I tried to see if I could play through Bros, because I couldn’t find any complete playthrough videos and I wanted to see what the ending looked like for this tragic bro game, or if it had any ending at all.
As you may already know the game greets you with a somewhat lifeless looking title screen with a weirdly sad theme playing in the background. It gives me the feeling that this is the bro’s first adventure but may also be his last…
The game also kicks you back to this title screen every time you get a game over. It’s the beginning but also the end.
This game is such a bizarre experience. I knew what the first few levels were like based on a video I saw but they couldn’t make it past a certain burning pipe without running out of lives.
When I got past it I knew I was walking into unknown territory. I had to rely on save states because this game is long, hard and unfair. I doubt anyone has even beaten this game without save states or cheating.
Shortly after this burning pipe the levels started getting weirder by using bizarre and also kinda scary color palettes.
I already thought the game had this melancholy, lonely and hopeless feel to it, and these color palattes combined with the unfair difficulty and awful level design doesn’t help. Every time you die the game also plays a realistic voice clip of a man going “uUNGH!!” so you’ll be hearing that a lot too.
I had no idea how long time game was going to be. Every world has 4 stages, with the fourth one being a castle level. After about 4 or 5 worlds I was thinking I had to be close to finishing the game. Yet I was still greeted with the same message at the end of every castle.
And then I got to world 8. This had to be the end, I could feel it.
I saw the entrance to the final castle and I was finally going to solve the mystery of this game. Do you finally get to save your brother, or does this game even have an ending at all?
But first I had to face the final challenge… the void.
Either the developers didn’t think anyone would make it this far, or they must have hated their players. The final level of the game is a series of mazes with tricky jumps in the pitch black darkness. You’re also very low on time, so you have to be really fast. The game also freezes for half a sec every time you jump into a wall, making this really frustrating to play.
Luckily there are no enemies or pitfalls that can kill you here but the timer is still a big enough problem.
It was way too hard and unfair, and I was starting to doubt if I could get through it, even with save states.
But after a while I finally made it.
And this is all I get for the trouble.
I don’t know what I was expecting…
what the frick is this game if it’s melancholy gimme music
from my limited knowledge of this the soundtrack is entirely copyright-free classical music
keithstack
