Bramble is the game you don't expect.
And one I didn't expect to end up playing.

I stumbled upon Bramble during the Steam Next Fest event where Dimfrost participated with the demo and although it wasn't exactly the type of game I've typically entertained myself with in recent years, I can't hide behind a finger and deny the fact that I am a lover of monsters and dark fiction.
The trailer won me over giving me a violent blow to the head: I was left speechless by how beautiful the graphics, the setting and the story were for me.

This time, however, I had the opportunity to play the full version not through a gift key, but thanks to an official giveaway organized in February, during Steam Next Fest.

Why am I surprised that I played it? Because its premise was clear: it was an action-adventure/platformer and, more importantly, it was dark.

And as much as I love monsters and dark fiction, my project, this site, is called "Relaxing Gameplaid" for a reason and "Relaxing" is not exactly clickbait, but a precise statement of what I like to play and what is not for me.
Of course, it is still a guideline and not a gospel set in stone, but you can already tell that games like those in the Amnesia series, as beautiful as they are, I have no rush to play.

I've been more than happy to watch the gameplay videos, but unless I have really, REALLY important reasons... it's "thanks but no" for me.

So Bramble fell right into the category of those games that were beautiful but too stressful for me to play.

I don't like scarejumps, I don't like ending up with my shoulders so stiff that I'm only good for hanging coats in the hallway. Or having bizarre nightmares during the night. So extreme horror or survival games and especially games that are both horror and survival, are something I stay away from for the sake of my mental and physical health.

I like to play in a relaxed way, to disconnect from stress, to let go with a nice cup of some kind of herbal tea in my hands and some homemade biscuits and talk to myself about the mechanics and worldbuilding of the game of the moment.

So, how did I end up playing the demo during Steam Next Fest?

I wish I could fall on my head if I knew, but after playing the demo and sleeping on it (in a reasonably consequence-free manner), I can't say I regretted it, because despite being a dark fairy tale with a few scarejumps and moments of panic, Bramble is truly beautiful.

Bramble: The Mountain King is a dark adventure, set in a medieval period in an unspecified location and exploring Scandinavian fairy tales and folklore. Swedish, if we want to be precise.

We follow the odyssey of Olle, an eight-year-old boy who, waking up one night after a nightmare induced by a bedtime story told by his mother, goes to seek reassurance from his eleven-year-old sister Lillemor in the next bed, only to find that she has disappeared. He finds the window open and the blanket used as a rope to climb down.

Nei primi momenti dell'esplorazione troveremo un libro che racconta la storia di una bambina che, scappata dalla finestra della camera da letto di notte, nonostante il divieto della madre, s'inoltra nella foresta. Qui, invece di tornare in casa, si spinge sempre più nel fitto attratta dalle promesse di avventura delle creature che lo abitano.
La foresta, però, passa in fretta dall'essere bella e misteriosa ad oscura e spaventosa e la bambina decide così di tornare indietro, ma lunghi rovi la intrappolano impedendole di muoversi, facendo sì che di lei nessuno seppe più nulla.

Questa appare quindi la premessa in cui l'incipit ci proietta: Olle sembra davanti alla favola del loro libro, con sua sorella come protagonista.
Spaventato dall'idea, decide di tirare fuori il suo coraggio e affrontare le sfide che lo attendono per andare alla ricerca dell'amata sorella e salvarla dai rovi, dalla foresta e dalle feroci creature che la abitano.

A beautiful adventure that will take the player among the most famous monsters and spirits of Scandinavian legends.

Bramble è un gioco di azione-avventura, con grafica 3D ed elementi di esplorazione.
Il gioco non è open-world.

Lasciatemi iniziare col dire che la grafica è stupenda.
Non solo per il 3D di tutto rispetto che mostra, ma anche e soprattutto per come sono stati creati i vari ambienti silvani, la qualità delle texture ed il livello dei dettagli. La regia e la fotografia, le inquadrature e la gestione del colore mi ricordano molto lo stampo cinematografico.

It looks like an indie animated film. One of those strange pearls that the Internet occasionally spits out, perhaps leftover from some festival that the mainstream usually doesn't even care about.

