How Many Brothers Does It Take to Screw in a Lightbulb? Let's Dunk on Two Brothers Until It Breaks

[Timrod]

Click Here for Update 6

: Well, we’re in New Jersey now. You might notice Mark behind me - this was actually me testing to see if I could successfully hack him into a place he wasn’t supposed to be.

: I’m not sure if he’s going to be here or not, but the good news is I have a save backup from before I screwed with it. I only recorded a tiny bit of this before stopping anyway.

: I equipped the Huge Sword just to see what it did. For the second run through, I was using the axe instead of the Krobroc Blade. Weirdly, it looks like that axe in the beach area doesn’t do anything - you just sort of have it from the get-go.

Typo Counter: 15

: This scene plays as soon as we take a few steps into Egg Harbor. It plays a song that is about as close as you can get to the theme that plays in Pokemon when your Pokemon is about to evolve without actually being a copy.

: Wait a second… isn’t that the thing that revived the fish instead of Roy’s wife?

: When we go to talk to it, the thing runs away.

: There are a LOT of pointless buildings in this town. The only one we give a shit about is the Inn.

: So I’ll be real with you guys, I don’t feel like grinding money or whatever, so I just went into the save and cheated 99999 money in. You’ll see it later. It helps make an upcoming boss fight slightly less shitty.

: Roy goes to sleep and wakes up on a beach near Fucking Wife in a scene that is absolutely not the end of Ico. Gotta love that bathroom.

: “Hey, you’re the one who made me go back and feed the cat!”

: “Well, you’re here now and that’s all that matters to me… :)”

: Yes, the emoticon is in there in the actual game script. This is Brian Allanson we’re talking about. By the way, for Jane’s dialog portrait, I’m using a photo of Gex’s dream girlfriend, Jane Fonda. Somehow, I think Jane Fonda would hate Roy Rogers, but maybe I’m wrong.

: “Roy dear, can you switch on the radio?”

: “It was our honeymoon, wasn’t it…?”

: “Our honeymoon… just as I expected!”

: “Didn’t we go to the observatory that night?”

: “Mhmm… we gazed at the stars… all night long.”

: “Just the two of us… we should do that again tonight!”

: “But Roy…”

: “…Yeah, Jane?”

: “We couldn’t go… there is no tonight!”

: “What…? What does that mean…?”

: “This is a dream! … I’m gone … you knew that… you didn’t forget that I’m gone, did you?”

: I’m turning Emo Roy on for the rest of the game and answering everything with the crying face that I can.

: “Jane… don’t… please… don’t.”

: “Roy… please don’t be upset.”

: So yeah, as far as I’m concerned this is Roy talking to himself through his dead wife the same way that Alex talked to himself all the time in YIIK.

: “What… what am I supposed to do now…?”

: “Eventually you’ll have to wake up… why don’t we play a little longer, though?”

: “I did…”

: “Is it beautiful…? What did you call it…?”

: “I called it Jane… and it’s not as beautiful as you.”

: There’s a couple of things I don’t get about this cutscene. The first is why Roy and Fucking Wife are in full color, and why the blankets or whatever are also in full color when the only one we’ve found so far is teal.

: What would’ve made this work far better would’ve been if this was a memory playing back in Roy’s dream, only the water is different than he remembers it.

: “Haha… typical you. Yes, I found one… and I think there are more.”

: “What do you plan on doing with them once you find more?”

: “I’m not sure… since I last saw you no one really cares for my theories… they say I’ve gone mad, that…”

: WE KNOW! FUCK! This cutscene has several hundred words more than it needed to. Hell, I could’ve done it without words at all: have Roy remembering himself on the beach and then the water starts flickering, and then it’s colored in.

: “That losing me made you go crazy and believe in an afterlife? Yeah…”

: Here’s what I don’t get about this at all. Roy actually has a color thing on him. It’s not like it really matters where it came from.

: “Well, I always did make you crazy! But… in all seriousness, Roy - find them and show everyone that they exist. A few months from now… what is happening?”

: “What do you mean? Do you mean the Academia Fair?”

: Roy wants to take teal to the science fair. Amazing.

: “That’s it! Remember we were going to show our findings from the [Cursed Lands]? Then seize the chance to show everyone what you have found!”

: “This… this isn’t a bad idea…”

: “Good! Darn… look at the time… the sun’s already setting.”

: “Jane! Please don’t go… I don’t want to wake up yet.”

: The next place we want to go is this bar. We actually could just skip it… I think.

: We can find Mark in here and get him back. The thing is, if you have Mark in your party, he takes a 15% cut of all the money you find.

: Now we need to leave Egg Harbor. I don’t know how I intuited this, I just kind of did. Maybe I’m just so used to the Allansons and their brand of bullshit.

: On the way out, we get accosted by… Baphomet?

: “…Do I know you?”

: “I don’t believe we’ve met. Where are you heading, Wanderer?”

: “I don’t believe I see a reason to tell you, stranger.”

: “Fair enough. You can call me Voinier. I am a wanderer like yourself.”

: “What makes you think I’m wandering?”

: “You have the look of a man who is looking for something, or someone, that he can’t quite put his finger on. Am I mistaken?”

: “Yes, quite a bit. I am heading North to see a friend.”

: Are we really just going to sit here and make small talk with Baphomet?

: “…”

: “Is something wrong? You seem…”

: “…”

: “I think you should tell me why you seem concerned.”

: What the hell kind of grammar is that?

: “I believe I know you…”

: “No, I am heading to see a friend running an expedition northwards. Is there something I can help you with?”

: “No. I am just passing through… manners are dead, aren’t they? It’s always nice to say hello.”

: “…What are you?”

: Now that we’ve been through… whatever that was… we can head to our next objective, Northern Pass. I’m seriously not sure if that’s supposed to be foreshadowing Roy going insane, or Voinier being evil, or both. Quality Allanson writing right there.

: Northern Pass is just kinda there, honestly. There’s a few “new” enemies - we actually saw one of these in Kalta. I can’t find it right now, but Brian Allanson admitted that there’s actually only I think two enemy AI types in this game.

: All we have to do from here is head to the right and we’re out. The Huge Sword is kind of a piece of shit: it’s not stronger than the axe is, and it has some incredibly fucky hitboxes that can sometimes miss enemies standing right in front of Roy.

: I also found out what the “walking sword combo” is. Basically, if you have a combo medal, you can get an extra forward thrust attack if you press the sword button rapidly while moving.

: Excavation Town has a lot of very pointless buildings, but also…

Typo Counter: 16

: From left, we have the same axe we already have, a blank book, a “knife”, the Eastern Blade and the Gallon Hammer. Since we have as much money as I feel like editing in, I bought all of it. I don’t think any of us feel like coming back later, and it’s not like any of this stuff is super overpowered.

: By the way, one of the reasons I edited in infinite money is because there’s a glitch where if you accidentally try to buy an item you don’t have the money for, the game will subtract the money from your total and not give you the item - or so I’ve heard, anyway.

