Footsteps to Follow: On Brothers: a Tale of Two Sons and Ico

Imagine you are the younger of two brothers. You will not get to forge your own path through childhood, because there will always be an elder sibling that came before you. Your parents and your teachers will always look at the two of you, and they won't be able to help but compare. Your own decisions will be flavored by the choices your older brother made before you, and at every turn, there will come a question: will you emulate, or differentiate? Will you invite the comparison or run in the opposite direction?

Brothers:  the story is about two brothers trying to cure their ailing father

Brothers: a Tale of Two Sons is a story about two brothers, trying to find a cure for their ailing father. And it is a game, one that is consciously trying to follow in the footsteps of an earlier game, Ico. The shadow Ico casts is long: it is considered a classic, a game that pushed the medium in new directions upon its release in 2001 by Sony Computer Entertainment.  Developed by Fumito Ueda and team ICO in Japan, Ico is a name that is likely to come up when you try to discuss Games as Art, for its style, for its storytelling, for its innovation, and for its imagination.  Brothers, released 12 years later, developed on a different continent by Swedish developer Starbreeze Studios, and directed by filmmaker Josef Fares, embraces the influences of Ico proudly and eagerly, and because of that you can't help but compare the two as you play through it.  (here's a link to an interview where Fares says Ico influenced his game:  Shack News - Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons creator talks inspiration and a grander world)

CONTROL AND CHARACTER

Ico:  Ico and Yorda

Ico is a game where you control a young boy with horns called, well, Ico, imprisoned in an abandoned castle on an island. He comes across another prisoner, a slightly older girl in a white dress whose name is Yorda, and the rest of the game is spent exploring the castle with Yorda, trying to escape. Along the way, you'll come across levers to pull, drawbridges to lower, ledges to climb, bombs to ignite, and shadowy monsters to fend off. But that's not the core of the game, and it's not the reason its memorable.

 If I had to use one word to describe Ico's design philosophy, it would be constraint. It's a short game, finish-able in a couple hours.  It takes place primarily in one location, a castle. It tells a simple story, and even that story isn't too much of a focus; you can figure out exactly why things are happening, but outside of the opening cutscene and some ending ones the game really isn't interested in laying out too much of it for you.  The only sounds you hear are Ico and Yorda's footsteps as they run, and perhaps their heavy breathing from exertion.  Stand still, and only then might you become aware of the rush of air currents in a room, and the crackle of the fire from torches.  There's both no sound and constant sound, sound you might not notice too much, but as you enter different places the ambience will change too, and in that way your mind subtly shifts.  It's a game that communicates so much through everything other than words.  Yorda and the boy speak different languages; the boy's speech is translated, but on first playthrough the girl's is not, not that they speak too much anyways. Instead so much about these two characters is conveyed through their mannerisms. The boy is over eager and energetic, scrabbling up ledges, jumping fearlessly onto hanging ropes, running eagerly ahead to see what's around the next corner. The girl follows, looking around inquisitively, picking her way around the environment while the boy runs around.

Among the various more standard controls you have over the boy -- a button to interact, one to attack, one to jump -- is a dedicated action that isn't seen too often in games, mapped to the R1 button. This button does a couple different things, depending on how far away Yorda is from Ico: either he calls out to her if they far away, and she'll come over, he'll wave her over with a different accompanying call once she's closer, or he'll grab her hand once she's close enough. This is the button that allows you to pull her along with Ico as you traverse the castle. Run at full speed, and the girl will barely be able to keep up, as the boy, indecisively pulls her this way and that.

Everything you do in Ico conveys effort on the part of its characters, of weight and size and personality. In the way Ico scrabbles across the granite floors, pulling Yorda along, over-eager to see what's around the next corner, and the way he attacks with a sword that is slightly too heavy for him, untrained, slightly unbalanced, but with all of his weight and earnestness behind each swing, and the way he swings on a hanging chain, and vaults off, smashing stomach first into the ledge, barely holding on, you see the personalities that are never explicitly told to you. And the way Yorda looks around with wonderment and pokes around the environment can't help but be infectious; this is a world worth exploring.

