Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is a downloadable videogame released on August 2013 for Xbox, PS3 and PC platforms. It is an indie development, meaning that is not a videogame created by a big studio but by a small company with limited resources -Starbreeze Studios in this case. That makes this videogame more deserving of credit.
As it turns out, the game is amazing. This story-driven videogame begins with one little blond boy mourning in front of his mother’s grave, close to a little house in the mountains. Then he goes home and finds his older brother, some years older than him, and his father. His father begins to fall ill and they call the doctor. He is in a critical state and the doctor tells the two brothers than in order to cure him they’ll have to travel to a distant mountain to get some sort of elixir which only exists there. That’s when the videogame begins.
You control the two brothers, one with each analogue stick on the gamepad. The mechanics are basically several puzzles that have to be solved with the collaboration of the two brothers in their trip to get the elixir to save their father. In their journey they encounter several characters with whom they can interact- the interaction is completely different depending on which brother is involved- and step-by-step the background and folklore of this amazing world is revealed to you.
There is no discernible language during the entire game – the characters talk gibberish- there is no voice-over explaining what the historical context of the game is, and absolutely no tutorial about how to play. And that plays a big part in the brilliance of this videogame.
It begins as a quiet, soothing and paradisiacal voyage of two boys in an imaginary world – it is both oneiric and fantastical. Later on, they encounter a lot of different environments that show us –without instruction or speech- the story of the world and the place you occupy in it. It’s like a fairy-tale, but interactive. The way the story is told, advancing slowly but progressively, inspires in you all the hardships and happy moments that the brothers deal with during the adventure, and makes you feel one of them in the way only a videogame can do. The soundtrack is amazing too, allowing you to feel the various states of mind that the brothers are in; depending on the part of the story they are experiencing.
At the end of the adventure, when you are so absorbed by the story that you feel totally immersed in this amazing world and feel one of the brothers, a disruptive event occurs that provokes a big emotional response in you. In that moment- and until the end of the game- you feel emotions and sensations that maybe you hadn’t had before playing the videogame. Everything makes sense, all the mechanics of the game, the different scenarios you have been through, and the fact that you alone control the two brothers. It all winds up being a moving, thrilling and memorable experience that, in my opinion, surpasses that of a movie or a book.
Videogames are a relatively new form of art –some don’t consider it an art form, but I’ll not go into that. As such, they are still trying to find the proper way to develop characters and tell stories in a convincing way. The medium is still evolving and the developers have a long way to go yet. Of course there are videogames with very little interest that serve only to pass the time, without any ambition or wish to create anything artistic or worth remembering, but we have the equivalent of these in movies and books too.
The big advantage of videogames over books and movies is interactivity. Unlike the other two mediums, in a videogame you are the protagonist, you are the hero or heroine that is part of the story, you can decide what to do, which path to take, how much time you want to invest in it. You feel part of the story because you are part of the story, you control the character, decide what the character is going to do next and in what way.
Every medium has its pros and cons. The immersion you get with a good book is almost comparable to nothing, and the condensed and easy satisfaction of a movie makes you enjoy sensations that with a book are difficult to achieve. But videogames have the best of both worlds. With the increasing capacitiy of graphics in video consoles and PCs and with the developers attaining more control over the medium and trying new ways of bringing experiences to players, in a short period of time we are going to see how videogames are considered as a superior storytelling tool to literature.
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