: For the record, we had like… a few hundred money. I also like how the “no” option is the Tim Buckley B^U face. Two godawful tastes that go worse together.

: I equip the Eastern Blade and leave it on for the rest of the run. It’s more or less the Huge Sword minus the broken hitboxes, and might do a bit more damage it’s hard to say.

: At the north side of town is the dig site, which is our goal for right now.

Typo Counter: 17

: “Hello Professor Ulu!”

: “…Last time I saw you…”

: “You’ve been listening to the stories about how Roy Guarder is now-”

: “Raving like a mad man!”

: “…I’m afraid it may have come off that way… but it’s all changed!”

: “Here Professor… take a look at this.”

: “Surely I am hallucinating ?! What do I even call that - that color… if it even IS color.”

: “I would say that it is color. From a color spectrum adjacent to ours.”

: “Where did you get it? (Surely not from your ‘after-life’).”

: You might ask yourself ‘Is Roy really going to do a complete recap of the story?’ and the answer is it’s a fucking Allanson game, of course he is!

Typo Counter: 18

: “Roy, are you meaning to tell me that… you’ve been intentionally harming yourself to conduct these experiments?”

: “And… that you claim to have the ability to freely travel back to…life? Roy, I will not deny you that these colors exist… but I can’t accept any talk of immortality.”

: “Professor… something changed inside of me after my time with in the [Cursed Lands].”

Typo Counter: 19

: “I never said immortal. When I am on the other side… I feel how easy it would be to stay there… get sucked in forever.”

: Yeah, except what you’re describing is the fucking definition of being immortal! You can’t die unless you want to! That’s exactly what immortality is!

: “But as long as I can still find these otherworldly objects and explore the very nature of life and death, I will do so.”

: And here I was thinking that a Gameboy-style format would force the Allansons to be less wordy, not more.

: “This goes against all I believe in. Roy, I will reserve judgement on your actions until you give me more data. But now I must ask you… you believe there are other of these objects out there?”

: That’s not a typo, it’s just bad grammar. Seriously, sometimes I wonder if English is the Allansons’ first language.

: “Yes.”

: “And when you find them, what will you do with them?”

: “I…”

: “Roy, this is an amazing discovery. - and scientific implications of your discovery could surely change the world - but it WILL NOT BRING JANE BACK.”

: No, I didn’t typo any of that. That’s exactly how the text is presented in the game. There’s a full stop, and then the next line starts with a hyphen.

: “…I… I know this.”

: “Roy, make sure that the reasons you are doing this research are based in logic.”

: Seriously, is it just me, or does this sound like it was run through Google Translate?

: “You need to be careful. Why did you come to me? How can I help you?”

: HE JUST SHOWED YOU WHY!

: There’s something else here I’d like to point out. This game is clearly styled after the Game Boy, presumably from the early Gameboy Color era.

: When developers made games on the Game Boy, you didn’t see gigantic fucking walls of text like this. This entire exchange between Roy and Ulu is around 50 text boxes long.

: They did this for a reason - it was because the Game Boy was a portable system that was powered by a couple of AA batteries and had very limited memory.

: In the Game Boy era, developers didn’t know what your circumstances were when you were playing their game, or when your batteries were about to run flat. They purposely designed their games to accommodate this, and part of that meant forgoing long cutscenes that the player might have to sit through multiple times if they had to turn the system off part-way.

: Now, I’m not saying that any game with a retro aesthetic has to be 100% console-accurate: Shovel Knight wasn’t console-accurate to the NES hardware even if people thought it was. What I am saying is that if you’re going for a game that looks like it’s from older hardware, there should at least be some thought put in as to “how do we at least make the game feel authentic even if it’s not”? The Shovel Knight devs clearly thought about this, but I don’t think the Allansons did.

: “Hmm. it goes against my better judgement telling you this… but in science, it is always a good idea - to repeat the original experiment to try and achieve the same results.”

: “Now, I am NOT condoning harming yourself… but it is the most logical place to start.”

: What he’s saying is, don’t kill yourself, but… definitely kill yourself. Great mixed messages there.

Typo Counter: 20

: I’m not sure if there’s anything to actually do in the Game Over Zone, as I didn’t die at any point between the last boss and the end of this update.

: “Oh, and Roy!”

: “Huh?”

: “Get some rest you look terrible!”

: “Right.”

: Ulu has a mysterious chest he won’t let us open and a heart behind a wall. Nothing creepy at all.

: On the way back, I found a book in the library, which is a big building on the way to the dig site. This is for a sidequest in the Game Over Zone that I never wound up getting to. You’d think they’d put in a dedicated suicide button or something for getting there without having to get hit by enemies until you die. This is one reason I didn’t edit the save to have infinite HP.

: This is another dungeon that doesn’t really have a reason to exist. All you do is follow that weird texture on the ground.

: On the next screen, we run into uh… aren’t those just peahats from Zelda? Whatever. They’re the same as any other enemy in this game.

: Oh, right. Have I mentioned that this game has a co-op mode? A second player can take control of Bivare or Mark or whoever Roy has following him around. I’m not sure if it works with Steam Remote Play but if it does I’d be open to try it.

: Eventually, we reach a screen with three “angry rats” and a dead person. I think this is some kind of sidequest, but again, I wasn’t going to spend time dying on purpose to find out - especially since there’s no indication of when the game actually saves.

: I’ve noticed by watching the files on my hard drive that the game doesn’t actually save at every screen transition.

: Roy will say this once if you go near the body, but other than that… nothing.

: This area looks important, but you can’t actually go in the doors.

: These enemies are pretty annoying. They shoot lasers out of their eyes at you.

: We temporarily lose Mark again.

: Up north is a door that won’t open and a chest. The game just keeps throwing combo medallions at me to the point where I’m questioning why the walking sword combo isn’t just a permanent thing.

: Going… I think East from the door brings us to another great heart, boosting our max HP to 100.

: What we have to do is go until we find a box floating in quicksand, and then jump in after it.

: “Uh… yes…”

: “Yes but the light is getting away!”

: “Allow me to assist you in your hunt.”

: “Alright…”

: Unlike all the other times we ran into holes, which reduced Roy to near-death, we have to jump down this one.

: One thing I realized but didn’t capture is that you can actually access Roy’s bag even without Mark: if you press C, the second character will open the bag.

: “Who are you? What are you talking about?”

: “Listen, Roy. I can tell he will not listen to reason. Do what you must.”

: “I don’t know what your problem is, but I speak for myself!”

: The gargoyle is way, way easier than the giant beetle by virtue of being less glitchy. He flies around, does a stomp attack, and then shoots orbs.

: All you have to do is walk right up to him once he’s stomped and then mash the sword button. Roy will destroy any orbs he hits with his sword.

: The only real “challenge” here is that the boss gets invincibility seemingly at random, so it takes way longer than it has any right to.

: Wait, what!? We just kicked that thing’s ass! I barely even took a hit!