Ico:  Ico pulling Yorda up

Brothers also tries to show, not tell us about the personalities of the two brothers. A lot of that is through how they interact with the people and things they come across during their -- and your -- travels. You can direct each brother to interact with these objects, and their reactions aren't the same: come across a potted flower and the older brother might stop to smell it, while the younger one knocks it over. Interact with an old woman sweeping in front of her house, and the older one will grab the broom and help sweep while the younger one balances it on the palm of his hand. The younger brother will show musical aptitude playing a harp, while the elder one plucks away fruitlessly and the younger one laughs at him. In these contrasts, more explicitly spelled out than that between Ico and Yorda, you can see their characters emerge, but only if you want to; these objects, most often there to flesh out these characters and the world they inhabit, decorate the paths between the more gameplay-driven areas, but they are optional.  Like in Ico, everyone in Brothers talks in a gibberish language, and they don't say much, instead communicating to each other (and to the player) through mime, pointing, waving, and gesticulating in exaggerated manners.

Brothers: the older brother interacting with a villager

In the platforming and puzzle sections that serve as the main gameplay elements, the brothers have to work together to overcome the obstacles in their way.  The controls are simple: left analog stick controls the older brother's movement, left trigger makes him interact, right stick and right trigger correspondingly control the younger one. With only one analog stick and a button controlling each sibling, Brothers becomes less about the complexity of the actions each brother does, and more about coordination between the two.  This is different from most other games, where you only control one character.  This isn't a game about a single hero that can serve as the player avatar.

Even just moving the brothers at the same time can take some getting used to.  And there are puzzles that ask for more than that:  There's a cart at the beginning that they push and pull together, there's some parts involving climbing rope, and there's some tasks that they have to do separately; Brothers though never raises the difficulty stakes of any of these gameplay concepts too much.  It's a game trying to tell a story, and the controls are also there more to tell a story than to challenge you.  Ico is hardly a challenging game either; its combat is monotonous and it generally doesn't ask for any sort of precision jumping or timing.  Ico can't die from the shadow monsters; they can only knock him down.  Their real target is Yorda, who they'll try to pull into a shadow portal, but there's a lot of time to pull her back out.  Most of the time, the short-term objective in Ico is just about figuring out how to proceed: how to lower a bridge, or reach a ledge, or get Yorda up to a higher platform; there are switches to pull, and crates to push, and gaps to jump, and generally you will have to familiarize yourself with an area for a bit before you figure out what sequence of actions you have to perform to proceed. In Brothers, because of the more limited interaction options, there's less of a question of what to do next in any given area; more time is spent implementing the puzzle solutions than figuring them out.  You aren't going to strain any brain muscles, but still, the puzzles and platforming are generally are varied enough that they don't become monotonous.

Brothers:  Working in tandem, boosting the younger brother to a ledge

Here's something else both games do: they make use of common archetypes as as shorthand to convey character personalities. The older brother, as you'd expect from preconceptions in popular culture, is responsible, while the younger one is more mischievous. Ico is the prototypical boy, adventurous and bold, while Yorda is a captured princess, more prim, less hurried, and less agile.  A lot of the way you read into these characters is based on what you associate with these roles each of them play based on their gender and age.  There are other characters too, that you meet later on, which also fall into fairly common tropes as well, though these characters are secondary to the duo that are central to either game, their relationship, and the journey they partake in together.  A lot of the gameplay in Ico revolves around either building paths so Yorda can follow you, or fending off shadowy monsters from kidnapping her.  You are, literally, trying to save the princess from the castle.  In Brothers, meanwhile, the younger brother, is physically weaker and afraid of water, having to cling to the older brother's back to cross rivers.  In this way the gameplay makes it clear in both games the relationship dynamics and roles in play.

