Brothers: A Tale Of Two Sons Remake Review – A Tale Of Two Games

I missed Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons when it first launched in 2013 for the same reason I missed The Last of Us and BioShock Infinite. I wasn’t playing anything, focused instead on making my way through college. When I got back into games after graduation, I worked through the others, but for some reason never picked up Starbreeze’s indie hit. Brothers was a game I often heard mentioned on podcasts, but outside of a brief ten minute cloud-based session on PlayStation Now, it was one I never got around to playing.

That was a mistake that I’ve now rectified. This week, the single-player co-op game (more on that seeming contradiction in a bit) that set writer-director Josef Fares on his path out of the Swedish film industry and into his own unique lane of multiplayer gaming, has been revamped for modern consoles and PC by developer Avantgarden (previously Ovonsonico). If you enjoyed Fares’ later work at the company he founded, Hazelight Studios (A Way Out, It Takes Two), Brothers is the seed that would grow into those greats. But it’s also a full-fledged work on its own.

In Brothers, you play as Naia (the Big Brother) and Naiee (the Little Brother), elder and younger sons of a couple beset by misfortune. As the game begins, Naiee is mourning his mother at her cliffside tombstone, and in a flashback we see him helplessly watch her drown at sea. Their father isn’t doing much better, languishing from an unidentified illness. That mysterious ailment sets the game in motion, as a local healer points the brothers to a mystical tree that may be able to heal him.

The narrative is mostly told visually and through each new mechanic, as Naia and Naiee speak to each other in a made-up language. This is the game’s least successful choice. The brothers’ story is presented as grounded and emotional, but it’s hard to take their heartfelt conversations seriously when they aren’t actually saying anything. Other mechanics that result from this are better, like Naia and Naiee having distinct nonverbal interactions with people they encounter on their journey. While traveling through a rural village, the stoic older brother can stop to show an old lady a picture of their destination in hopes of getting directions. But interact with her as the goofy younger brother, and he’ll grab her chair and rock her back and forth as she laughs. It’s good, unshowy characterization through action.

Dual protagonists weren’t new in 2013, which also saw the release of Grand Theft Auto 5 (which upped the ante with three player characters). But Brothers’ interesting twist is that you control Naia and Naiee at the same time, with Naia mapped to the left stick and Naiee to the right. This is a little difficult at first, but the game slowly acclimates you to the controls. First, you push a wheelbarrow together, one brother in front, one in back. But there are also activities that only one can do, like Naia pulling a heavy switch and Naiee squeezing between narrow bars. And when there are the moments that you need to control both brothers simultaneously — like when you’re fighting a late-game boss that requires both brothers to work in tandem — the game has taught you well enough that it doesn’t feel overwhelming.

One moment that I particularly loved finds Naia and Naiee bound together with a rope. As they climb along the exterior of an old, ruined, building, each brother uses the other as an anchor, as they swing from one handhold to the next, then the other brother takes their turn doing the same. Another has the brothers flying through a gorge on a glider, shifting right and left to steer. A bit in a rowboat has you alternate between the right and left sticks to control the right and left paddles. Like many of the best games, Brothers explores a mechanical idea until it isn’t interesting anymore, then moves onto something else you can do with its single-player co-op concept.

Outside of dual-wielding the siblings, the game’s control scheme is pretty simple. You have an all-purpose interact trigger on the side of the controller that corresponds to each brother. You might use this to sit on a bench, pick up a basketball, or hang from a ledge. And, you can rotate the camera with the shoulder buttons. That’s about it, which makes the game feel a little simplistic at times if you tackle the campaign in co-op with another player.

If you haven’t played Brothers since 2013, the other new thing you’ll notice is, obviously, the graphical overhaul. The game had a more simple, flat look in the original iteration. Many indie games from around the same time used basic polygonal graphics as a stylistic choice, but Brothers kinda just looked like a PS2 game. The remake brings it up to more modern standards — you can count the individual hairs on the brothers’ heads where there used to just be blocks of yellow and brown — but doesn’t seem to do much more. I looked up a guide at one point, as the increased detail can make the game more difficult to parse, and also compared the remake to the original via walkthrough multiple times.

Level design seems to be identical, but cutscenes have been revamped significantly. The opening flashback, for example, is much more immediate and visceral, with tight angles on Naiee’s face as the violent storm rages around him. Some quality-of-life improvements that you might expect, like the option to skip cutscenes before a boss fight, are nowhere to be found.

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Shortcomings aside, Brothers delivers on what I really want from a game like this. When I play something with a focus on a unique mechanical hook, my primary hope is that it will explore its ideas to the fullest, finding all the nooks and crannies at the edges, and shining a light into them until we can begin to understand its shape in its totality. Brothers doesn’t quite achieve that high standard — maybe if it was a few hours longer — but it still has plenty of moments that made me think, “That’s really cool. I’ve never seen that in a game.”

Brothers isn’t perfect. Its blend of serious tone and incomprehensible delivery doesn’t fully work, and its characters (especially a female character introduced late in the game) are more archetypes than believable people. However, the remake’s improved presentation of the original’s unique gameplay make it well worth experiencing. Even if, like me, you’re a decade late to the party.

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons Remake

Reviewed on PS5.

Pros

• Enthusiastically explores its unique concept (almost) to the fullest.
• Onboards new players to its control scheme slowly and surely.
• Graphical overhaul replaces the original’s aesthetic that was dated in 2013.

Cons

• Serious story is in conflict with goofy made-up language.
• The inability to skip cutscenes before boss fights is frustratingly retrograde.