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cover-Bramble: The Mountain King

Monday, January 22, 2024 4:21:54 PM

Bramble: The Mountain King Review (jmac)

I'd been eyeing this game for a while and ended up purchasing it as part of a bundle with two other games for a grand total of $12. If you wanted to buy this game I certainly would not recommend spending more than that, as there's really not that much here, and I found what content there is in this game to not be nearly as compelling as most of the reviews seem to indicate.
My experience with the "horror platformers" microgenre is pretty limited. I played "Little Nightmares" a year or two ago and found it pretty frustrating to play, if visually interesting. My opinion on Bramble is pretty much the same, though I think Bramble is an overall worse game. I haven't played Limbo or Inside, which I gather also fit into this genre.
I found the first half of this game to actually be pretty enjoyable. It offered some diverse (if unchallenging) forms of gameplay outside of the platforming. The platforming, at least to start, worked well for me. By the second half of the game the difficulty spikes rather suddenly with some incredibly tedious boss fights, and the wheels start to spin in place on the gameplay in general. The game starts repeating its least compelling mechanics and hence loses its sense of freshness. Visual design and presentation slips very dramatically. A good chunk of the back half is spent in a generic medieval village running/hiding from generic zombies. It is gray and totally unmemorable. This is a pretty big problem for a game that is, at most, 5-6 hours long.
On the platforming. Your player character moves a bit like a boat, very floaty and imprecise. Which is fine to start. The platforming challenges are initially very generous. (Little Nightmares also has the "floaty" platforming but by contrast, required a degree of precision that made it more frustrating than fun). By the second half of the game this generosity wears off and you're essentially playing a different game. This feels like an artificial difficulty spike for the purposes of dragging out the experience.
The first half of the game has quite a lot in common with the "walking simulator" genre. There are a few relatively cozy puzzles and other challenges interspersed with some creepy imagery and dreamlike atmosphere. The problem is when the back half of the game decides it wants to be a "real game" and the lack of precision becomes frustrating as bigger challenges are put before you. There is a boss midway through the game that really epitomizes this shift in design philosophy. I understand that the game needs to become harder/darker as it continues, but with little on-ramp and generally poor controls, this difficulty spike felt needless and artificial.
This game's narrative and theming left a lot to be desired. The story-book folklore stuff is neat to start, but the game does not really do enough with it for me to feel like its particularly memorable. There is nothing particularly interesting about making fairytales gruesome for the sake of making them gruesome (sure, some fairy tales are actually gruesome, but usually in the service of moralizing to children, something that is totally absent here). One of the dumbest choices the game makes it delivering narrative both through "story-books" you read in game, as well as voice-over narration that comes and goes. They should have stuck fully with the voice-over or bothered to animate more cutscenes. What makes the "story-books" fail as a narrative delivery mechanism is largely that they occur *after* boss fights. They exist to explain the "lore" of the boss you just defeated after you defeated them. This choice really demonstrates that the narrative and world here is an afterthought.
Transitions between areas are likewise abrupt and unsatisfying. Really, what I see here is a series of set-pieces the developers created with very little concern for how to tie them together. The dream/nightmare/fairytale/folklore conceit allows the developers to play pretty fast and loose with overall coherence in this regard, but nonetheless I was continually confused by certain basic elements such as scale (you literally change size relative to your environment between segments for no discernible reason), narrative cause and effect, and overall plot themes. All of this would have been totally fine had there been some kind of larger arc to follow (emotional, thematic, story, or otherwise) but its really just a series of discrete experiences tied together with the barest suggestion of a story.
Maybe this genre isn't really for me. I initially found this game to be quite charming because the world design and relative ease of gameplay and variety of challenges and mechanics. For a five-hour game to totally run out of steam in the back half and devolve into narrative/gameplay incoherence is pretty unforgivable. Extremely so when you are asking $30 full price.