Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons

This post contains some massive spoilers about the game. Read no further if you haven't played it yet and don't want anything revealed beforehand.

I didn't go into Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons with many expectations. I'd heard it was a decent puzzle platformer with a unique control scheme that allowed a single player to simultaneously control two characters on screen. And that was about it. What I didn't expect at all was that it would be the most emotionally affecting game I think I've played to date.

The fable-ish, storybook quality of both the narrative and the images and characters was charming enough. The world is colorful and pleasing to look at but I was always keenly aware of the darkness underneath, the way a good fable unfolds. There were a few points when the cover of that darkness was removed which forced me to focus on the darkness. I won't mention them all here but in one instance, the scene involves the brothers rescuing a man from hanging himself. Through cooperation, they return a music-box to his family that was killed in a recent house fire, their charred remains covered next to the smoldering ruins by a blanket. You can even see the blackened feminine legs and small childish feet poking out from underneath. Like I said, dark.

In happier terms, the way the brothers would interact with each other and the world around them in different was interesting. Each of them would have different reactions to places and characters in the game. There were some heartwarming moments when you get to bask in the glow of satisfaction, knowing that you'd just reunited a loving troll couple and returned a mother sea turtles babies to the safety of her bosom.

But the truly great part of this game, what makes it rise above many others I've played, in terms of making me feel emotions was that it incorporated that feeling directly into the mechanics of the how the game works, not just inserting it with a few cutscenes, like most games I've played have done. Because the brothers have to work together, the older one on the left stick and the younger one on the right, you begin to associate those sticks to each boy. Just before the brothers reach their final destination, the tree that contains the restorative potion that will revive their father from his sickness, the older brother receives a fatal injury. Playing only as the younger brother, you race to the top of the tree, hoping that the potion might also revive your older brother. But when you return with the potion, you discover your older brother is dead.

Once the  cutscene is over, the game forces you to bury your older brother in the grave that you dig for him. It's part of the level and you don't get to just sit and watch. You have to perform the act. Then, in another cutscene, you are whisked back home through most of the vistas that you just traversed with your now-deceased brother in happiness, to return with the potion to your father. At the beginning, the game opened with a cutscene that shows the younger brother in a flashback unable to save his mother from drowning. The older brother helps the younger brother through all of the swimming portions of the game by carrying him on his back. Now at home again, alone as the younger brother, you have to swim across the same deep pond that your older brother once helped you across.

It was at this point that I realized that my left thumb ached to be able to use the older brother's left stick to use the younger one. And it was also that moment that I realized that the older brother's controls were there to help him. If I just tried to make the younger brother swim with the right side controls, he would shake his head and refuse. But by pressing the action button of the older brother, the controller shaking in my hand, the memory of his older brother pushes the younger brother through obstacles that he used to need his older brother to traverse. It seems like such a small thing, but it was that climactic moment that I felt more connected to these two characters than any other character in any other game I'd ever played.

Maybe it's because I'm older. Maybe it's because I now have two sons of my own. I don't know. But those final moments of this game spoke to me more than any of the hundreds of games I've played in my lifetime. Roger Ebert once said that a game had never and would never be able to make someone cry. If only he'd lived to see this game, he may have retracted his statement. Until now, I doubted him but only out of gut instinct, knowing that someday I game probably would maybe, just maybe, make me cry. Now that Brothers has done it, not just with a cutscene but making me my thumb ache from the absence of a character, there's no question that he was wrong.