: This reminds me of this one moment in one of the Disgaea games where I had grinded my party to maximum stats, instakilled a story boss and got a “He’s too strong! We can’t take him!” cutscene when even my healer could take him out in a fraction of a percent of a physical attack.

: My first thought here was “Oh, they’re probably ripping off Blind from Link to the Past where you had to get him under the light to kill him.”

: Here’s what I really don’t get. Voinier is pretty clearly evil, but then… I dunno. Is this supposed to be a thing where the gargoyle is a Colossus and Voinier is this game’s Dormin?

: In a good game, they would’ve made it obvious during the fight that the gargoyle is blind. Maybe even had a mechanic around it where you can distract it somehow.

Typo Counter: 20! (no apostrophe in “Gargoyle’s”)

: Oh, so we’re in Florida?

: “One I recognized, as a violator of Holy Relics and texts… the other was one I could not understand. A soul unlike any I knew from this earth.”

: How much do you want to bet that Baphomet is the first one?

: “I arrived here before with a companion… I mean no violation to what you view as holy.”

: “I mean no violation”? What the fuck kind of grammar is that?

: “Those two spirits are gone. What is your name, human?”

: “I am Roy Guarder. I am a scientist. I’ve come here looking for something. Although, I don’t honestly know how to explain what I’m searching for.”

: What he’s saying is that he’s a scientist. Yeah, ungh, he is a scientist. Yeah, ungh, he is a scientist. He tries to live on science alone. God dammit how did I not use that one earlier? Also fuck you Roy, you’re a dipshit who is looking for magic colors to bring his wife back.

: “…Guarder…? I like this name… I am The Guardian of this swamp so I guess this makes us brethren in some way.”

: That’s uh… that’s some logic there.

: “Tell me Guarder, when you entered the dark passageway, did you encounter my servant?”

: “I may have. What did your servant look like?”

: “He is a creature of an ancient race. He appears to those who seek Holy Relics of his home place. If danger befell you earlier, it is likely he came to your aid.”

: Oh man, this is another one of those “What does Donny do?” moments right out of The Room. I explained this in the YIIK LP but it’s a scene where… someone asks Tommy Wiseau’s wife what his adopted son does, and his wife just goes “Well, Johnny adopted Donny at a young age and Donny loves and idolizes him…” and doesn’t answer the fucking question.

: Also how much do you want to bet that the gargoyle is the gator’s servant?

: “I believe I met him.”

: “We were attacked, and I was forced to leave him behind.”

: “I see… I have one more question for you… why have you journeyed this deep in to the swamp, Guarder?”

: Because he’s a dipshit who thinks the magic colors will bring his dead wife back.

: “I was following an object I saw floating through the swamp.”

: “!! This object… describe it to me.”

: “I can’t… I don’t have the words. This object defies description! There are no words in my language that can do it justice.”

Typo Counter: 21

: “…Yes.”

: “Much is explained now… I must ask you a favor then. One who has seen the light of the other world - and has returned is one who can surely be trusted.”

: “I don’t believe I understand.”

: “But you do! With my servant gone. I will not last long if the dark powers I feel flowing throughout the swamp come to call. Roy, as a fellow Guardian… I ask you to enter inside me and hide what you find.”

: “Please do not speak of it to others. It would not be safe.”

: I swear, one of the Allansons is into vore.

: “I can do this for you. But… what is coming for what’s inside you?”

: Phrasing! Phrasing! Fucking phrasing! Take that shit to Furaffinity!

Typo Counter: 22

: So wait, what the fuck is this shit? First the gator says that he feels a dark force coming for him, and then… “uh… I dunno, maybe?”

: Next time: THE VORE DUNGEON.

[Timrod]

@Riley

Bivare: What is this? Some giant beatle?
Will Smith as Deadshot: Some kinda Suicide Squad?

Sid.

@Nidoking

Still waiting for the line the game was clearly based around. Maybe it happened and I missed it.

ROY: Gee, Biv…

ROY: Gee, Biv, it sure is boring around here!
BIV: Mah boy, these softlocks are what all true programmers strive for.
ROY: I just wonder what my dead wife is up to!

God dammit how did I not see their names being puns coming from a mile away fuck.

[LaZodiac]

At Prof. Ulu’s place he says “Good Earth, what is that?!” instead of “good god” and I’m like… god I’m not even religious and that’s annoying.

I… don’t like this overly detailed explanation for why we have to have a Jabu Jabu’s Belly dungeon…

[Timrod]

@LaZodiac

I… don’t like this overly detailed explanation for why we have to have a Jabu Jabu’s Belly dungeon…

The good news is, there kind of isn’t one. I stopped recording after the giant gator said his bit, and as it turns out you just go inside him and get purple. I also found a new softlock in the next update and am hoping it didn’t fuck my save.

[Nidoking]

@Timrod

Out of all of this, the thing I want to know most is: Who the heck is PhisPhace?

That scene with Voinier is one of the moments that I remember having seen elsewhere, and I have to say, I think it’s genuinely a bit creepy, in the way it’s clearly supposed to be. It doesn’t really seem to fit anything, and would have been served well appearing without all of this… this around it, but the idea of someone resetting a conversation over and over and saying less and less, getting closer and closer each time, almost suggests that either they’re aiming for a particular result that they have the power to get, or perhaps that they gained the information they needed and they’re gradually erasing the memory of the person they’re talking to. At least, that’s the sense I got.

@Timrod

: “You need to be careful. Why did you come to me? How can I help you?”

I do want to defend this line in particular, though. Roy has shown Professor Ulu a new color, but the question of “what is my role in this quest of yours” seems pretty legitimate. It’s not to help spread the word, because Roy’s asked Ulu not to tell anyone, and there doesn’t seem to be any course of study available. So, what DOES Roy want? It’s not obvious that he’s asking for directions, especially since he said that he’d seen where the various colors were from above.

[Timrod]

@Nidoking

Out of all of this, the thing I want to know most is: Who the heck is PhisPhace?

PhisPhace is some random NPC with one line of dialog who wanders around Egg Harbor. I’ll grab a screencap of him once I’m done recording the next area - I spent like 40 minutes wandering around trying to find progress and so I had to stop in the middle of a dungeon.

@Nidoking

That scene with Voinier is one of the moments that I remember having seen elsewhere, and I have to say, I think it’s genuinely a bit creepy, in the way it’s clearly supposed to be. It doesn’t really seem to fit anything, and would have been served well appearing without all of this… this around it, but the idea of someone resetting a conversation over and over and saying less and less, getting closer and closer each time, almost suggests that either they’re aiming for a particular result that they have the power to get, or perhaps that they gained the information they needed and they’re gradually erasing the memory of the person they’re talking to. At least, that’s the sense I got.

I totally agree. Taken by itself, it’s not a bad scene at all - it’s just that they don’t do anything with it and it gets lost in the noise of the rest of the game.

[SpammyV]

I mean we’re kind of already there with the ROYGBIV puns. Roy Guarder. Roy G. & Biv.

