[This blog spoils some aspects of the game.]
"Bramble: The Mountain King" is a video game developed by Dimfrost Studio. It was released in 2023. It is heavily inspired by Nordic fairy tales. In fact, this game lets you experience them first hand.
The story goes that a little boy named Olle is looking for his older sister. In his attempt to find her, they both end up in the fairyland of that realm. At first, it looks very cute and playful. You got the little gnomes with the pointy hats and such. This is incredibly misleading though.
The playful opening of the game does not represent what's coming. You see... the problem with Nordic fairy tales is that.... there is a preponderance of bad things that absolutely love to murder and eat little children, and this game does not pull its punches.
This game has every horror you can imagine. Nothing is good. It's all bad. Everything's trying to either stab you, cut you in half, eat you up, drown you, and the game has no problems in showing a little child meet a gory, horrible end. And you will see these things happen often, since the game has a fair bit of difficulty to it.
Most of the horrors in this game are too large for you to actually fight. You do have to fight them sometimes though. You have a single weapon which is a glowing rock. You can flash it at some things, and very rarely it can turn into a sword. But most of the time you are hiding or running away from giant hags, ogres, and zombies. Yeah, there's zombies in their lore. It's nuts.
Another thing the game does not pull its punches on is the terrible aspect of killing babies. This game goes into a sort of fairy cult where people are murdering babies by drowning them. You have to deal with this for a long time in the game and it will make you sick to your stomach, if you're like me. It's rough, but they actually did a good job at it. It's just another reason we should not be entertaining creatures like this.
Honestly, I think the baby thing was the worst of it for me. I was really upset over that entire plotline. And I am not upset with the developers at all. They gave me a legitimate look at how terrifying their fairy tales really were. They censored nothing.
Another thing that happens a lot in this game is that you will go through a dark period that is scary, such as a cave or just night time, and then breech out into the daylight. In most games, that means that you are getting a brief reprieve, but all too often in this game that is not the case. Daylight will just come with more problems. It almost never lets up. Bad things just keep coming from one thing or another.
What was even the more surprising was that this game actually has a satisfying ending. I won't go into what it was, but it was very good and worth the journey to the end. And with that, I am going to recommend this game. They did me proud with this one. If you want to see how absolutely terrifying fairy tales can get, then this is the game for you. If you are easily squeamish though, you might want to avoid it.
This blog was written on April 26, 2024.
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Interesting. Scary how true to life it is. Not only are the fairy tales about things that actually happened, but even among humans in our day and age, terrible things are everywhere, and do horrible things to us, especially if we are still children.
ReplyDeleteI was pleased that we got to really see how vile a lot of these monsters really are.
DeleteA lot of ancient mythology is filled with misery. Fairy tales merely follow this tradition. If you can stomach this, the stories can be enjoyed.
ReplyDeleteIt sure is rough!
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