Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons

Two sons must set out on a perilous journey to bring back the Water of Life to their ailing father.The airy, heartfelt Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons isn't the sort of game you'd expect from Starbreeze, the purveyors of grit and grime that previously brought you sordid fare like Syndicate and The Darkness. Unlike those grimly onerous games, Brothers operates with a beautifully spare efficiency in every aspect of its narrative and design, propelling you through a striking storybook landscape in which gameplay mechanics and thematic storytelling thread together more tightly than most games can manage. The resulting journey is so singularly devoted to creating a specific tone and atmosphere that you won't likely be able to stop thinking about it until long after you've seen it through to the end.

The simple premise has two brothers traipsing across a brilliant fantasy world seeking a mystical cure for their ailing father. The characters speak in a made-up language, allowing the game to paint its emotional hues with a broad brush. That makes it easy to get caught up in the nuances of the individual personalities; the younger brother was present for the drowning of his mother, for instance, so naturally he's afraid of swimming himself and relies on his older brother for help. But his size comes in handy in places only he is small enough to fit. The moment-to-moment journey revolves around the ways these two use their relative strengths to support the other through each of the obstacles their quest subjects them to.

OS: Windows® XP SP 2 (32-64 bits) / Windows Vista® (32-64 bits) / Windows 7® or 8®(32-64 bits) CPU: 2.4 GHz Dual Core Processor Memory: 2GB RAM (2 GB on Windows Vista or Windows 7) Video Memory: NVIDIA GeForce 8600 /ATI Radeon HD 2600 HDD: 2 GB of free Hard Drive Space