Olle's animation (but in general of all the creatures, especially the more humanoid ones) in my opinion clashes with the realism of the rest of the environment, resulting a bit wooden and less organic. However, this is only noticeable for the detachment that is created, not because the quality of the animation is low.
We must keep in mind that other games, especially triple A ones, have accustomed us very well through the massive use of motion and performance capture, capable of reproducing the movement of the human body much more fluidly and faithfully.

But between motion and performance capture there is already a gulf in terms of equipment and technique and consequently also in terms of budgets.

At first I thought that neither one nor the other had been used and that the animation was the result of manual rigging. However, while looking through the game's credits I came across a "Motion Capture" section, where unfortunately we do not have any specified role but only generic "Motion Director" and "Motion Actor". I imagine it is due to their covering multiple roles, perhaps even the same ones, making it difficult to differentiate who acted for what.
It's just a shame that in this way we will be left with doubts!

That said, despite the visual gap I mentioned before and which beyond a certain limit is also a question of completely subjective perceptions, Bramble's animation remains truly more than appreciable.

Let's get this straight right away: if you're expecting big fights and complex rotations, this isn't what you're looking for.

No, not even when talking about bosses.

Olle, in fact, has practically only one "attack", everything else is "run away and jump" to evade/escape.
This attack is made up of the bright flash of the stone that Olle always carries with him and the only thing you can do is decide its intensity, making the light more or less powerful.

Stop.

That said, in general the mechanics of Bramble are the classic action-adventure/platform ones, no more no less, with the only difference that here there is no constant combat and that most of the fights are based on evasion strategies.
Moreover, I honestly believe that this is a strong point, simply because innovation is not always the best thing that can be done. There is a story to tell and a game to play and these two things must intertwine but without one horribly swallowing the other: if the bare and raw gameplay mechanics had prevailed, we would have had a lot of action, little adventure and above all the story would have really been diluted into nothing given its simplicity; if the story had prevailed, it would have been more linear, but the game would have lost a lot of the action and adventure and would have done better to define itself in another way. Not a walking simulator, but certainly not an action-adventure.

As someone who loves horror games only on paper and who approaches them only through the gameplay of others, it can be said that Bramble has without a shadow of a doubt its own psychological intensity, transmitted through the mechanics. It vaguely imitates titles like Amnesia and Soma in the escape strategies (but I have seen that many find it familiar for Little Nightmares, which I have not played), compensating with the platform dynamics and for this reason remaining on a level accessible to many people, even those not familiar with the genre.

Anyway: Olle can jump, dash, crouch, climb, cling to structures (like cages), pull, push, and swim.

These are the actions present and usable in practically every phase of the game, but there are additional ones linked to specific places or encounters, such as crawling on the ground, walking in the mud or guiding a hedgehog using a rod and an earthworm.

The only seriously frustrating thing I found was jumping.
Mind you, not jumping in general: when you jump from bottom to top or between two elements at more or less the same height it's not a problem, as long as they are in front of each other or next to each other similar to horizontal scrolling.

There are two problems though: the camera is fixed and you can't pan it around Olle to see where you're shooting his feet, and Bramble is 3D and that means movement can go in any direction.

Too many directions when it comes to jumping from high to low, especially when you have to jump from a wall-clinging position onto a lower level floor. I quickly stopped counting the number of times Olle missed completely, forcing me to either climb back up again or watch him die with a broken neck outright.

The Bosses

In Bramble you will find several Bosses (if I remember, there are 8), all creatures of Scandinavian folklore, with unique strategies that do not repeat from one to the other. We always remain very classic as a typology, but you will still have to understand each time what to do (and you could die a Dark-Souls number of times in the meantime. Or at least, it was like that for me :V ).

In my opinion, the strategies are not difficult to grasp. They are almost always sequences of different attacks repeated cyclically, anticipated by animations or elements that let you guess which attack is coming, allowing the player to prepare the right reaction.
Some are more linear and short, others are divided into different phases where what needs to be done changes, and still others that turn out to be smaller competitions of skill or reactivity.

It's definitely a game that requires quick reflexes and a minimum of speed at times. Even though you will die a potentially infinite number of times, you don't have limited lives, nor is there a game over as a closure to a series of failed attempts (those are some frustrating memories of the 90s!).

I will take a few lines to say that the bosses are beautiful. All of them, although obviously I have my favorites.
The way they are presented, the level of extreme care and the anxiety that each of them made me feel, made them really intriguing parts of an otherwise rather solitary game, as it should be given the story.