[Timrod]

Click Here for Update 7

: I stopped recording after the gator bit because I assumed this was another dungeon. It’s actually not. Hilariously, when I loaded the game, Mark was just kinda here even though we left him at the start of the swamp.

: “At last… I have found another…”

: “Never forget… I have entrusted you with this task…”

: We then have to go back through Adventure Road, because of course we do. I’ll just cut it out, but what you do if you somehow get a copy of this game is head north and there’s signs marking an exit to town.

: You then just drop down and you’re back at the start.

: Halfway through recording this update, I found out that someone (probably one of the Allansons, because we know they did this with the third ending in YIIK) put out a full guide and a world map for this game on Gamefaqs. It contains minutiae that I think only the Allansons would know… like this place.

: This place is in Adventure Road. You go down the cliffside and then head Southwest for a while until you can go north to here.

: The Blue Shrine is completely pointless.

: In one of the side rooms is a shield. You’d think this would be useful. It’s not. The shield works exactly like it does in the 2D Zelda games: if a projectile hits you and you’re standing still, the shield absorbs the projectile. It breaks after three hits.

: There’s also a boss here. There is no fucking point in fighting this boss, and it’s very hard to do anyway.

: Basically, the boss jumps around the arena diagonally. This makes him very, very hard to hit with how broken the hit detection is. He also hits for like, a third of Roy’s HP.

: Naturally, I die and go to the Game Over Zone. There’s a room through a blue warp that brings you to Palma, who was the dead lady we saw earlier.

: Going down this hole will dump you back in Adventure Road.

: I go and kill Wild Cat just because I can.

: Fuck you, Brian Allanson.

: On the way out, the shield breaks. There is a weapon we missed in the swamp, along with an item for a sidequest. The sidequest is broken and has to be save edited to work.

: Outside, Palma’s house opens up as a new location. There is no point going in there, it’s just a room full of enemies and a couple of chests with money in them.

: The mermaid line just kind of comes out of nowhere. There is no mermaid here.

: She’ll also open a cave behind her house, but again, there’s nothing in there but trash.

: I also tried to go get the weapon we missed in the swamp. It’s a spear, but for some reason I can’t pick it up. For reference, it’s in the cave that unlocked once we teamed up with Voinier, right before where we jumped into the hole. You just take the exit on the left instead of the one on the right.

: Fortunately, someone on the Steam discussion boards posted their save file, and I was able to just edit the spear in.

: I also found the sidequest item while I was at it, just because I could. It’s in this cave, which is in the swamp if you keep going to the right of where we first met Voinier there.

: The Animal Capsule is in the Northwest corner.

: I got real fucking confused as to what exactly I was supposed to do, because I recorded this part before I found the guide. There’s no option to show Professor Ulu the shard, and there’s no new cutscene from sleeping at the Inn. As it turns out, what you have to do is die.

: Not gonna lie, getting some real YIIK vibes from this.

: “…This is something I do not understand myself. Who are you?”

: We are then shunted into the regular Game Over Zone.

: There’s a guy here who tells us to go check out Fishington. Do not check out Fishington. We will, and there is nothing there but an unintentionally hilarious softlock.

: We can also trade the book we picked up for a napkin. I don’t know what this does or who to give it to.

: After going back through the North Passage that we took to get to the excavation site, we can go east of Egg Harbor to reach Fishington.

: There’s also the Western Hills, which is our real destination…

: And a shop up here.

: Most of the weapons here suck. From left to right: Razor Axe, Hook Flail, Swift Dagger and Cheap Boomerang. The Cheap Boomerang is a cruel joke and none of the other weapons can cut grass… except the Swift Dagger, which is actually a decent pickup because it has the least broken hitboxes of any weapon thus far.

: When you first equip the boomerang, you can throw it. It goes a few tiles and then drops to the ground. It doesn’t return to you: you have to manually pick it up (and yes, it can get stuck in walls so you can’t pick it up) and until you do, you’re stuck with Roy’s default dagger.

: Let’s do Fishington quick. Fishington has two buildings: this one and the Mayor’s Office. The Mayor’s Office is a dumb dialog loop. This one, though…

: Then the game softlocks. This feels like something Roberta Williams would’ve done in King’s Quest.

SOFTLOCK COUNTER: 5

: Let’s just go to the Western Hills.

: There’s a bunch of NPCs here who don’t do anything.

: I spent like 40 minutes wandering around this giant empty shithole of an area. At one point, I thought I had somehow come to the wrong place and was supposed to, I dunno, go somewhere else. You can actually see where progress is on this screen: it’s the cave entrance right by the weird lizard house.

: The lizard house is full of enemies and is kinda pointless. It has some weapons in it, though.

: Straight back, behind a mermaid who makes a dumb joke about where the hearts in the grass come from (“they come from small animals in the grass”) is a whip. The whip is actually a pretty solid weapon, but is useless because it can’t cut grass or break rocks: both of these are things we need to be able to do and can softlock you if you can’t.

TYPO COUNTER: 23

: I actually tried the “short thick sword” for a bit. It has broken hitboxes, so into the pile it goes.

: You see that rock there? Never destroy that rock. If you do, it’s a long journey back. Let’s just pretend I didn’t go through any of that shit and go into the cave, shall we?

: There’s a handful of skeletons in here but we’re not going to bother fighting them.

: Tip Top Peaks is heavily “inspired” by that one mountain area in Link’s Awakening.

: The first room in here is full of those laser eye things. They nearly took me from full health to zero before I even got in the room, so I just let Mark kill them. Mark will attack things if they get close enough.

: I managed to escape with just a tiny bit of health left.

: You would think this pillar would be part of a puzzle or something, but it’s not.

: Down the stairs is another floor of laser enemies. What I could’ve done is used the spear - it has a long reach and relatively working hitboxes but can’t cut grass.

: Instead, I just took some hits and ran for it.

: Time for a stupid puzzle.

: “Yeah… no problem!”

: “I have an idea… I will help you, and you can just owe me later? How about it. I help you, you help me?”

: Is this supposed to be the villain, or Mr. Dink from Doug?

: Voinier drops an arrow statue we can use to save this guy.

: You have to throw him an arrow, and then warp to the statue.

: And now we can go on to our real target, Birds Road.

: Birds Road is where the combat in this game really starts to suck.

: This is where the game introduces assassins. They’re not hard, it’s just that they out-range most of your weapons that can reliably hit.

: In the corner, we find throwing stars. They’re a limited ammo replacement for the arrows, and as far as I can tell do the same damage but in a spread shot rather than a single one.

: See that statue with the open mouth? Those shoot a wave of fireballs at you if you get near them. Roy doesn’t move fast enough to dodge them, and because of where it’s set to trigger you’re almost guaranteed to get hit by it.

: For some reason, when I killed these assassins it briefly flashed to this screen.

: The shield here can be obtained by kicking a bomb down to it and blowing the boulder up. I don’t know why I bothered to do this - it takes forever to kick the bomb down there.

: You have to go past a couple of these and I couldn’t get the shield to work.

