Brathian feels like a game straight from the beginning of 90's. Literally. It means, it’s hard, frustrating, unfriendly to newbies and forgives no errors in player’s moves, but still brings satisfaction to those who managed to finish it.
Description like this is often appears to be a marketing trick, but in this case it’s completely valid: this game have simplistic gameplay mechanics, relatively high difficulty and relatively low play time (if you’re not new to the genre you will meet the final boss in 2 hours or less). At the beginning of the game players will feel constant frustration, but the more they play, the more skills-of-how-to-play-it-right they will gain. This project is not as hard as a NES-inspired rage games like You Have to Win the Game (from Minor Key Games), but at some moments you will definitely want to perform a rage quit – and I can’t say that it’s bad, because the genre itself means it.
From the technical point of view, Brathian has nothing revolutionary in it, although all the key elements of it work fine. At the start of the game your hero can move, jump and attack, and take 6 hits before inevitable death – by the end of the game he or she will be able to take more hits (depending on how many health upgrades you found) and also to perform double jump and dash attack. For a platformer from NES or GameBoy that’s even more than enough.
Although this game have metroidvania elements (open world that you need to explore to find the bosses, which defeat will bring you to gaining the new skills that will allow you to explore the world even more), it have no serious RPG elements (the character gets no experience points for killing the monsters, that’s why there is no reason to kill the weak or slow monsters at all). As a result, at the first playthrough player will spend a lot of time just to find out where the game wants him to go, without any compensation for it.
True to the early 90’s era, Brathian never explains you anything. For example, it’s up to you to find out that instead of suffering tiresome battles with poisonous monsters in the tombs you need to find a small lake that leads to the battle with the underwater boss, after the end of which your sword will be upgraded to more powerful version, that will help you to go through the tombs section (almost) without suffering. Also, it’s completely up to player to find out how to perform dash attack at the later parts of the game (just try to press all the buttons at the same time, and at some point you will find [spoiler] «Down + Attack» combination[/spoiler]), or how to strike enemies with the minimum losses (for example, if the monster spits acid, you have to [spoiler] stand between him and the acid pool [/spoiler] to fight him without getting hit – of course, until it will move forward).
It seems to me like at some points this game can be almost unbearable for a modern gamer from 2010’s who can’t imagine how and why people played old frustrating NES platformers. On the other hand, I liked it a lot, so all I can say – give it a try if you still like sometimes rage-inducing but in general strangely pleasing games from the 90’s.
