Brothers - A Tale of Two Sons
Moderate overall intensityWhat's in it
The brothers face hostile figures, wolves and a monstrous spider; injury and blood are shown but combat is stylized and there is no lingering close-up gore from the player's own hand.
The story centers on a drowned mother, a dying father and the death of the older brother, all shown on screen with open grief.
A dark cave sequence features a monstrous spider that hunts and tries to devour the two brothers.
A man is shown attempting to take his own life at a high ledge, and the brothers physically pull him back to safety.
The brothers cross a battlefield strewn with the corpses of slain giants and blood.
The brothers fend off and kill attacking wolves as ordinary gameplay during the journey.
A young woman flirts with and seduces the older brother; nothing sexual is shown and the game has no spoken words, only invented gibberish.
Who can reach your kid
What it is
In Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, a brief narrative-led puzzle adventure, the player guides two boys simultaneously, assigning one sibling to each analog stick as the pair crosses a fairytale realm in search of medicine for their ailing father. The focus falls on teamwork and puzzles built into the surroundings, with fighting largely absent; because every character speaks a made-up nonsense tongue, meaning comes across through movement and what happens on screen instead of words. Grim material runs through it: the pair walk past a field strewn with slain giants and blood, defend themselves against wolves and a huge spider whose attack leaves the older sibling with a fatal injury, discover a man who has taken his own life by hanging following the loss of his family to fire, and encounter a young woman who lures the elder boy in only to turn on the two of them. Loss and mourning bracket the entire trip, opening with a mother lost to drowning and closing with the older boy's death as the tale nears its finish.
How it's framed
Rather than treating its bloodshed and sorrow as spectacle, the title casts them as the burden carried through a fairytale mission; harm is what the siblings suffer or observe, and the feeling at its center is devotion to family alongside what it takes to rescue someone dear. Acts of cruelty bring no reward, and its bleakest points, an attempt at suicide, a death, a mourning child, are shown with restraint, woven into the tragedy the narrative tells.
Details
- Developer
- Starbreeze Studios AB
- Publisher
- 505 Games
- Released
- 3 Sep, 2013
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