: That lizard-shaped house to the right has a room full of chests. Most of it’s worthless garbage, but the bottom-right one has the Rifle… which is actually a quest item and not a weapon.

: To the north-west is the bird temple… which is shaped like a lizard and shares none of the weird totem pole kind of designs we’ve seen coming up here.

: Actually… shouldn’t this be kinda hard? Roy’s only seen her in the Game Over Zone, where she’s purple - but this world has no words for color. I’m just imagining him going “Uh, she’s a bird.”

: This dungeon is easily the most broken thing we’ve run into thus far. To open that door on the left, we need to hit this switch. This should be simple - just use an arrow, right? The problem is that the arrows won’t shoot upward for some reason. They don’t even come out of Roy’s sprite - he’ll make the throwing motion but it won’t do anything.

: What I had to do was break out the spear, which is just long enough to hit the switch. I have no idea what you’d do if you were playing this in 2013 and missed the spear but also didn’t know about the Kickstarter code thing for the giant foam finger, the only other weapon that can reach the switch. As such, I’m going to label this a game-breaking bug.

GAME-BREAKING BUGS: 2

: The next room has a statue in it.

: There’s a bomb just south of it that you can’t see from the entrance because of the arbitrary darkness mechanic.

: The floor switches in the next room cause the room to light up if you step on them. There’s a switch here that opens another door.

: This room is… honestly kind of dumb. If you stand on those white squares on the floor, it lights up the room so you can see the path, which is otherwise invisible. The light stays for a fraction of a second after you leave the button.

: It’s the other half of this room that’s the real dumb part. See those cracked walls? We can attack those.

: This statue leads to the final area of the dungeon. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to kick the bomb we saw down the stairs up here, right?

: Wrong. The Allansons handled this in the worst possible way - what happens is that if you try to kick a bomb up there, there’s an invisible wall at the base of the stairs that causes the bomb to slide underneath them - this is why it’s not visible in this shot. Either that, or the game just kind of selectively broke when I tried to kick a bomb up there.

: And so naturally, you’d assume we need some kind of item to break the statue, right? Wrong again. You’re supposed to kick the bomb up there, but we haven’t reached the event flag to give the stars collision.

: Instead, we need to drop down to another area, because that makes sense somehow.

: Off to the right of that area is where Ceila is. This is why I didn’t edit in infinite HP for Roy, because it will actually softlock the game here if you try that. Hell, the game almost softlocked with the regular amount of HP.

: It’s not at all obvious, but what we have to do is sit on one of the two mats next to her and press down.

: At this point, the game takes our controls away, and I was very afraid I had run into a softlock… or worse. No, that’s how this is supposed to go.

: A good ten or fifteen seconds after it takes control away, the game starts doing damage to Roy in a loop until he dies, because simply having a warp to the Game Over Zone wasn’t good enough.

: “How is this possible?”

: “I will show you the way, but you must walk.”

: The text being fucked up here is intentional… I think. There was a line from Roy that was on screen for a couple of frames where he asks what she’s saying.

: Ceila’s gimmick is that she can fly Roy over small gaps.

: “Now, meditate on a point and let an arrow fly!”

: If you can barely see the arrow, you’re not alone.

: “Share with me your wisdom.”

: “You are on a dangerous path Roy Guarder.”

: “!.. I spoke to you once, as if in a dream… but I just saw you, alive on Earth… how can --”

: “For a man of such self-assuming intellect, you do resort to crude methods… I do not need to destroy myself to come to this place.”

: “There exist other ways… in the temple, I meditate throughout the day, every day… I have done this since I was little. In that time I have never seen one like you…”

: I immediately decide that Roy is now horny for this bird furry because that’s exactly what Andrew Allanson would want.

: “Well… I guess I have that effect on people.”

: “You came to this place in a way many do, that is nothing new. Then you left, that is also nothing new. They all leave eventually…”

: “Then I saw it. You… returned. I wasn’t sure at first. Your people all look similar in my eyes. But then I saw you again… and this time you led another back with you.”

: I guess her entire job is just meditating herself into what’s apparently the waiting room for the afterlife so she can… uh…

: “You were not meditating, this I could see… no, you were dying – did die… a lot… on purpose I suspect a few times.”

: “Listen…”

: “No! YOU LISTEN! I don’t know why you continue to do this, or why it is allowed to continue.”

: So yeah, I guess her job is just to be a ghost cop or some shit. It makes no sense.

: “But you need to stop now. I will teach you the ways of the spirit. The techniques of my people will let you [visit this place without death].”

: “That sounds less… painful…”

: “We did it a moment ago… it was no doubt less painful than what you are used to…”

: “Do not trick yourself into thinking you can ever stay away from this place… once you have seen it, you will be forever drawn to this place…”

: I mean, you could’ve just said “forever drawn here” since the subject is kind of implied but whatever.

: “…”

: “Finish my trial with me… and I will teach you the ways of my people…”

: “… But didn’t we just…”

: “I helped you… you are weak in spirit, and could not do it alone.”

: “…Right…”

: “My father will [test your spirit]. I was tasked with this as part of my own trial.”

: “Of course I will!”

: “First I must complete my trial, and you can help with that.”

: “Of course!”

: Here, I get really, really fucking confused. I assumed that you couldn’t bomb that statue from earlier, so therefore her father must be somewhere else.

: Nope! Talking to Ceila removes the invisible anti-bomb wall.

: We can then grab the Wing Key… except we haven’t seen any locked doors. I knew where they were because I kept wandering around looking for her father, but they’re in a place you actually can’t reach or even see without Ceila.

: The locks are in an area across a gap from the dungeon entrance.

: “It is a trial. When the [chieftain] is locked away in the shrine… a temple servent (sic) must come here and do… a task to open the door.”

TYPO COUNTER: 24

: “What do you mean ‘task’?”

: “I would not tell an outsider even if I knew… It has not been done for a hundred years! But, by listening to the [whispers of the spirits] we can do it.”

: I… don’t think I get it. So you want to show Roy this ritual thing, and to do that he has to complete your quest or whatever, but you can’t let him see the quest. How does any of this make sense?

: “I see. Just have faith…”

: “This is a trial for you as well as for me.”

: You just said it wasn’t! You just said he couldn’t know of the trial or whatever because he’s an outsider! Make up your fucking mind!

: Now we have to find a saber.

: The saber is on a separate platform south of the one with the statues on it.

: I go back and hit the statue, and then go for the door.

TYPO COUNTER: 25

: Except it won’t open. This is because there’s actually three statues. They’re pretty easy to find and all do the same thing the first one did.

: Oh, you thought this was the boss? Hahaha no.

: This brings us to a switch that opens…

: A door right above that first switch at the dungeon entrance! Time for more backtracking. Don’t you just love backtracking?

: And now we’re at the boss.

: “Father - I mean Great Chieftain - I have found the spirit walker… he has agreed to learn from us.”

: “No Great Chieftain… he found his way here without my aid… but he has no wings, so I gave him aid… as was a part of my trial.”

