6) Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is hardly what I’d call a lighthearted game, despite its feudal fairy tale aesthetic, but I don’t think many people fully expect the ultimate weight of its final act the first time they play it. Chronicling the titular pair of brothers journeying across the land to find a cure for their ill father, the story climaxes when, after saving a young girl from an apparent sacrifice ceremony and travelling with her for a period of time, she ends up being a monster in disguise, leading to a boss fight where the teenage older brother must pull off her newly revealed spider-like legs.
Though the siblings do prevail over the monster, it’s not without great cost, as the older brother is stabbed by one of the limbs in the dying moments of battle. It’s a wound that our hero ultimately succumbs to just as the pair reach the coveted source of magical water, which holds the cure to their father’s ailments. And while the younger brother attempts to revive him, he arrives too late, and now not only must cope with the loss of his sibling and partner throughout this entire journey, but bury him as well (which the game makes you control).
The younger brother is able to make it back home with the water afterwards, thanks to a friendly griffin the pair freed earlier, and it’s during the final playable scene that the game’s unique control scheme delivers its own emotional payoff. From the beginning, you’ve controlled each brother individually, with the left joystick and trigger button going to the older one and the right pair going to the younger one.
After close to three hours of getting used to these controls, the final moments of the game feel strange and isolated, as you’re now limited to the right stick and trigger only, helping you feel the full weight and importance of the connection the brothers had and how the younger one is now all alone in his quest. While he is able to get close to home much faster than normal thanks to the aid of a griffin the pair earlier assisted, he finds that his final obstacles aren’t dangerous creatures or people, but his own fear.
The game originally opens with the younger brother recalling the memory of being unable to save his mother from drowning in a storm, resulting in a severe fear of water and swimming. On several occasions throughout the game, you’re required to have him piggyback onto the older brother for assistance in getting across several ponds and rivers. When there’s one last swim ahead of the now-isolated younger sibling, players may be at a loss regarding what they should do at first, but eventually and inevitably, when you resort to pressing the left trigger one more time, things click into place.
What exactly this triggers is open to interpretation (it could range from the older brother urging his sibling on from the afterlife or the younger brother remembering the encouragement he received from him throughout the journey), but you hear the older brother’s voice faintly in the background, and the younger brother forces himself to swim at long last. Soon after, you come across a huge lever necessary for getting across a bridge, which initially seems too large and stiff for the smaller brother to operate, but pushing the left trigger one more time gets similar results.
The final scene is the tragic cherry on top of a heartbreak sundae, as we see the now-healed father and younger brother paying their respects to the mother’s grave seen at the beginning of the game – only now we have the older brother’s grave sharing space with it. The heartbroken father eventually collapses to the ground and weeps, while the younger brother continues to solemnly stand upright – a sign that the journey he’s taken and how it ended has helped harden him for the future ahead, whatever pains it may bring.
– John Fleury