Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons | Why I Love
Why I Love is a series of guest editorials on GamesIndustry.biz intended to showcase the ways in which game developers appreciate each other's work. This entry was contributed by Ember Trail's Cruz Segovia Ardiz, game director of the alien planet management game Distant Bloom, which launched on Steam last week.
I was barely a teenager when I played Metal Gear Solid for the first time on my brand-new PlayStation console. The whole experience was exhilarating, but what truly left a mark on me, like for many others, was the encounter with Psycho Mantis. For those who might not remember this boss fight: to defeat this mind-reading enemy, who could predict all your movements, you had to physically disconnect your controller and plug it into the Player 2 slot controller, so that Psycho Mantis could not read your mind anymore, allowing you to finally defeat him.
Back then, I did not fully understand why I found this feature so mind-blowing. For a while, I just thought of it as a great example of breaking the fourth wall. However, while Metal Gear Solid had many other instances of breaking the fourth wall, mostly through dialogues or in cutscenes, none felt as impactful to me as that one boss fight mechanic.
A few years had to pass-by for me to fully understand what had happened there or why certain narrative solutions just felt more powerful to me as a player and the game that finally made it all click was Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons.
Brothers, developed by Starbreeze Studios and released back in 2013, is arguably one of the pinnacles of this kind of storytelling through wordless, moment-to-moment gameplay mechanics, for me as a player and specially as a wannabe Game Designer. It was one of the first games I felt like playing with a notebook nearby, so I could write down and analyse how it was all built as I tried to discover how the team was capable of achieving such a meaningful narrative and such deep connection between the two brothers, without writing dialogue
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