The Game Pass Trap: Bramble: The Mountain King has great aesthetics and mediocre gameplay. I forced myself to finish.

Bramble: The Mountain King is what would happen if you played a few indie hits like Limbo and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, then watched a horror movie while reading a book about Scandinavian folklore. You play a little boy, Ole, in an unnamed Nordic land. His sister has gone out at night to explore the countryside. Despite being nervous you follow her because she is your favorite person, and after a brief reunion she is captured by the agents of the titular Mountain King, leaving you to try and go rescue her before she meets a gruesome demise.

What does this look like to you?

What follows is a bit of a pastiche, both in terms of story elements and gameplay. You travel through a variety of environments ranging from cozy towns full of gnomes to blood and offal strewn abattoirs, mostly encountering horror-inflected versions of Scandinavian folktales about trolls and changelings. The gameplay can best be described as a 3D puzzle platformer but there are also some stealth and adventure game elements, and there are boss fights in the style of an extremely clunky third person shooter.

Bramble is a game that’s about the aesthetics more than the gameplay. It has a story too, but its de-emphasized and mostly told through narration and through optional storybooks Ole finds that tell him about the particular folktale he is playing through, often giving the backstory of the boss character and some detail about their victims. Instead the focus is on the environments, which are naturalistic and realistic in style but with fantastic elements like giant bouncy mushrooms and fairy creatures. This gives the game a look that recalls Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, another game that mixed fantasy with grounded environments, and also explored some of the “in the land of giants” themes that Bramble: The Mountain King does with its enormous trolls and some of its later environments. It’s an effective style and manages to ground the fantastical elements in a world that feels plausible, which in turn makes the horror and violence more shocking when it does happen. And this is an extremely violent game.

Behold. Violence.

It’s not just that Ole dies in a variety of ways, much like the protagonists of Limbo or Inside but with a more realistic 3D art style. He also witnesses violence against others, including watching gnomes be slaughtered and bodies mutilated and treated as meat. There are pools of blood and offal, themes of human sacrifice, and lots of disturbing imagery. It’s not really a scary game, though it verges on that at points, but it fits comfortably into the horror genre. If you like horrific images then there’s something for you here.

If, however, what you like is good gameplay, then things are not as rosy. It’s a slog to play. Ole can run, jump, climb, sneak, pick up or move certain objects, and at times throw things at targets and enemies. All of this works okay, but none of it feels great, and he’s slow, as befits a little boy. Much of the time you’re just running around from one set piece to another, taking in the sights and maybe avoiding some dangerous obstacles. Sometimes you’ll enter into a specific stealth scenario where you need to hide behind objects or in tall grass to prevent an enemy seeing you. Sometimes you’re doing some basic platforming or avoiding traps. Sometimes you’re solving puzzles involving matching symbols on a door. It tries some of the variety gameplay of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons but without any of the polish or creativity, or that game's primary gimmick that makes even standard puzzles at least somewhat engaging because of the novelty of controlling two characters. None of it feels great to play, with sequences ranging from inoffensive to frustrating and annoying.

Except the boss fights. Those just suck. The main problem is that Ole is slow and clunky to control, aiming is slow and clunky, and aiming also zooms you in so you can’t see Ole’s body to avoid attacks. Boss fights generally involve running around for a bit to avoid incoming damage, and then zooming in to aim mode to try and throw something at a boss’ weak spot(s). It all feels bad, it’s not exciting, and because you can’t see the boss’s attacks when you’re aiming, and aiming is so slow and clunky, it’s easy to die while trying to draw a bead on the enemy’s vulnerable spot. And Ole always dies in one hit. Some of the bosses do look huge and impressive, but none are fun to fight, and it would be better to have just made them into platforming challenges instead of actual bosses if this was what the combat (the only combat in the game) was going to be like.

Boss encounters would be better if they were all like this.

This leaves Bramble: The Mountain King in a bit of an odd spot. Because it’s visually impressive it can be entertaining to play when you’re cruising along, but none of the challenges are fun to engage with so it’s very easy to become frustrated when you can’t immediately figure out what to do, or execute it perfectly. I put the game down pretty soon after starting it, and kept trying to pick it back up but fell off again for the same reason. The thing that forced me to finish it was the news that it was going to be removed from Game Pass. I knew I would feel tempted to purchase it at some point just to see it through, even though I can’t imagine going through it more than once. It’s not the game I really feel the need to own but it wasn’t bad enough that I felt comfortable leaving it forever unfinished, so I set aside a few hours to plunge through to the end on the last day it was on GP. Playing through the back half of the game in one longish session was not ideal. One boss fight in particular, the one depicted in the game’s ‘cover’ art, seriously irritated me with inconsistent collision detection to the point where I almost gave up. But I persevered and finished it and was able to uninstall it without any temptation to buy once the Game Pass access expired.

I won’t say that Bramble: The Mountain King is a terrible game. It has some impressive graphical set pieces and moments that impacted me and at least gave me a reason to keep playing. I enjoyed some of the storybooks and environments. It wasn’t a miserable game to play, just a mediocre one. I also could have spaced out my playthrough more effectively so I didn’t have to marathon the back half. Playing a game that’s frustrating for such a long session just causes the frustration to compound. That part’s on me and my scheduling. I started Bramble: The Mountain King because it got good reviews and looked interesting, and I finished it because it was compelling enough that I felt a pull to get to the end. Every time I got sick of an area there was a new one around the corner that had fresh ideas to show me.

Don't get in the sack! It's a trap! Like Game Pass!

But the fact that I felt compelled to finish it all at once is also part of how Game Pass works. There’s very low friction to starting a game because it’s “free” (included with your subscription) so anything that’s reasonably interesting is worth a test drive. Sometimes you get sucked in and have a great experience. I just finished Botany Manor, and while it’s not an all time favorite I’d definitely say it’s a game I enjoyed enough to have no regrets or reservations about having played it. Sometimes you bounce off something pretty quickly, like I did with Into the Pit, a game I was interested in but did not enjoy. But it’s those in between games that are the trap. Games that aren’t good enough to be clear winners but not bad enough to easily quit. That happens with purchased games too, but unless it’s something like The Crew where there’s an external expiration date at least with games you’ve bought you can play or not play them at your leisure. There are many games where I’ve taken yearslong breaks, which is probably atypical, or just set them aside intending to maybe play them again and never actually done so, which is very common.

Game Pass makes it harder because unless it’s a Microsoft owned game you’re going to reach a point where you have to decide between one of three choices. Force yourself to finish the game, abandon it even though you don’t want to, or buy a copy either immediately or later on sale. Often finishing it can seem like the simplest option, but forcing yourself to play something goes against the concept of video gaming as an enjoyable hobby.

Of course this can happen with video streaming too, and even, in theory, with a borrowed library book, but most video game consumption in the past was done primarily through short term purchases or rentals. Subscription services are different. The upside is being able to try lots of different things. The downside is that if you’re not careful you’ll fall into this trap and end up playing stuff you don’t really like or that you don’t like as much as other things you could have played. There’s only so much time to play games, and spending that time playing something that’s just okay is less than optimal. It’s a trap I’ve fallen into before and probably will again. The Game Pass trap.

Well I feel uplifted.