Review for Lost Brothers
Lost Brothers is a first-person real-time adventure in which players are cast in the role of a man named John in present-day Oregon. John’s come to a local forest in one last desperate search for his brother Sam, who disappeared here at the age of eleven a decade ago. Discovering a walkie-talkie, John makes contact with Samantha, a writer who has become trapped in a nearby cave and who may know more about Sam than she’s letting on. It’s a decent enough premise along the lines of Firewatch, but poor writing, a lack of almost anything to do other than walking, and an overall air of unfinished-ness, even after months spent in Early Access, prevents this title from being anywhere near an immersive experience.
Except for a brief prologue set in the past, where John is talking to an unseen Sam on the night the latter went missing, the only other character in the game is Samantha. She too is never seen, only spoken to over the walkie-talkie. Unfortunately, the script is no great shakes. John’s conduct towards Samantha vacillates between concern for her predicament, to making light of her situation, to even threatening to walk off and leave her to die, and back again. There’s no apparent rhyme or reason to what John will say next. I found this lack of consistency to be jarring and a hindrance to following what was going on narratively. The storytelling also isn’t helped at all by a rather poor and stilted English translation.
Samantha guides John to an old mine, which you navigate him through via the standard WASD/mouse combination or game controller. It turns out she was investigating the area because there have been over a hundred disappearances there. This is never fully explained, but Samantha implies that it is due to something supernatural as a result of a coven of European witches congregating in the woods in the 18th century before they too disappeared. That’s par for the course for this hour-long title, as it sets up several questions and oddities but never feels obliged to pay any of them off.
The ending is poorly executed too, even after a recent major update that actually added one. Previously the game stopped abruptly, cutting off a line of unvoiced dialog from John – shown in ticker tape fashion at the bottom of the screen – in mid-reveal as the screen suddenly faded out and returned to the main menu without disclosing the fates of either Sam or Samantha. Now there is something of a resolution, though it’s no more satisfying as it raises more questions than it answers and comes awkwardly out of left field.
While some may find the ending more acceptable than I did, that surely won’t be the case for the spate of technical issues that remain even now. While I encountered no show-stopping glitches, at least initially, there were a plethora of minor bugs and rough edges that demonstrate the still-incomplete nature of this game. Frequently rocks, walls, and other solid objects allow for either full or partial clipping through them. In some places, stepping off a ledge causes John to fall to his doom with the game reloading before the fatal step. In other cases, doing so just sees him fall safely to the ground several stories below. And on still other occasions, instead of falling at all, John will simply levitate in mid-air (no, he has no magical powers), slowly descending to the ground as the forward button is pressed on the keyboard. Speaking with Samantha sometimes results in dialog choices that make no difference to the story, which would be no big deal except that frequently the text options displayed are cut off in the middle.
As rocky as these issues are, they pale in comparison to the new “upgrades” Lost Brothers received when it emerged from Early Access. In replaying the game after that, I encountered frequent lockups, which required tasking out of the game and ending it from Windows. Fortunately, through frequent use of the game’s manual save system, which complements a progressive autosave, I was able to get through after multiple attempts. However, at one point I got into a repeating loop, where having successfully scaled a rocky incline and jumped across a series of giant mushrooms, I was immediately deposited at the start of the slope again, with the same dialog playing out once more. What’s worse, the save file was so corrupted that even after exiting the game completely, the same looping problem still existed when I reloaded it. The only solution was to restart the entire game from the beginning and cross my fingers. (Luckily, it worked!)
Beyond these egregious technical problems, my game was also thwarted by an issue pertaining to a series of notes written by Sam. These pages have been left scattered about the environment for John to find, and in theory they relate what happened to Sam after he went missing. The problem with the notes is two-fold. First, it’s possible to get close enough to the notes to read the actual handwriting on them without picking them up, but the text on each is always identical, referring to how Sam wants to set up a zoo in the cave system he wandered into. Only by picking them up do you realize that they’re meant to convey different messages, as displayed by the text overlay.
The second issue is that whenever an interactive hotspot is encountered, an on-screen meter appears. The mouse button must then be held for a brief period while the meter fills to actually engage with the object. This meter appears for each note, but I found that it rarely worked properly. In fact, on my initial playthrough I could only get it to work on very last note – sort of. For that one, the game switched to a close-up view that showed not only the text for that note but the text for all previous notes as well. Fortunately, after the upgrade the appearance of the text overlay became much more reliable, though still not 100% successful. At any rate, whenever a note is found, whether seen in close-up or not, John and Samantha discuss its contents so it’s possible to more or less follow what’s going on through context, though the difficulties make it extremely hard to get immersed in the proceedings.
Beyond the story, the game doesn’t offer up much to maintain player interest. Certainly there are some nice visual locations to admire with their colourful, almost cartoony 3D look: the sun-dappled woods with their ambient birdsong; the dark mine tunnels also accompanied by … birdsong; the caverns beneath the tunnels filled with multi-hued giant mushrooms and spikey, gnarled, purple trees; and even a bone cave where skeletons adorn the walls (possibly all the people who disappeared in the forest over the years, although this is never explicitly stated). Throughout all of these is a single, well-delineated path to follow. Tunnels really only go in one direction, and though the mushroom scenes are quite dense, there’s a clear trail between their towering heights. Add to this the fact that the game has exactly one puzzle – throwing a series of power generator turbine switches in an easily determined order – and there isn’t much to do other than hike from the start of the game to the end, reading the dialog as it goes by.
Early Access is supposed to be an opportunity for developers to refine unpolished games, but even now, Lost Brothers proclaims its incompleteness at almost every turn. With little to do beyond walking, and a narrative that never comes together, it feels like a rough draft of something that could be decent. There are elements referenced in the dialog – unexplained disappearances, witches, Samantha’s connection to Sam – that could be creatively expanded and developed to tell a compelling story but are largely abandoned here. There are varied locales that look nice but are screaming out for interactivity to be added. And there are a whole host of bugs – some verging on completely game-stopping – that are in desperate need of still being squashed. Perhaps all of these issues will be addressed at some point, but as it stands now, players would be advised to move along, as there’s nothing to see or do here.
