Kickstarter Focus: Two Brothers

Two Brothers is an exciting Kickstarter game that emulates series like Legend of Zelda and the original Pokémon games (judging from that Missing No screenshot, at least). The game looks like it uses the same four-shades-of-gray color scheme that the Gameboy used, although as you progress you encounter more colors that the main characters hope to spread through the world. Although it looks like a typical retro indie game, they’ve also incorporated several elements that make it stand out from both new and old games. It plays like the old Legend of Zelda games, but you can access the afterlife, speak to other characters, and change the world through dialogue decisions in both major and minor ways.

As far as its gameplay is concerned, you battle and cut grass with a sword and interact with blocks by pushing them—exactly the same way Legend of Zelda works. However, unlike Zelda, when you obtain a heart from an enemy, you literally pull it out. When you die, you don’t restart at the beginning of the area, but journey through the afterlife and discover more puzzles and places. In said afterlife, you can actually meet with other characters who have died, and talking to them will reveal new information about the world. When interacting with other characters, you can opt to tell the truth or lie to them. Hopefully there’s some kind of karma that follows you throughout the game—in example, if you play as a compulsive liar, other characters become wary of the things you say.

The graphics and music definitely harken back to the old retro systems. Just seeing a screenshot didn’t convey the same feeling as the trailer—despite the low amount of colors, the sprites and graphics have a modern feel as soon as they are animated. This makes for a clean-looking game, even in the older style. Along with that, the font and interface look very nice, and while the interaction emoticons look very strange, they fit into the setting well. The creatures and areas look quite beautiful, and while some of the graphics do seem rough around the edges (quite literally, the corners of some of its tiles were visible), I could see the game being published at this quality. I didn’t see enough of the color sprites to form an opinion about it, but if the artist handles it as well as he handled the gray sprites, it should be beautiful.

It will be exciting to see how the game looks after it’s completed, along with how the developers incorporate all of their inspirations. Hopefully the developers will post more information and screenshots as the Kickstarter picks up steam. The only odd part about the game is how the sounds and controls seem to be a clone of Legend of Zelda—but as a fan of the older games in the series, it’s not negative in-so-much as questionable (is it even legal to use those old sound effects in their games? Or are they just that good at imitating them?). In any case, this is a very interesting Kickstarter game that I will be following over the next month. They have just passed the halfway mark in funding and still have 27 days left. If you are interested in this game, please give their Kickstarter page a visit.