Little Brother Jim

Little Brother Jim is just your typical game about a bear trying to park a Jeep between a bunch of cones. But hang on, because this game is also a first-person walker where we climb a mountain and read letters left to us from Jim. It's an odd pairing of genres with a lot of fun driving puzzles and an emotional core that may catch you by surprise. Unfortunately, it also has one of the dumbest, most ham-fisted endings I've seen in a long time. I hope that bear is buckled up, because things are about to get rough for Little Brother Jim.

I don't want to bum you out at the start of this review, but it has been a full year since Jim passed away. As you can imagine, this has been weighing heavily on older brother Paul's mind, so he decides to take a walk up to the hill where the two of them last hung out and watched fireworks over the city. This proves to be a long and emotionally draining journey that sees Paul reading a series of letters written to him from his younger brother.

These notes talk about the good and bad memories of growing up, including the creative lengths they would go to torment each other, the way they dealt with bullies and how much they loved their pets. We learn more about Paul through these letters and discover that Jim was a big fan of a parking simulator starring a bear driving a Jeep. That's where the driving part of the game comes in. We alternate between walking through the forest collecting mail and completing a series of increasingly complicated driving missions.

These driving levels aren't as integrated as you might expect. There are a few dozen of these bite-sized missions, most of which have you collecting coins and navigating a maze in order to find the parking spot. There's not a lot of technique here apart from drifting around corners and most of the challenge comes from trying to avoid cones and the deer that occasionally runs across the road. Once you've completed eleven of these stages, you'll get whisked back to the first-person journey to read a few more letters from Jim.

While the journey from one magical mailbox to another won't be for everybody, I liked reading about the memories and learning more about Paul. More than anything, I think the trip up to the hill is absolutely gorgeous. From the beach to the forest to the small village along the way, every part of this hike is stunning, and almost calming in a way I appreciated. In fact, the setting is so pretty that it felt like it was wasted in this game. There's so much I wanted to do in this world, yet I was stuck going from one mailbox to the next.

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I had similar complaints when it came to the driving simulator half of the game. The concept of a bear trying to park a Jeep is funny, but they don't do enough with it. There needs to be a lot more in the form of obstacles and wrinkles to the formula, because it starts to feel like you're just completing the same type of mission over and over again. And since it's not timed, there's almost no challenge to these stages. You can complete every single one of them on your first try by simply slowing down and being careful. There's no depth or challenge here, which makes a lot of these stages boring.

It's a shame that these two halves of the game aren't better connected. Jim talks about liking the driving simulator in a few letters, but it's not necessarily something that needed to be in the game to complete the story. These two parts of the game should have been building to something big, maybe even adding context to the other half that you couldn't get from one genre. But that's not the case in Little Brother Jim. You can skip entire chunks of the driving half and not miss a single thing.

But the real problem with this game comes in the final few minutes. I'm going to try and not talk around the specifics, but in order to really explain what's wrong with this game, I feel like I need to get into minor spoilers. The truth is, I like a lot about the story. I wasn't as engaged with the driving levels, but I found the letters from Jim to be emotional, captivating and generally well-written. It gets into a lot of topics I didn't expect, even dipping its toes into politics from time to time. All this largely worked for me. Unfortunately, all of that is undone by the game's ending.

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After we've run out of letters and know everything there is to know about what happened to Jim, the game decides to add a coda that includes a monologue about being nice to others and appreciating the short amount of time we have on this planet. This, of course, is the message we get from Jim's letters. We've spent two hours reading letters designed to make us reflect and appreciate the time we have on this Earth, so the added monologue is the very definition of redundant.

The problem I have with this isn't that it's unneeded, but rather that it's the cringiest, most ham-fisted monologue I've seen in years. It's laughably bad, to the point where not even James Earl Jones could make it sound good. It's somehow both generic and mawkish, recycling every shallow greeting card sentiment you can think of. And what makes it even worse, is that this monologue is supplied by a computer program trying to approximate human speech. No joke. The voice acting is literally credited to VoiceBunny.com.

I cannot think of a worse way to end this type of game. It's bad enough that the game feels the need to remind you what the point was in the most insulting and redundant way possible, but all this is made so much worse by the computer voice delivering the awful writing. This is not only an absolutely terrible way to end your game, but I have a hunch it's going to be the only thing I remember about Little Brother Jim. He must be rolling over in his grave.