Under the Radar - 2013

Under the Radar – 2013

This article is the result of a sort’ve spontaneous decision, a random happenstance. Anyone who knows me also knows that I’m a sucker for Valve’s annual holiday Steam sales. I’ll often buy games simply because they are on sale at ridiculous prices, but never play them (a sickness I fear afflicts far too many of us). But this year, there were two games in particular I was itching to play and I knew, if I saw them at a reduced priced, that I must purchase them and that I would play them. Those two games are Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons and Papers, Please.

Originally released as an XBLA downloadable during Microsoft’s “Summer of Arcade” event, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is a charming little platform/puzzler from Starbeeeze Studios, developers of The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, its sequel Assault on Dark Athena, and one of my favorite games of all time, The Darkness. Papers, Please on the other hand is a retro-style puzzle game published and developed entirely by one man, Lucas Pope, wherein you play as a border patrol inspector for the fictional Soviet-inspired country of Arstozka. Both games were released in 2013, and sadly I have only managed to play them just recently. But having done so, I felt inclined to tell the world about them, because had I played them sooner, they both could have easily been selected as some of my top games of 2013.

I’ve already briefly discussed why I felt Rayman Legends was the most underrated game of the year, and I still feel that way even after playing both of these games. But where Rayman is a fairly popular, longstanding franchise that went criminally underplayed despite every attempt by Ubisoft to put it in the hands of all types of gamers, Brothers and Papers, Please had very little support to begin with, largely due to Microsoft’s incompetence at marketing for Brothers, and Pope’s near-impossibility at advertising his own game to great effect.

   

First up, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. It’s a rather interesting concept that can best be described as a single-player cooperative experience. It requires a controller, but you assume the role of two brothers: one, the older, stronger of the two, and the other, the smaller, nimbler one. With the left analog stick and left trigger, you move and perform actions for the older brother; with the right analog stick and trigger, you control the younger brother. Those are all of the controls the game gives you, and throughout its roughly three-hour long story, you will use them all to varying degrees.

It’s a rather somber tale that begins almost immediately with the death of their mother. How it happens is rather tragic, and greatly affects the younger brother, as the scene opens up with him sitting at her grave. Soon you are tasked with an unenviable dilemma – your father is gravely ill, and the only cure that can save him is from a magical tree in a faraway land. Thus, your adventure begins. It’s a fantastical world filled with giants, trolls, and massive castles. Think Fable on a much smaller scale, but far more realized. Dialogue is entirely made up of a fictitious gibberish language, akin to Shadow of the Colossus or Ico. Through a character’s facial expressions and body language, you’ll learn to understand and empathize with their plight.

  

The puzzles themselves are rarely difficult, but are presented in such a way that demands some pretty tricky fingerplay, often requiring simultaneous button pushes and stick movements in a timely manner. It’s a game that wants you to finish it, so don’t expect to be stuck in an area for too long. There is no combat in the traditional sense, although “boss” fights do appear and can be bested through environmental puzzles rather than with brute force.

What lingers the longest about Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is its presentation and the emotional journey of these brothers. It’s a gorgeous looking game: the world is vast and colorful, with some truly extraordinary vistas, and the music is apt and poignant. The lack of true voice acting gives each brother a unique personality, because you learn to understand them and see them grow through their actions alone. The younger of the two is a prankster, possibly trying to hide his emotions from the loss of his mother, while the older brother is stoic and blunt. The way these characters grow throughout their journey is quite special, considering the lack of dialogue.

It’s a rather amusing game, as well, but make no mistake that it is also a mature one in the most sincere use of that word. It is a game about death and experience, about growing up. It is essentially a coming of age story for the younger brother, and truly he has his moment to shine. It is also the only game that I can recall that facilitates the use of its control scheme in service of its story. It isn’t just a neat gimmick that lets you control each brother independently, but make it to the game’s climax, and your entire experience throughout Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons will culminate in a rather powerful gameplay moment.

Shifting ever so slightly to an equally bleak and affecting game, Papers, Please is a bureaucracy simulator, but to leave it at that would be a tremendous disservice to the level of intricacy and depth it has to offer. On a foundational level, you play as a border patrol inspector whose task it is to decide who can and cannot enter the fictional country of Arstozka. Sounds simple enough, and in truth it starts out that way. You’ll inspect passports and stamp either “DENIED” or “APPROVED” on it and send the person on their way. But you’ll quickly see that things get far more complicated after the first day.

    

See, you have a family to support. You recently moved to this country and could only find residence in this shady, rundown apartment complex. Rent is high, you have a child, and your family has needs. It’s also 1982, so the pay scale is a far cry from what it is today. You are paid based on how many people you let into the country, not how many passports you stamp. And yet it is your job to approve only legitimate immigrants. You are allowed up to a maximum of two violations per day, before subsequent ones deduct from your pay.

The rules are slow and steady at the start. At first all the travelers need to show are passports. Analyze it to determine its legitimacy and approve or deny from there. But after a scripted event early on, the rules begin to change. Now certain citizens from neighboring countries must be examined. Then those traveling for work must provide work visas. Soon, it becomes a game of examining and identifying handfuls of documents of these people before allowing or denying them entry. But this is where Papers, Please is truly fascinating.

  

You’ll sometimes be presented a scenario where a husband and wife are in line together. The husband’s passport checks out and he is allowed entry, but the wife’s does not. Do you use one of your warnings to let her in, knowing full well that it is a violation, or do you do your job, deny her, and save that warning for when you truly make a mistake and might need it? It gets very tricky very quickly, and the more situations like this that you are presented, the more you start to ask yourself these kinds of personal questions: “Do I willfully neglect my duty to support my family?”

You have a lot at your disposal to attempt to do your job properly: every day you are given a new set of rules, or laws, based on some of the previous day’s occurrences. These are actually represented in a newspaper headline you see at the start of each day, letting you know the outcome of some decisions made previously. You also have access to a separate rule book, which contains all of the pertinent information on what is required for someone to be allowed entry. There’s also a regional map, which, for a game like this, normally would not make sense, but is in fact more useful than maps in most games. Passports from foreign countries are issued by a select set of cities, represented on the passport itself. Opening the map allows you to verify if the issuing city is indeed part of that passport’s country, as missing this would be grounds for a citation.

  

The retro art style and washed out colors are intentionally dreary, to give the game its oppressive feeling. There’s tons of gray and black and red, and though the setting never actually leaves the border patrol office, you get the feeling that outside of those walls, Arstozka is a country where it never stops raining. Like Brothers, there is no voice acting in Papers, Please – not even fake voice acting; just mechanical sounds and booming Soviet-inspired percussions and bass to emphasize the gloom.

These two games typify something that I have mentioned on this site before; that the age of the independent or downloadable game is upon us. Even looking at my Most Anticipated Games of 2014 list, three of the seven games listed there are independently produced. Two of my Top 5 of 2013 are also indie titles, and one of them is even free to play. It’s getting to the point where we can’t look down upon these kinds of games just because they don’t have the same AAA publishing push behind them from studios like EA or Activision. We have become far too spoiled by the blockbuster style action game over the last few years, mystified by the dizzying spectacle of sights and sounds, when the real heart and soul of the industry lies with the independent scene.  

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons and Papers, Please are two sides of the same coin: both tell affecting stories about family, albeit through different means, and both are presented in unique and distinct ways. Whether you’re running across a troll’s arm to cross a massive canyon or allowing an illegal citizen into a communist country just so she can be with her husband, there’s one question that links it all together: “What would you do for your family?”