Bramble: The Mountain King

Bramble: The Mountain King is another one of those Scandi fairy tale cinematic platformers - a mixture between Unravel and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. It's one of those games that could just as well have been a sidescrolling adventure, because it's basically on rails. Every so often a new puzzle mechanic is introduced without context or reason. Just... here are some gnomes, and they run away, so you have to conclude for yourself that OF COURSE you have to play hide-and-seek with them. And the prompts on the screen, telling you what to press, are often misleading and poorly expressed. As usual, in these types of games, you have to have a piss-poor obligatory stealth section or two, so miserably telegraphed that you end up dying the obligatory 4-5 times. It's drab and tedious.

Bramble is also the kind of "delightfully quirky and artsy" game where characters don't talk for the sake of being quirky and artsy, because it's the norm in these games - the characters just utter weird, childish noises constantly. But for some unexplainable reason there's a narrator voice. If she can talk, why can't our characters? Anyway, Bramble has this REALLY unfortunate combination of being a platformer AND lousy controls. Along with poor depth in the images it makes for a lot of frustrating traversal.

What Bramble has going for it (and it's not a lot) is when the story turns dark and bloody. Finally it has something that sets it apart from what it's trying to emulate. And in some areas, with what little music there is, the music is nice enough. But why people find Bramble above average is baffling to me. Bramble isn't a mediocre game because it's a faded copy of a mixture of pre-existing things; it's mediocre because it's a platform game with bad controls and one of the most annoying final boss battles of all time.