Top 10 Games of 2013 Worse Than Brothers
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is not a bad game. Brothers is a game that squanders its potential.
It's a game that leaves a fantastic last impression, but frustrates during the journey.
It's a game that prides itself on a simplistic and easy to use control schemes, yet consistently has trouble interpreting the most basic commands.
It's a game full of cinematic shots and varied landscapes, yet has an ugly and unappealing art style, constant framerate and texture pop-in issues, and some serious animation problems.
It's a game so proud of its world design that it vainly give you a bench to stare off at its world directly after sporadically skipping from one environment to another that have no logical connection.
It's a game that is all about building connections between the characters, yet fails to do so with every character beyond the titular brothers.
It's a game that has received a lot of praise on this site and in the industry as a whole and I have no idea how.
It's not that I don't understand Brothers itself. I very clearly understood what it was going for. I understand why someone who played the game would be affected by its narrative, impressed by its clever use of controls as part of the experience, and/or were blown away by its actually quite good ending. I understand the raw potential this game has to affect the player profoundly, which makes it even more disappointing that it fell completely flat for me.
No, it's not the game that perplexes me, it's the uniformity of its praise. Hey, not every game is for every person and it's not exactly a farfetched concept for people to hate well crafted experiences. Brothers to me is just one of those games that, despite critics and the public both adoring it, I just cannot understand what other people see in it, how they ignore all of its flaws.
Seems like a lot of people wrestled in a similar way with all the outpouring of support for Gone Home last year, even beyond those in the "Gone Home is not a game" ignorance crowd. Looking back on the past few years, we have the public and media both saying that Dark Souls, Skyrim, and The Walking Dead are three of the best games ever made, but even those games have plenty of detractors too.
What I'm trying to say is this: just because everyone loves something, doesn't mean you can't hate it. And just because someone hates something, doesn't make it wrong for you to love it.
And, in the end, I hated Brothers. And that's okay.
...But this list is not about Brothers. It's about turning this dumb joke on Giant Bomb on its head.
It's about the only ten games I can think of that I played in 2013 that I somehow enjoyed less than Brothers.
Some of these games are terrible and you should not play them. Some of these games hit a nerve with me and instantly felt the need to reject. Some of these games I was legitimately excited about, but just did not live up to my expectations.
All of these games I never want to play again (in their current form).