: “His name is Roy… Roy Guarder… sir.”

: “He… does not possess the same… abilities… as his friend.”

: We then enter into a fight with the bird chief. He is a very broken boss and I’m going to have to cheat to get around him.

: As a boss, the bird chief is a direct ripoff of Agnahim from Link to the Past. He teleports around, shoots fireballs, and also has a lightning attack that is kind of hard to avoid if you’re trying to hit him.

: The boss basically does not take damage from weapons - he has a shitload of HP. What you’re supposed to do is reflect his fireballs, but this doesn’t work for a multitude of reasons.

: I couldn’t get a good shot of it, but what he does is fires his fireballs in one of two patterns: either a + shape or an X. He tends to prefer the X shape, which is an issue because they tend to either go into walls before you can hit them back or bump into the statues.

: His lightning also takes off quite a bit of Roy’s health bar. Here’s the real kicker, though.

SOFTLOCK COUNTER: 6

: If you die during the fight and come back down from the Game Over Zone, the game softlocks. This fight is a fucking nightmare.

: With the power of sex and weed, I get a shot of his fireball attack. You can see that three of them went into walls. There’s also a decent chance that he teleports away before the fireball hits.

: I should also mention I had to die once before the full 69,420 HP kicked in, but it did.

: Once his HP gets to about half, he turns into… a generic giant enemy that can be hit directly with Roy’s sword for damage.

: He likes to spam lightning in this form, but with 69,420 HP this isn’t really a concern.

: That fight was complete bullshit. Ordinarily, I’d transcribe the next part, but I want you to experience the Two Brothers ™ experience of sitting through like fifty text boxes.

TYPO COUNTER: 26

: The dialog just kind of cuts off here. This isn’t something I did.

: And now that’s three colors out of… seven? Probably seven.

TYPO COUNTER: 27

: What is this guy, Senator Armstrong?

: “I do.”

[beast_of_burden]

I hate how the text just, lingers when nothing is being said. It shows off the incompetence of the programmers more than any essay could. Also, how do you fuck up hitboxes and boundaries this badly?

[Timrod]

@beast_of_burden

I hate how the text just, lingers when nothing is being said. It shows off the incompetence of the programmers more than any essay could. Also, how do you fuck up hitboxes and boundaries this badly?

: I was actually working on a post-mortem that would explain this last night, but it kind of went out of scope. Let me start by answering your question directly.

: The reason that the hitboxes and boundaries are so broken is that for some reason, Andrew Allanson decided that instead of making his game move on a grid system, he’d do everything by the pixel.

: That kind of system can work in Multimedia Fusion 2, the (now-deprecated) engine used to develop Two Brothers. Freedom Planet did that (as far as I know anyway) and it worked.

: Doing things by the pixel is extremely complicated. This is because you have to account for the player being in weird positions, and have to also do everything with a coordinate system. You can see this in the save file:

: This weird pixel-coordinate system is why everything in the game is so broken. I have a feeling that a lot of the softlocks are due to the game running into a situation where it doesn’t know where to put you, so it just kind of locks up.

: This softlock from Update 5 is a great example of that. The darkened tiles behind Roy are solid, and the pillar in front of him is solid. On a grid system, you could prevent this from ever happening by putting the two things on separate grids to ensure the player could never be standing on both at the same time.

: I’m pretty sure this is also why the softlock on the bird boss happens - the game doesn’t know where to put Roy if he enters the room from the Game Over Zone, so it places him out of bounds.

: The hitbox issues are derived from the issues with the movement system. If Brian had gone with a grid for movement, everything would be easy. Instead, as far as I can tell, he was basically hard-coding hitboxes for every weapon without understanding what makes those work.

[Image Credit: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=412007318]

: One thing I noticed he definitely did was failed to account for sprite collision. You’ll notice in the above screenshot that in L4D2, the melee hitboxes start inside the player’s model. There’s a good reason for this: if they started where the actual weapon model is, enemies could “dodge” attacks by being too close. This definitely happens in Two Brothers, because enemies can get between Roy’s weapon hitbox and his actual sprite.

: Good hitboxes are hard even for seasoned developers. The team behind Skullgirls, as an example, took years to fine-tune everything to avoid those kind of scenarios. Brian Allanson, who had basically zero game development experience, did not. All he had to do was go with a grid system and everything would’ve worked out.

: So, where does the blame for this lie?

: Brian Allanson blames the Multimedia Fusion 2 engine a number of times in his Kickstarter posts as to why he felt he needed to remake the game.

: Now, while it’s true that MMF2 wasn’t the greatest engine (it was re-made as Clickteam Fusion 2.5 with a lot of changes) that’s not really the root cause. As I mentioned earlier, plenty of other games have been made in MMF2: Freedom Planet and the original Five Nights at Freddy’s among them.

: I also looked it up, and MMF2 did in fact have a system for making grids for movement. Brian purposely didn’t use it.

: So, in a nutshell, that’s why everything is so broken - because Brian went with a complex solution that I don’t think he really understood.

[beast_of_burden]

So he put the cart before the idea of a road was thought up of for the horses to even ride down. That explains so fucking much.
This was sold for real money. Thirty bones iirc.

[LaZodiac]

God this game is agonizing. I’ve been following it up until this entire bird nonsense and now I feel completely at a loss for what is going on or what happened.

[Timrod]

Click Here For Update 8

: Now that Roy has fulfilled his spirit quest or whatever dumb bullshit, there’s a meditation mat in his bag that he can use to go to the Game Over Zone.

: In the Game Over Zone, there’s a sidequest that involves talking to this guy five times, but each time you have to leave the area and come back.

: I went to walk to him, and then Roy fell into… I have no idea what this is. Little did I know, it’s actually a softlock. This is the Bird Shrine, but an area of it that’s out of bounds.

: Now, this isn’t a softlock… yet. We can go into Roy’s bag and meditate again to go back to the Game Over Zone - in fact, you can do this even if you’re already IN the Game Over Zone. However…

SOFTLOCK COUNTER: 7

: It is actually a softlock because now even if we talk to the Guide, we get sent back here and thus we cannot make it back to the world map. Thankfully, this somehow was not a save-breaking bug. I’m just as mystified as you are.

: The first couple of times, he makes small talk.

: While we’re up here, there’s a thing we can break to get a “Super Small Mermaid in a tiny bottle”. This is part of a collection sidequest that feeds into the bigger collection sidequest - that being the one we got the Rifle and Animal Capsule for.

: His third location (I talked to him once off-screen a few updates ago) is in the northwest part of the zone. There’s a “Sword of Color” here that we can pick up, but it never actually shows up in our inventory.

: Fourth location is through a red warp thing you can see from the center of the zone.

: The last one is through a warp. If you’re wondering what he’s saying, it’s dozens of text boxes about how he came here trying to find his wife and couldn’t and then he lost his face and now he’s not sure if she went to “heaven” and he didn’t, etc. I can transcribe it if people really want to see it.

