Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons

Absolutely lovely. The design is breathtakingly beautiful and contains many memorable set pieces and charming little interactions, as well as a few secrets. And that experience is what it's really about: though ostensibly a puzzle game, all the puzzles are very easy and shouldn't give anybody a challenge. The joy comes from the presentation and the original and satisfying way in you traverse the environment. It's essentially an interactive story.

Though it has no legible dialog, Brothers still manages to convey a lot of nuance. The two characters—you play them simultaneously as this is a single-player game—have individuality and personality and it's wonderful to see how they respond differently to situations. You'll want to try to get them to interact with everything and everybody just to see what happens.

The control scheme is at once intuitive, confusing, and pleasurable. It feels like dancing when you get it right and manage to have the two characters behave as you think they should. And the price of failure is minimal, as you immediately get to retry the same action.

Note that despite the storybook aesthetic it does have some morbid, scary, and very sad moments. I would not recommend playing this with children.

All in all, Brothers excellently achieves its design goals. My only complaint is a bit of bugginess. Twice I had to restart the game due to breakage, and a few times I got annoyed when the controls didn't seem to respond. But these are minor issues and did not stop me from being delighted.

If you enjoy pretty little experience-type games that are light on actual gameplay then I strongly recommend Brothers.