Collectible Cards

Although the game is not open-world, it is still possible to explore the game areas to a limited extent: there are in fact many nooks and crannies that are out of direct line of sight and that without pushing Olle in those directions, it is impossible to see.
In these corners, as well as behind the structures, it is possible to occasionally find carved wooden figurines, representing either bosses or Olle's allies.

It can be said that most of these are quite easy to recover and are marked with the white interaction dot as for all investigable objects, apart from a couple placed a little more out of sight.
There are two achievements linked to these: one for each individual figurine found and a second global one if you find them all.

I have to say that my appreciation for games with no or very limited soundtracks is growing as time goes on.

I'm not saying that games with background music are bad, by any means, but usually when you think "a game with no music and only ambient sounds", one of the first thoughts that comes to mind is not "wow!".

I was like that too.

Years ago I would have thought that a game like this would be missing something fundamental, that I would feel some kind of "emptiness" while playing or, even worse, that the game would be boring because of this, as if it were set on the Moon.

I would have.

However, after trying games and demos like Bramble and Planet of Lana (just the demo, at the time of writing), I can say that sometimes the music is an NPC that is too loud. Some games, like Bramble in fact, with these magnificent and extremely spacious panoramas, need to make the ambient sounds the loudest ones. Or maybe the only sounds. If this doesn't happen, the effect is a bit like that of films that are shot on indoor sets and the ambient sounds added afterwards: not very genuine and natural.
Luckily nowadays technology helps us much more than in the past, and in this case the effect is perfect.

And it's also perfect to leave the music only in certain moments or very important scenes, as you would do with special characters or specific areas, like bosses or places where it's necessary for us players to feel under pressure.
Bramble has very few moments where there is actually real background music/soundtrack and in each one the anxiety I felt grew exponentially, with a sort of Pavlovian reflex: Music = something bad or scary.

But the music, when it's there, is wonderful.

Bramble is not a game that goes easy on us.
It doesn't do so with the visual aspect, it doesn't do so with the story or with the type of narration with which it's offered to us.
The game deals with violence and death in an explicit and detailed way, without sparing the player anything, perfectly embodying the atmosphere of the "dark fairy tale" which, in reality, is dark only for the present day but perfectly in line with the era from which it's inspired.

It iisn't difficult to discover that most of the fairy tales and fables that we know today were originally much more crude and complex, with violent epilogues and moral lessons that were not very sweet. A typical characteristic of German and northern fairy tales in general that has been somewhat lost, "thanks" above all to certain animation giants who have distorted the original stories a little to make them digestible for children (so far nothing bad, it's a shame that they have become the dominant versions, de facto erasing the original ones, unknown to most).

Dimfrost, in my opinion, has managed to perfectly recover the ancestral spirit of these stories and to create that fascinating but at the same time terribly disturbing and dangerous atmosphere when you go just below its surface.

Just like in the game, where on the one hand we cannot help but be attracted by the wonderful, almost cinematic photography, which places us in front of wonderful glimpses of wooded landscapes and flowery fields, inhabited by strange but benevolent creatures that live in harmony with their surroundings; on the other hand, however, we clash with the night, the evil beings and the curses that thrive in the undergrowth among mossy roots.

It's a skillful dance between genuine atmospheres and strongly horror elements that shoot us, literally, in the entrails forcing us to gasp so as not to drown, forced to realize that in every shadow there is something dangerous that wants to devour us. Mentally, physically or spiritually it does not matter.

"Never go out at night". A mantra that parents will have repeated to their children since the dawn of time, to warn them of the dangers that lurk beyond the family environment.
And it's precisely from the instinct of preservation that man has transformed shadows into monsters and inexplicable phenomena into spirits to be afraid of, to stay away from everything that could constitute a threat.

Olle will have to face many of these creatures, ready to deceive him, capture him, devour him, if it were not for allied and friendly creatures that will help him continue on his journey to his goal.

Despite the few but frustrating flaws (such as jumping, due to the fixed camera perspective), Bramble is a wonderful journey that will keep you glued to the screen and will push you to continue hour after hour, one chapter after another until you reach the end without even realizing it. You will be accompanied by the wonderful soundtrack, which however will only be heard in the crucial and pathos moments in general, leaving you otherwise in the company of the sounds of the forest.

Bramble is not a game for everyone, however, pay attention to the initial disclaimers!