[i]This is the [b]23rd[/b] review of the Steam Redlight series, a series where I purposely seek out negatively or controversially rated games on Steam to see if they're as bad as the Internet says they are. It's accompanied by a video review that can be found [b][url=https://youtu.be/8W8VDtdbij8]here[/url][/b].[/i]
[b]In summary, I cannot recommend this game[/b], the graphics have a plethora of trivial complications in addition to the overall lack of polish this game has. In addition, my controller wouldn’t cooperate with the game even though there’s full controller support. The game does have some translation issues, but I’m willing to overlook those, but not the fact that there’s parts of the game that are untranslated at all. Lastly, there [i]appears[/i] to be a bug that’s preventing me from completing the game.
[h2]Introduction[/h2]
In Lost Brothers, you play as John, a member of a family who traditionally goes hiking as a way to spend time with one another. During a hike that John and his brother, Sam, go out for -- Sam goes missing and is never heard from again. Fast forward ten years, John goes out for a trip in the same area and discovers an abandoned radio near his campsite that’s calling for help. That caller’s name? Sam… antha. Samantha’s trapped in a nearby mine, and John being the able-bodied all-American hero that he is, is here to save the day.
The game is mostly a walking simulator that features a very small amount of puzzle-solving and platforming -- the controls are simple with nothing really notable among them. There’s not much more to talk about without getting into the good and the ungood that this game has, so we’ll just move onto what I liked about the game.
[h2]The Good[/h2]
This game unfortunately does not have any overall strong strengths, which we’ll get to shortly. It’s not that there’s [i]nothing[/i] good about the game, but there’s nothing that’s overwhelmingly positive that I could really share that isn’t more than an accessory to the experience instead of something that the game excels at.
So, let’s move onto what are some of the things that are undermining this game.
[h2]The Ungood[/h2]
To start with some of the smaller nuances before leading up to the greater evil, I wanted to talk about the graphics. This game [i]should[/i] have had graphics as a strength as there are parts that look great, but there are too many lackluster encounters that really stop this from evolving into a strength. To cite some examples, as you walk, you may see some texture flickering on parts of your journey. There are also some environment pieces where lighting doesn’t wrap around them - some foliage or the spider webs for example, they’re either fully lit or they’re almost completely absent of light depending on where your flashlight shines, no inbetween. To talk more about the flashlight, the cave is both well-lit and poorly-lit at the same time. Caves are naturally absent of light, and for some portions there’s no visible light source. The game tries to explain this by saying light is bouncing off the crystals - but that would provide more of a faint glow particularly around these crystals but that’s not what I experienced. The cave is so consistently well lit that you don’t even really need your flashlight for most of the journey.
I’ve picked at the graphics specifically, but there are a myriad of other parts of the game that lack polish for what should be a finished game. Some small examples is that occasionally while holding the left mouse button to interact with items the game doesn’t seem to [i]take[/i] the input, leaving you to have to try again. This was mostly encountered trying to pick up the first radio or the diary pages later on. Another small things is that this game seems to be full of invisible walls - the game is insistent on having you follow a specific path, and when I tried to so much as go down a [i]slight[/i] hill, I ran into an invisible wall that stopped that shortcut even though the path intended is just a dozen steps to my left. There are also some invisible walls that if you jump on, you can just [i]glide[/i] along, which definitely seems unintentional. Speaking of jumping - I attempted to jump onto a roof and I fell right through - like the roof isn’t coded as an actual solid. In this same section, the game takes an arbitrary amount of time before automatically progressing you to the next portion of the game - I thought it might be me needing to explore more, but I had to just idly doddle around until some dialogue came up, throwing me into the next section. Just [b]a lot[/b] of small things, so many that I couldn’t even cover them all in here or even the video.
Next up is the controller support - so I use a PS4 controller with DS4 for Windows for many games, but in Lost Brothers this setup didn’t work. In the main menu, pressing down once seemed to highlight a random part of the menu, or sometimes it wouldn’t move at all. Going into Options caused the resolution to rapidly change among its various options. When trying to advance text in the intro, I had to press buttons sometimes a dozen times to go onto the next dialogue piece. Finally, when I got into the game and tried to move with my analog stick, John just stared at the sky and spun with incredible speed until I hit my touchpad [mouse input] to stop it. While this could just be my specific setup, I haven’t encountered anything like this in any other game.
Another big thing is that the game has some translation complications - while I’m totally fine with there being typographical errors, poor translations, or just awkward-sounding sentences, I’m [b]not[/b] okay with parts of the game being untranslated. There’s a small handful of sections that are displayed in Cyrillic. Some sections of the star-staring context areas and even some exchanges between Samantha and John can’t be read in English, and some parts of the Options menu aren’t translated either. In addition, there’s parts of the script that are credited incorrectly, such as Samantha saying a line that’s [b]actually[/b] John’s - which you can figure out with some context clues.
Lastly, there are two bugs that seemed pretty major, at least to me. One is extremely specific; to talk about it, if you’re in-game and go into the Options menu and then the Controls section you can press Escape. If you press Escape, another Options menu is summoned - this in itself isn’t the bug, but if you press Escape [b]again[/b] you’ll get stuck in this secondary menu. Backing out of the menu locks the cursor to the second part of your screen and you can’t click on the Back button which mostly forces you to have to close the application. The second is that there’s a part of the game where you just need to [i]get out[/i] of the cave. There’s only one clear exit that has this faint green glow, but once you get up to it you get teleported back to the beginning. I looked around pretty vigorously to see if this was a “[i]false escape[/i]” puzzle, but I couldn’t find an alternative exit. I looked to the Internet for some gameplay videos and found two videos from February of 2020 where the players simply just went the way I am intending to go without any type of level-loop. I understand this might have changed with the recent release patch, but if it did there’s no clear direction of where you should go to get towards the next section of the game.
[h2]The End[/h2]
That’s about it - I appreciate the transparency BitLight shared with their release post, but the game just falls a bit too short in my opinion to be considered beyond its previous Early Access status. Best of luck to your next project, BitLight!
[i]If you’re into curator groups, [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/38757311/]we have one of those[/url]. [i]Did you like this written review? Watch the video review which does have some different coverage not talked about here:[/i] https://youtu.be/8W8VDtdbij8
