Happy Monday, folks, and welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread! Between an upcoming birthday and a project that’s been going very well, I’m in high spirits.
On Tuesday, I played Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons to completion. Pretty great game, even if I had some issues with one aspect of its controls, but it’s the main aspect that matters: this is a game where you control two characters, and instead of jumping between them you control them both at the same time. Older brother is on the left stick and younger brother is on the right. It’s deceptively intuitive and extremely challenging all at once, and it creates an interesting kind of skill to learn and master over the two and a half to three hours it takes to play the game. Brothers’ best feature is that it puts this interesting gimmick at the center, to the point where its best emotional beats come purely through the gameplay. Since you’re always with them.
It’s a very different kind of take on this idea—call it “one-person co-op” or what have you—than what I associate with the concept, the Mario & Luigi games. In those, it’s very much a gimmick; you effectively control Mario except for the times when you switch to Luigi or have to use them both in a quick time event. This has historically left me cold, which is strange for a Mario game, and alongside the sub-series’ other issues it boils down to the fact that it feels more like a tool of branding. You know, it’s not a Mario platformer, and it’s not the good Mario RPG franchise, so it has to have this to distinguish itself. I assume this more than any other header will result in angry comments.
But back to Brothers. It’s an ungainly system, but there’s also a sense to it and it ties into things from puzzles to movement to the relationship at the core of the game. Not surprising I found this the most interesting part of the game. Which makes me interested in seeing other takes on this, not, say, jumping from Claire to Moira in Resident Evil: Revelations 2 (which I guess is what Mario & Luigi is closer to anyway) or finagling a complex AI character like in The Last Guardian. This “one-person co-op” seems interesting, and I’ve become interested in it and whether the idea has been explored outside of Brothers developer Starbreeze Studios. So I guess that’s my first prompt of 2024, not anything about the year or where we’re going. Just have you ever experienced this kind of game, how did you take to it, what would you like to see from it, and what you think it could do if expanded upon. Just a nice, simply prompt.
And as always, what did you play this weekend? I mean, I played a ton. I’m just a video game playing machine by this point.