Ico:  Balancing on a ledge

PACE

Brothers is a game about a journey, while Ico is about an escape. The former is an epic sprawl that winds its way through villages, forests, caves, mountains, ruins, and more, while Ico mostly takes place in a solitary abandoned castle. Both games are, at their core, adventures. They are about exploration much more than combat or puzzles, even though those might've been used to fill in the need for the game to have gameplay. Ico, though, always feels like a game that encourages this exploration and is more wide open, while Brothers enforces its linearity and feels constricting.  Ico takes place in an expansive castle of looming rooms, winding stairs, torch lit corridors, and sun soaked courtyards; the game is just as linear as Brothers, but these spaces feel especially large, and you, the young boy Ico, particularly small, and in the way the game winds you in, up, down, and around the castle, your path never feels completely straightforward or telegraphed. You'll enter an area, and not have any immediate idea where you're supposed to go. You might see a courtyard far below you, and then, ten minutes later, you'll have a flash of recognition as you find yourself in that same courtyard, and you'll look up, trying to spot where you were before.

Ico:  a half-raised bridge overlooking a courtyard

Brothers:  the brothers, sitting looking at a castle in the distance

In Brothers, you might see a courtyard in the distance, but you're never going to see it again. Well, that's not true. You might see a castle ruin in the distance, the older brother will point it out, the camera will pan over it, and you'll spend the next section of the game trying to reach it. But in Brothers, there is no going back; in Ico, even though you won't walk the same path, you'll see places you've been before, below or above you. Ico builds on the seeming complexity of the castle, while in Brothers there is only ever moving on forward. This does tie into some of what the game is trying to say, so that in itself is not a problem, exactly. But the game also always feels hurried, in a way completely opposite the relaxed tone of Ico, and not in the a way that quite matches the pace that the brothers or the game itself should want you to move at necessarily, either. There are more actiony sections where you might be chased or in peril, but it's not those sections I'm thinking about, but the parts where's there's only a path to follow. Or there may be a ladder, or some rocks to jump or vault, but all of that adds up to the same thing: you push both sticks forward, and the brothers go forward. It's these sections that make it so abundantly clear that there's nothing for you to do here, really, so you better keep moving, that seem a bit too barren. There are the objects to interact with I mentioned earlier, but those become less frequent as you move further into wilderness, but they don't exactly  sustain your interest for long; the number they have is enough.

Animation and controls also play a part in this, I think; running and jumping around in Ico was fun, but the brothers don't animate quite as smoothly when running or especially when transitioning between when they're standing and any environmental interactions, and the game doesn't have jump or camera control that you can perform anywhere you want either, like Ico does, so there's literally less choice of what buttons to try at any given point.

Brothers does try to slow the pace of the game down with these benches it has placed at various points of the game, generally at the edge of cliffs. Sit either brother down on one of them, and the game will pan over to show a nice vista (generally of the location you'll be going to next), which you can admire... and that's about it. You can hold down the interact button and sit there a while, but you can't do anything else; you won't be able to move or do anything else, and you can't move the camera yourself.  You sit there, admire the pretty scenery, and keep holding down the button until you've had your fill.

Brothers:  Taking a breather in the village

THE WORLD

Ico:  that's not just background, you can climb up that windmill and arch

In Ico, the castle feels like a real place. The castle doesn't feel of our world -- it feels too mythical for that -- but it does have a gauzy resemblance to it.  Most other games released around 2001 were still segmented into levels, and their settings were designed with distinctly video gamey logic. Floating platforms over bottomless or spikey pits, random crates of coins or health kits, towns that could only be accessed by fighting your way through caves of monsters, and segmented missions with beginnings, middles, and ends, those were the types of game logic and level design that was the norm back then. In Ico, there's no world 2-1, ice level, Strut A Deep Sea Dock, Djose Highroad, or The Library. There's just you finding your way through this expansive castle. The surroundings change, but these feel organic, slowly shifting as you move through the structure. There's a sense of place and space, a history, and architectural weight. Not so for Brothers: its world is distinctly not realistic, nor even logical; it neither emulates any sort of real world or tries to introduce its own sense of rhyme or reason to its world-building. Instead of a more specific world, all of the various settings together are abstracted into a sweeping sense of the fantastical.

