Played through Max: The Curse of Brotherhood over the last few days. It's a puzzle platformer by Press Play, who you'll probably remember from their earlier game Max and the Magic Marker and probably won't remember from their Windows Phone exclusive Tentacles. This game originally debuted on Xbox One and later got Xbox 360 and PC ports. It's basically a physics driven puzzle platformer. You're a kid, Max, searching for his lost brother. You have a magic marker--if this is starting to sound like Max and the Magic Marker, I assure you it has nothing to do with that game and is definitely a way better game--that can activate environmental puzzles. As you go through the game, the marker gets more powers: at first it can raise columns out of the dirt to lift you up. Then it gains the ability to grow branches and vines. Then geysers of water which you can direct in any direction. Then finally to shoot fireballs at enemies. You can only use these powers at specific marked, glowing points in the ground and you have a limited amount of "ink" for each. If you don't like what you've drawn you can make it crumble. Branches can be cut off and pushed around, vines can be hooked onto branches or pillars. So a lot of the game is sort of self-contained puzzle rooms using these elemental powers, sometimes in a sort of non-linear way. One very cool room has you grow a hooked shape branch, cut the branch off, push the branch of the edge of a cliff so that the long part hangs off and the hooked part stays on, connect a vine from the bottom of the cliff to the branch, disconnect the vine from the cliff--and then when it swings past the branch, jump off the cliff and catch the vine. The branch is still hanging on the cliff, and you swing on the vine and jump off to make it to your destination. There are some good brainteasers, although most rooms didn't take me more than a few tries. I'd also add that for a physics based game, the physics are surprisingly solid, I very rarely had trouble with stuff being finicky in any way.
What doesn't work as well is these periodic chase sequences where you're forced to run away from a big monster while activating the environmental powers. These sequences are often very reflex based, and certainly precision based. It's extremely annoying when you miss a jump by a milimeter and respawn like 5 seconds before that jump. It's basically a QTE rather than a puzzle. In many cases the game recognizes that the control scheme can't even perform and so slows down time while these QTEs are occurring. I think this should have been something that made them reconsider how heavily they lean on the chase sequences.
Which reminds me of the controls. You control Max with the analogue stick. You hold the right trigger to take out the marker, which basically becomes a giant cursor. While holding right trigger you use the analogue stick to move the cursor. If you're above an environmental interaction point you can hold A and move the marker to draw. You slash through a drawing with X to detach it. The game tries to make things go faster by having sort of "sticky" points where if you start using the marker it'll be drawn to the nearest interaction point. This doesn't quite work, particularly on screens with four or five interaction points. I don't know if the game has KBM controls, I never checked.
The game has maybe 20 levels which I think would take about 5-6 hours to complete. There are around 100 collectibles which take maybe another 2-3 hours. Then there are achievements for beating certain levels without dying--these are far harder. I spent 9 hours to 100% the game. If you miss a collectible, you can easily see which one (by pausing you see an ordered list of dots for the collectibles in the level, so you can easily see if you missed the second or fourth or whatever). You can replay any previous level. You can quit mid-level and resume from the nearest checkpoint.
In general I'd say the game is worth a playthrough and better than Max and the Magic Marker, which I thought sucked hard. I'm not sure I'd pay $15 for this game. It was occasionally frustrating. I feel like it's a high 7 low 8 meaning good but not great. It's not a must buy. But if you want a cute mid-length physics puzzle platformer, this is a pretty good choice. I do feel like it's been a little overlooked, in part because MS doesn't give a shit about PC, in part because they screwed around with the launch timing, and in part because reception hasn't been hot enough for the game to go viral. It's a pity, because I think it deserves a little better than it got.
The dev's next game, Kalimba, launches in February or so.
