Brothers: A Tale Of Two Sons is such a landmark title in 2013. It showed up in a year filled with big blockbuster releases that even an indie game with a brilliant gameplay hook with an emotional story can make up for its simple, almost cartoony presentation. It launched a game-making career for movie director Josef Fares, now at Hazelight making more inventive compulsory co-op games.
Now more than a decade later, a remake of Brothers is coming out, rather soon. This time developed by Avantgarden (previously Ovosonico, of Murasaki Baby and Last Day Of June fame), the remake attempts to be faithfully recreate the magic of the original- beat-by-beat, but now with a different art style powered by Unreal Engine 5.
After playing an hour (which is to say a good chunk of the game- it’s a pretty short experience), I came away impressed how the gameplay and story has held up. Though I am still unsold on the new art style.
First off, let me say this: the gameplay is a brilliant use of a game. You control each of the two brothers on either end of the controller. It’s not the first game to do so- FromSoftware’s The Adventures Of Cookie & Cream predates Brothers by more than 10 years. But it’s still one of the most successful implementations of controlling two independent characters on one controller.
PC players will be glad to know that the remake will feature keyboard support- WASD for big brother and arrow keys for little brother- unlike the original release.
The platforming, puzzles and platforming puzzles you do in Brothers still holds up today. It’s fun to rack the brain to remembering which side of the analog stick controls who and make sure they’re walking in the right direction. The puzzles where the brothers have to work together to move objects- which requires one brother to input another direction opposite to the other brother, are good fun. In no way I find them bothersome.
And yes, the gameplay is beat-for-beat the same. And yes, the many, many benches overlooking nice vistas are still there as well as the silly little interactions the brothers have with the world.
While the gameplay is all well and good, I still have mixed feelings on the new art style. The remake attempts to hi-res the game with more detailed textures and more realistic shading on the characters. In some places it looks good- the village you visit early in the game looks lively still and the non-human characters look great with this realistic art style. But the humans look… off. Uncanny. Maybe it’s the eyes, or the animations are a bit too stilted. Or maybe the preview build isn’t optimised for lower-spec PCs just yet.
The remake also changes up the lighting a bit, and in some scenes it’s for the better (the mines aren’t as dim and you can see more details in them) and some I have mixed feelings of (the intro sequence is now set to dusk, with a more orange-y light that does fit the tone of the story but also makes most of the details to drown out).
With the game releasing later this month, I’m not sure how much the final game will change when compared to the preview build I had hands-on with. However, as you see in the screenshots here, it looks more favourable than what I saw when playing the preview build. It actually looks good.
Hopefully what we will see in the final release has a lot more polish put onto the graphics, because that’s supposed to be the big selling point for a remake. And I’m not really sold just yet.
Still, it’s good to see that a game with “Remake” on the title living up to being a faithful remake. For those that didn’t play the original Brothers, Brothers : A Tale Of Two Sons should be an experience worth going through, either solo or with a partner.
Brothers: A Tale Of Two Sons will be out on February 28 on PS5, PC (Steam) and Xbox Series X|S.
Played on PC. Preview key provided by publisher 505 Games.