Brothers' world is an un-reality, in the vein of old European fairy tales like Jack and the Beanstalk, Snow White, and Alice in Wonderland. The brothers start off in their village, and the obstacles you're presented with there include getting past bullies and running past angry dogs. It's very... Dennis the Menace, very 1950s Americana neighborhood mischief. The setting soon moves outside of these friendly confines and into the broader world, and that's where we see the fairy tale aspect take hold.  The brothers encounter wolves, and trolls, and other more fantastical and eccentric beings.  There are small character encounters, some optional: helping out families, reuniting loved ones, things like that.  But the game can come off a bit children's picture book-y at times, sometimes dropping too far into the saccharine and the predictable, even with the occasional hints of darkness and death at the edges. You understand that it's supposed to be heart-warming, but it's difficult to truly make the emotional connections to what's happening, when you know what's going to happen, when they're all so brief and basic.  Maybe 60% of the way through, the game hits you with a section that is starkly, unflinchingly sombre, even horrifying, in what it depicts. The developer serves notice that their game is not content to completely do what's expected of them, and they follow it up, too, with each section after that varying from what came before, in both setting and tone.

Ico is a chill, meditative experience. There are small discoveries, but no open surprises, no sudden tonal shifts to bombast. There are parts that are unsettling, but overall, there were only changes in space, between exteriors and interiors, claustrophobic rooms and huge caverns, staircases and waterfalls.  And everything felt interconnected; it all felt like one castle you were exploring.

In Brothers, the world isn't as logically laid out.  You reach the top of mountains and the bottom of caves, ruins and battlefields and friends and enemies, and as you move further away from the village, all of it feels a bit disconnected from whatever came before it.  The game does cut between the different sections/chapters, fading out as you finish one and fading back in as the brothers arrive at another, and there's no telling what happened in between. If the intent was for there to be off-screen travelling, then that didn't fully come across for me. But distance and time in games are always going to be a bit abstracted. It feels like Ico and Yorda do a lot more running in their game than the brothers do in their's, even though the former are contained in a castle while the latter journey across their world, presumably over weeks or months and not hours.  The game world we the player are presented with in Brothers doesn't feel as coherent, or whole, as Ico's but that's perhaps not necessarily what the game is going for.  The places aren't connected to each other, but they are connected by our pair of protagonists as they travel through them, as a part of the larger journey.  Which I think might be partly the point, perhaps.  It's a wide and varied world they travel, sometimes scary, sometimes kind, sometimes cruel, but even as it grows discordant and cold, these brothers have each other.

Brothers: a forest path

CAMERA

Brothers:  shimmying across a ledge

That scope is also reinforced through the positioning of the camera in Brothers. The camera is quite pulled back, compared to many other contemporary games. This is at least partly because of the fact that you can order the brothers in different directions, meaning the camera has to be able to keep both of them on screen all the time. If they do get too far from each other they'll refuse to go any further, instead standing in place and calling to each other. Sometimes, like when you're shimmying the two brothers across a ledge, the camera takes the opportunity to show what's below them or around the next corner by zooming out, similar to what Uncharted does. When you're running through a village, the camera might zoom out a bit, to show glimpses of the lives of the village occupants. The camera isn't just passive, moving in response to whatever you're doing; at these points and others it takes artistic license to frame the world in its own way. The camera isn't perfect; it does sometime have to do some crazy reverses and flips having to follow two different characters, and without a right stick dedicated towards camera controls as is most common in most other games the player has no control over what they see. Ico's camera generally only has to keep the boy in focus, unless you're calling out to Yorda, in which case the camera will pan over to whatever direction Yorda's in. The camera there, too, is quite pulled back. Pans, zooms, and other techniques pulled from cinema are also used in Ico, to great effect. Most cameras in third-person games back in 2001 could only be described as utilitarian. The big focus developers seemed to have was to ensure the camera simply didn't get stuck in corners and walls. Ico treats the camera as something more. It isn't just static; the camera moves, it follows, it swoops, and it frames. In Brothers and in Ico, two games with such minimal use of dialogue and text, the way they both use the camera in different ways to convey information. And it's definitely not just information: a fixed camera like Resident Evil would have lent a completely different tone to either game, as would've a centred, always behind-the-character camera like Max Payne or Oni. The focus of the camera in both games isn't on the characters all the time; it's also showing their place in the world.

