Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons Remake [Review]

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons Remake is a game developed by Avantgarden and developed by the soon-to-be-out-of-business 505 Games. This is a remake of an old beloved game from 2013. For the sake of the review, I will be discussing the remake as its own game and its previous incarnation won’t matter in this review.

A Tale of Two Sons is a game about the concept of death and mortality. Dealing with two children searching for a cure for their father’s critical illness, while doing so they come across many different kinds of death. The imagery in this game isn’t any more disturbing than other games with similar concepts so I wouldn’t call this game too gory or anything. In fact, this game is bright and colorful. It looks gorgeous. The game knows it is as well, considering there are benches throughout the game where you can sit and look over the scenery.

I want to preface that I played this game co-op despite the game itself telling me that it is not meant to be played this way. I want to point that out because why would they include an option that they clearly didn’t intend for? And, how is this game not meant to be co-op? It’s literally about two people on a journey together, with two characters. It feels like a slap to the face to say this game isn’t supposed to be co-op and then make the game co-op but do nothing to support this feature. You can use two controllers but you cannot change the controls. So, if you play as the younger brother you are stuck using the right stick to walk around and it’s horrible. We had to change the button mapping on the controller itself to make this game enjoyable as a co-op experience. Speaking of the controls, there are two buttons. The walking stick and the trigger button do literally everything in the game. There are so many buttons that they could have included to make this a more comfortable experience and provide a better control scheme. They could have used both shoulder buttons instead of one or any of the face buttons. Even making one button for grabbing onto things and one button to jump would make the controls so much better.

It was hard for me to immerse myself in this game. As someone who adores world-building and fantasy realms, I like to learn the lore about the world and understand it for myself. I don’t think this game does a good job with it, and this game is all about making you feel something. When trying to have me connect to the characters but I’m too focused on the confusing world it takes me out of the game. The biggest fault for this is that the characters aren’t speaking a real language. You are supposed to gather everything based on pure emotions. This is a really interesting concept, but this falls flat here. If the game is going to try so hard to make the world and language unknown to the player then the world has to instantly make sense without any confusion. But this world raised so many questions for me. There are giants in this game but for some reason, I could not fully comprehend the size difference between the main characters and the giants. It felt so off that it didn’t even feel like I was a tiny person in a giant's castle. Let me explain; at one point you come across a forgotten battlefield filled with dead giants. But it doesn’t feel right. Because where they are doesn’t make sense. Why are the giants in a land that clearly doesn’t support their size? They had a battle in the middle of cliffs and mountains that they would constantly trip over and get stuck in. Why would they not live in an area with giant trees and large flat lands? And something like this must exist because earlier in the game you explore a giant’s bedroom, this room has wooden floorboards big enough for a giant to stand on. This means there are trees big enough to make those wooden planks yet you never see them. So that brings me to the question again, why were the giants there? The game can’t explain this to the player because they’ve locked themselves out with a language barrier. This is not the only time the game made me feel confused like this. The game isn’t clear on what some of the creatures are. Near the end of the game, there are some invisible orc/trolls as to why it was rampaging through some snow town. I care too much about lore to enjoy this game's world-building, it’s a difficult thing for me to just ignore for the sake of the story. If you aren’t someone that cares about things like this then you will have a much more enjoyable experience with this game but unfortunately, that’s not how my mind works.

The world falls flat and takes me away from understanding and connecting to these characters. And them not speaking a real language makes it hard to understand how they even feel about everything. These children do some messed up things throughout this game; killing an orc, mutilating dead giant bodies to climb across them, stealing fake Leonardo De Venchis Flying contraption, also the young boy trying to take a lantern right out of a lady's hand that they are trying to ask for help, and ripping a spider person’s legs off one at a time. I understand that these are necessary actions for these two to get to the cure for their father but if they could talk to the player they could make these scenes as heavy as the game is trying to portray them. But, without any communication, all we see is these kids doing a lot of messed up things to go to a location the player doesn’t even know about.

I personally think this game fell very flat in the things it was trying to portray. The world felt flat and not fleshed out. The characters seemed monotone with no way to communicate with them. The controls had delayed inputs and were constantly fighting us during our playthrough. Anytime I would push a button to interact the character would walk over to something else or out start to conduct an action and then just stop, making it to where I had to keep pushing the button until it wanted to work. These annoying controls made it less enjoyable. I don’t think this game would be very fun by yourself, regardless of what the game itself says about co-op not being the intended way to play. I understand that this game is a remake of a ten-year-old game but like I said, I am not reviewing this game as a 2013 game. It has been ten years and the only thing about this game that has changed is the graphics. It doesn’t hold up to today's standards of games and unfortunately, is no longer a unique concept with many newer games doing it better. While I can appreciate this game for being the first one to do what it did, that doesn’t automatically make it good. I would personally rate the game a 5/10. Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons Remake is available now on PlayStation 5, Xbox X and S, and Steam.