Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (PC) (2013)

20150110:
I just put about two hours and fifty minutes to play and finish this game. Throughout the game, I definitely praised it for its stunning visuals and its powerful soundtrack. At times, playing Brothers - A Tale of Two Sons felt more like watching a movie.

The game's puzzles were decent, perhaps hovering around the difficulty of puzzles in standard action-adventure games like The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time or Beyond Good & Evil. I would, however, turn the focus back to the game's visuals and soundtrack, which alone are more than enough reason to play the game.

Of course, the game also has a powerful story with an ending that just blew me away with its execution. Without giving anything away, the story delivers the "Book Ends" trope (tvtropes.org). The three things that originally came to my mind when I thought of the "Book Ends" trope were puzzle platformer Limbo, television series LOST, and 3D platformer Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.

Getting back to the game, I would also say that the end was so shocking and good that I kept thinking thoughts like "Is this for reals?" and "Oh okay, that makes sense."

Overall, this game certainly deserves its positive reviews and ratings. I would highly recommend this game to anybody who has a computer that can run it smoothly.

Remark: I have yet to try how the game feels with a keyboard; however, I imagine that playing the game with a keyboard will be slightly less natural than playing the game with a controller.

Second remark: Having only achieved six of twelve achievements on my first run, I'll definitely have to play this game again some day. It helps that its a short game.

Third remark: The game has a checkpoint/auto-save system. While this is generally good, it would be most unfortunate if a bug occurred and the only choice was to start over. For this reason, I would personally favor a multi-slot save/auto-save system in game design, as found in Portal and Half-Life.

Steam Game Time: 2.9 hours (cumulative game time)

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20231219:
Today I revisit the game while looking to complete the remaining six achievements:
Call of the giants "You sounded a giant horn."
A sad tune "You made someone feel better."
Whale Song "You practised singing."
Falling star "Make a wish."
Take a Break "You Took a break from adventuring."
Love Birds "You re-united the two love birds."

Gameplay Log:
I stopped the game to try and fix the controller (left y-axis was inverted). In my case, simply "Enable Steam Input" fixed both that issue and my B and A buttons being reversed.
I got to the statue and waited. But apparently I did it with the Big Brother, and tried it with both. Doing it with the Little Brother, however, is what it takes to unlock the achievement.
A sad tune. I did the first part of this automatically (save the man) but I had to read the second part in a guide otherwise I would have missed completion of the achievement.
Love Birds. I felt like the telescope was key to achievement, I could have sworn I saw a bird cage in the tower, but I had started the gliding and restarted checkpoint. I looked at the guide and sure enough the telescope would help trigger the Love Birds achievement, but not at all in the location I thought.
Call of the giants. Looking for a giant horn makes this one straightforward.
Whale Song. There's a chance I would have found this without the guide, but I can also see how one would miss it. I've been sitting on all the benches throughout the game, but this bench is located just beyond a saw which players would naturally stop to take to progress the story, thereby missing this bench. This woman jumped across a wide gap... she can't be human.
I had forgotten that this woman was a monster.
I did not like this boss battle. Dismemberment of the legs just seems strange.
I had forgotten that the older brother died. While there is a small plot point to be gained in that the little brother was able to do some tasks on his own, it did not seem within the boundaries of the story for us to expect the older brother's death.
Completed at 6.1 hours total (so about 3.2 hours for the run)
Finished the final missing achievement by restarting Chapter 1. Had to rewatch the cutscene with no way to skip.

Overall, while I previously gave this game the top 25 tag, I did not like the story much this time through. A lot of the visuals were still great and some of the interactions were neat. There were various times throughout the game where the strengths of the two brothers was just a bit more than I could believe. I do think it would be reasonable for them to be strong - they seem to live the life of farmhands of some sort. But again, I just felt there were portions in the game where their strength exceeded my believability.

Steam Game Time: 6.2 hours (cumulative game time) / 3.3 hours (session game time)

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Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (PC) (2013)

Relevant Links:
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (Wikipedia.org)
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (PC) (MetaCritic.com)
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (Steam Store Page)