: Anyway, he gives us the “Ubie Doll”, which is easily the most useless piece of equipment in this game.

: The doll gives Roy the ability to jump, so it’s basically the Roc’s Feather from Link’s Awakening. The thing is… jumping is USELESS. It doesn’t let you access anything new, and you can’t use it to jump over enemies - in fact, doing so gives them a free hit on you.

: Even funnier is that if you use it in a town, Roy will do his game over death animation instead of a jumping one.

: And now we get the amazing Bivare segment of the game. The good news is that we can skip like, half of it.

: “Recently, she joined the Order of Ramsden (A secretive religious sect).”

: The traditional Allanson “tell, don’t show” technique at work.

: “When we last spoke it wasn’t on good terms. My ever growing doubts about the ‘after-life’ led to a long quarrel.”

TYPO COUNTER: 28

: “Hopefully I can get an audience with her. Last I heard she had taken a vow of silence - which might work out in my favor as she’ll be forced to listen.”

: “I don’t know what I intend to prove, but atleast I have proof of my beliefs.”

TYPO COUNTER: 29

: Bivare has a spear and his throwing knives.

: Now, what we’re supposed to do is get on that boat and sail to the next destination, but we can get there faster by just swimming.

: We can find a magnifying glass for Bivare north of the dock. It does nothing.

: There’s a big expanse of nothing on the other side, but if you just keep going to the right…

: You wind up at a path.

: The building we want is in the northwest corner.

: “It’s good to see you too, Agnes.”

: “…I’m happy you came. I was starting to miss that face of yours.”

: Yes I’m recycling icons from YIIK and yes it’s because I couldn’t think of a good joke to use for one. Also, didn’t he say she took a vow of silence?

: “Careful now. Don’t want to go giving me the wrong idea.”

: “HAR HAR, Mr. Guarder.”

: “It really is nice to see you. I traveled quite a while to get here, you know. Roy and I were at Egg Harbor.”

: “It’s lovely there this time of year. How is Roy doing?”

: This doesn’t sound at all like a nun who has just taken a vow of silence. If I had to write a character like that, I’d probably have them just speak in ellipses until Bivare starts making fucking sense.

: “As good as can be expected. His wife dies and he throws himself into his work. In typical Guarder fashion of course. He still hasn’t gone to see Jane’s parents… not since the funeral, at least.”

TYPO COUNTER: 29

: “I see. It’s a shame. She was such a beautiful young woman. Don’t you think?”

: “Of course. She was one of my best friends. Neither of us will ever be the same.”

: I know he’s talking about Roy when he says neither of them will be the same, but the way he’s saying it makes it seem like he’s saying “Neither (Fucking Wife) nor I will ever be the same” and it’s like, no shit, she’s dead.

: “She’s in a better place now. Even if you don’t believe so.”

: “That’s why I’ve come. To talk to you about that.”

: “You don’t mean to seek spiritual advice from me do you, Biv? I never thought this day would come.”

: “Hey now, don’t get ahead of yourself. I’ve come to brag. I’ve seen it.”

: “You’ve seen what? The light?”

: Now, I know this game has no plot to speak of. It’s not clear what Roy or Bivare’s motivations are beyond “science!” and it’s not really clear why we’re doing anything at all. This scene though… this scene is totally pointless. What’s it trying to do? What is the purpose of this scene?

: “!? What do you mean?”

: “Remember when Jane died and Roy was ranting - about colors and the after-life and all that?”

: “Well, we’ve been experimenting with it. And we can prove it exists. You see, Agnes, there exists another real filled with the most GLORIOUS colors.”

: “I would try and describe them… but there aren’t words to explain how amazing it is.”

TYPO COUNTER: 30

: “- you claim exists. But I can tell you that there is another world beyond this one. And it’s incredible.”

: “So you’ve come to mock me? We may not be together any more, but I thought you still respected me. You’re a real rotten bastard Bivare Guarder. Get out of here!”

: “Hey! Calm down Agnes! I’m here to tell you that I understand.”

: “Now I don’t know about your religion and other beliefs… but I can promise that there is a life beyond death.”

: “But how on earth do you know? What did you do?”

TYPO COUNTER: 31

TYPO COUNTER: 32 (2X TYPO COMBO!)

: “What is this complex device…?”

: “A knife.”

: “So you stabbed yourself to see the after-life? If it was that easy to come back from, someone would have done this ages ago!”

: Seriously though, what the fuck is the point of this scene? They’re talking about shit we’ve already seen for like, the third time now.

: “THIS is where it gets weird. Something happened with Roy when his wife died. For some reason, he can walk between our life and the next.”

: “I couldn’t think of a way to return, but then Roy appeared… and he brought me back. It was incredible.”

: “… … I …”

: “You don’t believe me?”

: “It’s… just…”

: “A little far fetched?”

: “It’s just unfair! Why does the agnostic scientist get to experience the glory of the afterlife and - and not the faithful like myself? This is madness.”

: No, this is Two Brothers.

: “Calm down… you’ll get there eventually I’m sure.”

: “And what do want from me? How can I help?”

TYPO COUNTER: 33

: Have you noticed something yet? This is almost the same conversation that Roy had with the professor at the dig site.

: “Your order has been around longer than most. It’s said that your faith has a leader… someone who has lived longer than any other human or animal.”

: “I was wondering if you could tell me where they are.”

: “…”

: “I’m not going to cause trouble. I just want to speak with him. I want to see what I can learn.”

: God dammit. I’m not sure if this is worse than the whole Golden Alpaca thing or not.

: “Thank you Agnes.”

: “Of course. I am happy you believe.”

: “Any chance of you running off with me in search of adventure?”

: “…You know I can’t.”

: “Not even for science?”

: “Take care of yourself, Biv… don’t kill yourself again. You’ll get to the after-life one day. Just don’t bring it on yourself.”

: And now we’re Roy again. I’m very surprised we didn’t have to backtrack through Road of Birds again.

: Our next destination is the poorly-signposted Narrow Way.

: It’s like, two screens long.

: See that little black thing following Mark? That’s a random encounter with enemies. Our next stop is the graveyard, because there is a hilariously broken sidequest there.

: The graveyard is fucking huge and also full of graves for what I assume are family members of the devs.

: The only reference I could find was a grave for Harry Mason, the protagonist of Silent Hill 1 who later dies in Silent Hill 3. Fuck you, Allanson! Keep your hands off Silent Hill!

: There’s a grave to the left of the entrance that has a key in it. It’s not immediately obvious what this does.

: There’s also one to the north-east that has a collectible in it.

TYPO COUNTER: 34

: I wasn’t sure about the names on the graves until I saw this one and a couple near it with the name “Alfaro”. Jose Alfaro and Tony Manfredonia were both composers on this game. They also did work for YIIK. We’ll talk about them in the post-mortem I’ll work on immediately after this update.

: If you have the Graveyard Key, Roy will stay here until it gets dark.

