Bramble is like the sister game to Brothers. Both Swedish productions, the team of Dimfrost keyed into the same joy and heavy darkness inherent in Nordic folklore as Starbreeze did with one of the best-ever stories in games, in Brothers.

Bramble can turn on a dime. It’s a beautiful thing. You might be climbing a mountain awash in beautiful moonlight then you’re down in it, wading through entrails and guts, trying to dodge the knife of a massive troll butcher. Maybe you’re being helped by a cute helpful troll or rowing along as your young boy character, with a figure of death seated right behind him, occasionally clasping his hand over the boy’s mouth, and sending him into a nightmare battle on the fringe of death.

There is a simple, pleasing linearity here. The game is not so big so as to overwhelm any of its simple story and not so small that you it doesn’t exude feeling consistently.

There is art right out of a Swedish storybook. Seriously, in comparing many images to traditional Swedish illustrations from some books, many things are pulled and recreated in the game’s own aesthetic, paintings reconfigured, old stories decontextualized.

It’s really good straightforward stuff, like Hellblade before it, exploring a culture’s stories where most of our children’s stories actually come from, but are too rarely honored in games. It’s a special game lasting only a few hours but it does a lot in a short amount of time and is full of cheer, jumps, foreboding moods, and a really pretty soundtrack.

It’s a winner and it’s short: play it on GamePass, the right space for a game like this.