Ico: climbing spiralling stairs; Yorda's cage is at the top left

STORY

To see Brothers for what it is, you have to pull further back. It isn't about the details. The story in both are simple enough. We don't need to know what these characters are saying, because their thoughts aren't ever particularly complex, really. You can figure out it out through basic cultural literacy: what would this sort of character feel in this sort of circumstance? Neither game attempts to subvert any of this; these characters are exactly as they appear. In both, the pivotal narrative moments mostly happen bunched at the beginning and the end, but the journey in between is the brunt of what the player experiences, and in that part is where the game really has to make its mark. Ico is so ground-breaking most of all because of its presentational aspects, and its level design, but Ico's ending (and story) doesn't really matter. It's well done, it hits emotional beats, it world-builds, but it doesn't factor in anything you did in the game, really. Its “story” could be stripped out, and Ico would still be considered a classic, I think. The relationship between Ico and Yorda is great, but it always only functions on the level of save-the-princess, and there's no narrative arc or purpose to it.  In Brothers, though, the journey does matter in the end: its mechanics and controls are simple, the world is an un-reality, and most of its story elements -- both the overarching narrative and the smaller moments -- are tropey. But all those moments in between the beginning and the end, taken together, do get across the sense of adventure, and the scope, and an understand of the brothers' relationship arc, needed to make the ending, and thus the story, work. Make no mistake: there isn't really any sort of character growth or relationship arc for the brothers, really. They go through tough times together, they save each other's lives, they hug, they console each other, but I never quite saw, or felt, their relationship change or develop meaningfully. On an intuitive level though, even though what you're doing during their journey isn't all that interesting, the game uses such familiar story-building blocks, and such a wide swath of them, that you sort of have to expect these brothers to have grown, because they went through so much together, and all of that ties into the ending.  And the controls and mechanics feed into that, because the whole time through, you're controlling these two brothers, coordinating their movements and actions, crossing bridges and fending off monsters, figuring out how the brothers can help each other get through any obstacle laid out in front of them.

Ico feels like it's a game that is always trying to build into a certain experience, a feeling and tone. Brothers is more about hitting certain emotions while trying to tell a specific story. And in the end, it does add something new to the table, because it also tells its story in a way only a game can, through its interactivity. The final puzzle is pretty brilliant, and the puzzle that most explicitly manages to incorporate narrative and characterization into its core.  The game is testing your understanding of what's happened on this journey, what these brothers have gone through, what they've experienced and learned.  Even if I didn't quite fully experience all of that, I still understood the roles these characters were playing, and the story the game was trying to communicate in all its broad gestures, and symbols, and conventions.  And the controls, simplistic as they are, are more than enough to convey what is happening during the final section. It's a powerful moment, and it made me rethink what had came before.  The gameplay part of the game might not be challenging, but the puzzles aren't just hoops to jump through, and the controls have a purpose; this is a game that actually manages to marry story and gameplay together. 

Brothers:  Running

SUMMARY

Is it fair to compare to Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons to Ico? Perhaps not. In treading similar ground, it can't help but pale in comparison. But then again, there have been very few games released since 2001 that have even attempted to do what Ico did that just mimicking Ico's general tone and aesthetic is still enough to make a game stand out.  Brothers might not be unique, but it still manages to different enough.  It uses commonly used storytelling elements and techniques, but because it's a game it can make that work, because games can re-contextualize them, and use them differently.  Interactivity is the key. Ico's story is basic, it arguably barely matters, but it's still a game that is praised for its story-telling, and rightfully so, because of the differences in the medium.  It can present a world and characters and emotional resonance with barely any words, without deep characters, relationship arcs, or a meaningful story.  Brothers doesn't seem quite as unique and ground-breaking as Ico was in 2001, but it still manages to stand out from other games because of the way it, too, uses its influences, with the story it tries to tell and the way it tells it, Brothers also manages to step out and be its own thing.  The gameplay consists of fairly pedestrian and unchallenging puzzles, the world is beautiful but too empty and linear to make it too worth taking your time to explore, and its controls limit the level of interaction.  As a story, Brothers an overly traditional fairy tale with traditional, predictable character types, and it borders on maudlin at times.  But Brothers makes story and gameplay work together, something that games generally haven't done all that well, and it creates a sum that's greater than its parts.

Ico:  By water