"I love unorthodox and nonlinear methods of telling a story, I love video games that play with the medium" I say to myself with gritted teeth as I watch another six minute Skype video where an actor spends half of it silently staring and blinking at the camera. Despite every digitally recorded video taking place in the late 2010's, the laptop controls like a VHS where I have to manually rewind the entire video frame by frame to see the beginning. Tears well up in my eyes. I cry.

While I ultimately liked A Tale of Two Sons, it sadly falls into the common "Games Are Art" indie game trap where the great graphics, artistry and atmosphere are all directly in service of a narrative and gameplay that is nowhere near as impressive. The battlefield filled with the fresh corpses of giants and the man with the music box are definitely going to tickle my brain for years to come. The narrative that feels like one of those dreary coming-of-age Newbery Medal winning books you had to read in grade school as the two boys operate levers and shuffle along narrow ledges? Decidedly less so.

The downside for me is that, once I took a step back and ruminated on the game after beating it, I find the story a relatively weak progression of the two boys - one confident older brother, one wimpy younger brother - running into random events that may or may not be sad and may or may not feel a bit contrived while the puzzle part of the puzzle-platformer peters out in complexity after the troll mines. Once the environments and their masterful use of negative space and forced camera angles stopped dazzling me, the cracks began to show.

One part that bothered me in particular was the whole gryphon plotline. So the two boys save an abused, bloodied gryphon from a giant's home out of the goodness of their souls. They ride on the back of the gryphon, only for the gryphon to seemingly perish from its injuries, causing the two boys to have a moment of silence, a funeral, and a flashback to their dying father. This same gryphon - Sike, it wasn't dead! It just needed to curl up and lay on the ground like it was dead to heal its injuries! - then shows up at the end of the game to explain how they got back to the sick father in a way that feels less "narrative payoff" and more "wrote the characters into a corner and needed a method of fast travel" and doing this made the previous sad death scene feel cheap.

When the sad plot beats land, they really land. Unfortunately, not every weepy part feels necessary and there's a small amount of bloat.

I guess I can't complain too much since it's a three hour game and, at the end of the day, I did like it. The music in particular, which makes heavy use of Swedish kulning, does a lot of heavy lifting to make some of the sadder moments feel like a real gut punch. I just expected something a little...better. Especially from a game with such a high Word of Mouth pedigree.

Also this might be the only game I've played where the spear-waving, bone-wearing death cultists chanting and dancing in a river of blood and preparing a death sacrifice on a stone altar were actually the good guys. I owe you an apology, cultists. I wasn't really familiar with your game.