Lost Brothers

How do you know when you've beaten a game? There are usually a few obvious signs, like a really dramatic cinema, the credits rolling and maybe even a good, old-fashioned "Game Over" screen. But what do you do when you aren't entirely sure if you beat a game? That's the issue I'm running into right now with Lost Brothers, a first-person story-driven adventure that just ends. Instead of giving us a cool cinema or some kind of payoff, this game abruptly fades to black in the middle of a sentence. And, trust me, that's only the start of the problems for Lost Brothers.

What I normally like to do when I review a game is talk about the setup without spoiling too much of the story. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that's even possible when it comes to Lost Brothers, since I don't think there's anything to spoil. This tells the story of kid brothers who like to go camping in the summertime. It's on one of these trips when Sam mysteriously goes missing. His backpack was left behind and his brother John is able to follow the footsteps, but Sam is nowhere to be found.

We pick up with John a decade later, long after everybody has given up hope on finding the lost brother. He's returned to the campsite in order to drink a few beers and pay tribute to the memory of Sam. But before John even has a chance to get settled in, he's contacted by a woman named Samantha who is trapped underneath a bunch of rocks in a nearby cave. This sends him on a mission to save the girl and, well, pretty much just do that.

What John doesn't realize is that Samantha is lying to him. Instead of being trapped under a bunch of rocks, she's actually stuck in another world with no way to escape. Oh, and surprise, now John is stuck there, too. What makes this strange new world so curious is that there are diary entries from missing brother Sam littering the path, with each one filling in the story of what happened to him in the last ten years.

John isn't just picking up diary pages from Sam, because he's also keeping in contact with the missing girl Samantha. A lot of the story is told through these brief conversations over walkie-talkies, some of which give you options on what you want to say. We walk along the path and explore the small environments, all while hoping that it's leading somewhere. Unfortunately, it's not. This path only leads to disappointment.

Where did Sam go? Who is this Samantha girl? What is with these stairs and bridges? How do we get out of this strange underground world? What the hell is going on??

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These are all great questions that are frustratingly never answered. Or maybe they are and I'm just missing something. After following the path and picking up the letters from Sam, the game just ends. And I don't mean that it ends in an artsy way that leaves things open to interpretation, but rather that is fades to black and sends you back to title screen. To make matters worse, it does this while John is talking. It literally fades to black mid-sentence. Check it out and see for yourself:

Now, I know what you're thinking: "Cyril, I bet you did something wrong." The truth is, this was my first thought, too. So, I decided to play through the game a second time and look for alternate paths and other clues to the story, but it all ended in the exact same way. And when I looked up the playthroughs on YouTube, I found other gamers running into the same problem. Clearly, something is seriously wrong with Lost Brothers.

Of course, this is far from the only thing wrong with this game. For one thing, the writing is terrible and filled with spelling and grammar problems. The story it's attempting to tell isn't especially deep or compelling, and the adventure itself is little more than walking down a path picking up floating pages. There's also the matter of drifting when John stands still. It's subtle at first, but when you aren't moving, the game has a funny way of pushing you in one direction. It's almost like you're on ice and slowly sliding across the stages.

But as annoying as it is, that's the kind of thing I could probably get over if the story was gripping. I mean, you barely notice it when you're walking around. The problem is that the story just isn't very good and the way the game abruptly ends feels like a mistake. John isn't nearly angry enough at Samantha for tricking him into traveling to a weird new world against his will, especially since there's a good chance he's going to die there. And the conversations they end up having are often shallow and pointless, usually coming across like two robots trying their hardest to act human. It's possible, I suppose, that there's a great reason for the lame story and robotic dialog, but considering that every part of Lost Brothers feels like a first draft, I'm not sure I should be giving the developer the benefit of the doubt.