![]() The second game is Papers, Please, a bare 30 meg download on Steam that turned out to be one of the most strangely absorbing experiences I've had with indie games lately, and like a mysterious rash, I've been taking every opportunity to get people to look at it. So in summary, Brothers holds the interest well enough while it lasts but quickly fades once consumed like a cheesy wotsit shaped like a willy. So the emotional stuff feels a bit clumsy: no time for niceties, just gouge that chest cavity open and jam away at the heartstrings like a heavy metal guitarist whose hands have gone to sleep. I'd have like to known why their dad was so fucking great that he was worth pulling a Saving Private Ryan for! All I saw him do was cough a lot and teach the older boy fishing in one brief flashback when either of them looked into it. ![]() Little Brother is the only character who gets any fleshing out. The game's so short and moves along so fast that I just didn't feel invested. The strength lies in the storytelling which is mostly visuals, as the characters can only communicate in off-brand, Team Ico gibberish and occasional grief-racked sobs.īrothers is a game of strung together moments, some very effective moments in well-designed environments, but they come and go quicker than an abusive foster parent's sex partners and I found the bridging narrative lacking. Sometimes there are things reminiscent of the old Gobliiins adventure games, where the puzzle is which brother to interact with the things with, but for the most part, the core gameplay is "keep moving forward". You pull one lever then the other, it's not exactly Zork Nemesis. ![]() Thank Christ there's no combat, it would've been like being Professor Stephen Hawking's tennis coach.īut without combat, what the hell is there? Well, there's puzzles, although a few exceptions these are puzzles in the action-adventure game sense, meaning not puzzles at all. This is regardless of where the brothers are in relation to each other so half the challenge is just figuring out how to navigate the path without wheeling round smashing into walls and furniture like the drunken abusive foster parent that inevitably lies in their future. The gameplay is best described as single-player co-op, and I know that sounds like saying "I'm not gay, I only suck off pantomime dames ," but it is! You control Pissy McCornflakes with the left analog stick and left trigger, and Custardhead Drownedhismum with the right. It's like a very very short NeverEnding Story, ironically. And the mum died Ni No Kuni style 'cause the younger brother drowned her or something and presumably the dad got ill from the older kid pissing in his cornflakes every morning, so it falls to the two boys to go to a perilous mission across the land to the magical tree where can be found the cure, passing through an odyssey of set-pieces and picture postcard fantasy environments with seemingly no relationship towards each other whatsoever. So obviously their mum's dead and their dad's dying from the old classic "unspecific persistent cough" disease. Cus-Blah has long had an affinity for games about small children with big heads exploring scary worlds, and Brothers is kind of overdoing it with two of the little buggers, an older stronger one and a younger nimbler one who looks like time froze just as a water balloon full of custard was thrown at the back of his head.īut it wouldn't be a small child big-head XBLA game unless shit got real bleak real fucking fast. But this week saw two interesting new downloadable releases that I'd like to discuss for you now.įirst up, the slightly redundantly named Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, part of the usual XBox Live Summer of Arcade flappery. It's like watching people on a train carriage shifting from a fat bloke in the middle sitting cupping himself with his legs wide open.Ĭonsequently, the middle of this year has had a fairly fruitful harvest of risky new IP, some of which have taken more risks like, say, a bullet to the head. But now Christmas is the celebration of our lord and saviour Call of Duty, and everyone who doesn't want to try and compete shifts to post-Christmas or pre-Christmas or pre- pre-Christmas. ![]() It used to be so straight forward: Good shit comes out at Christmas because the kids would want something to do after Christmas dinner once they've turned into lolloping gravy balloons. The summer game drought period is kind of like the space between the legs of an attractive potential sex partner as you tell her your opinions on Japanese animation, in that it seems to be getting increasingly narrow and you could probably be having more fun with it than you currently are. This week, Zero Punctuation reviews Papers, Please and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons.
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