotions that the game hit me with. I definitely recommend this game, its short, its sweet and its an actual example of how to weave narrative and game design together unlike some other rubbish games I can actually think of (Cough, Braid, Cough).
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