: There’s two underground mausoleums that will unlock, one in the north-east and one in the south-west. I think you have to do this one first but I didn’t really check.

: There’s another bottle mermaid to Roy’s left, but that’s not why we’re here.

: In one of the corners, kind of on the north-west side, is this jar that’s spewing smoke. You’re supposed to break it and fight a bunch of skeletons, but I had the spear equipped and couldn’t break it.

: These skeletons are different in that they throw fireballs and also are vulnerable to arrows when regular skeletons are not. I had to die and come back with the axe to finish them. By the way, if you die after destroying the jar, it resets your progress on the sidequest.

: The second mausoleum has a chest with a sidequest item in it. It’s through a gate which looks like it needs a switch to open, but you can just walk right through it.

: There’s also a great heart we can eat to bring our health maximum to either 120 or 140. I lost count. One thing I should mention: you see that sarcophagus behind Roy? If you hit those, skeletons come out. The thing is, the skeletons that come out aren’t always visible, so you can die from invisible skeletons.

: Once we destroy the jar in the second mausoleum (I forgot to capture it but it’s exactly the same) we can go to… a hole in front of Fucking Wife’s grave.

: This is the “Fallen Hero”. He’s a boss without a health bar who sits in one spot and does nothing. I’m not even kidding.

: He has an orbiting skull that will damage you if it hits you, but… other than that? He won’t move, won’t attack, and won’t do much of anything. He’s also immune to Roy’s attacks.

: You can damage him by pushing one of these bomb things near him. It has to be within a certain pixel range, and if you go too close the bomb teleports back to its starting location. You then have to finagle Roy into a spot where it’ll trigger the boss to raise his scythe.

: He’ll then charge forward into the bomb and take damage. The thing is, not all statues have bombs on them. It took me a second to realize this.

: You have to do this four times before he gives up. Now, you might ask why we couldn’t just trigger his attack and then swap places since the bombs are mounted on arrow statues - and the reason is that if you go too far away he drops his scythe immediately and just goes back to sitting still.

: “Who… what are you?”

: “I am… I was a great warrior and a member of a sacred order. Our brotherhood wandered the realms maintaining peace, and protecting the innocent.”

: “When we discovered this land, our leader sensed the importance that it would play in the future. The task fell to me to guard this land, until such a time came when I was no longer needed.”

: “However, over the course of the years I grew restless and angry. Eventually my brothers returned, but our commander said that the events had not yet come to pass.”

: “As they turned to abandon me once more, I lashed out in my anger and murdered my leader.”

TYPO COUNTER: 35

TYPO COUNTER: 36 (2x Typo Combo!)

: “As the darkness closed in I swore that one day I would return to get my revenge. You asked who I am. I am an oath breaker, and murderer. I am the soul of the nobel warrior that I once was.”

TYPO COUNTER: 37 (3x Typo Combo!)

: “By defeating me you have helped me to finally overcome the anger that consumed who I was. The sun is about to rise, and when it does all the damage that was done above will be undone.”

: “I will finally move on. But before I do I ask that you take my old weapon.”

TYPO COUNTER: 38

TYPO COUNTER: 40 (3x Typo Combo!)

: I’m glad I did this to rack up the typo count, if nothing else. The scythe is special in that it’s a “color weapon”. As far as I can tell, that means nothing since I think all the weapons in this game actually do the same damage.

: Next time, we’ll progress with the “story” and uh, probably see some more softlocks and two dozen typos or something.

[Timrod]

: Now that we’ve done that last update, let’s continue with the post-mortem. Last time, we talked about why so many of the bugs in this game happened.

: This time, we’ll be talking about what the Allansons did to try and save the game from failure - or more accurately, what they didn’t do… and whether the game could be fixed.

: When Two Brothers released on Steam in December of 2013, it was almost immediately obvious that something was very wrong with it.

: Some people couldn’t get the game to load. Others quickly found game-breaking softlocks as early as the introduction to the game, before Roy’s wife dies.

: There weren’t many immediate responses by Brian or Andrew Allanson. The earliest one I could find actually addressing the bugs was posted on December 20th, a full two weeks post-launch.

: The Allansons did update the game… exactly once, to fix a handful of bugs that addressed almost none of the myriad issues people were reporting to them.

: I should mention that the game (and this patch) both apparently came out on the Humble Store and to their Kickstarter backers in DRM-free form about a month before the Steam release.

: The developers largely remained silent until March 27th of 2014, nearly four months after the Steam release and five months after the initial Humble Store launch.

: If they ever did any further polishing, no one ever saw it. I’d also like to address the “Mac/Linux” thing quick - they never existed.

: That isn’t to say the Allansons didn’t promise them - they did, in both the Kickstarter and on the Steam store page. There’s a number of posts from Mac owners who purchased the game on Steam only to find out that it didn’t run. I should add that this was before Valve was sued in the European Union and forced to implement a refund policy.

: While I don’t know exactly how long it was there for, posts on the Steam discussion board indicate that the Steam store page for Two Brothers said it was Mac-compatible for several weeks post-launch.

: Finally, in May of 2014, Brian announced that he had scrapped plans to patch the existing game and was going on to remake it in Unity. I’m not sure how he planned to accomplish this, but there’s some hints from his later posts.

: It appears that at first, Brian had attempted to port the original MMF2 game to Unity, which wouldn’t work for obvious reasons.

: The most obvious death knell for Two Brothers, or Chromophore as they were now calling it, was in September of 2014. Why, you ask?

: By September 2014, Andrew and Brian had been contacted by a publisher - likely Ysbyrd games, the publisher for YIIK - and had signed a contract to produce YIIK full time.

Nintendo eShop - Chromophore: The Two Brothers Director's Cut E3 Trailer for Wii...

: What’s clear is that Brian DID work on Chromophore for some time - he even put out a trailer that made it to Nintendo’s Youtube channel for a release on the Wii U.

: So why didn’t it release? To understand that, we need to look at Brian’s posts to the Two Brothers Kickstarter from a few years later.

: First, at some point between 2014 and 2016, Brian had a falling out with Tony Manfredonia and Jose Alfaro, two of the three composers (the third being Andrew Allanson) for Two Brothers.

: The falling out was so bad that they demanded Brian remove all of their content from the game. I can only guess as to why this was - both Jose and Tony were in the credits for YIIK.

: My first guess is that one of them discovered that Andrew had plagiarized a song from Shadow of the Colossus and left because of the possibility they might be associated with that.

: The second is that there was some kind of internal falling-out. That’s also possible.

: On top of this, the Allansons had apparently paid money to a third party to complete the console port for the Wii U, only to have the company renege on the agreement.

: I have no idea what the truth of this is, and I really can’t speculate as to why it happened.

: The thing is though, in 2017 - a full year after they now knew that the game was music-less and not coming out on the Wii - they were still insisting that Chromophore would be a thing.

[Image Credit: https://twitter.com/j_rake_pygm/status/1123854194987937793]

: By the way, one frightening thing I discovered is that there are apparently fans of this game. Weirdly, even people who bought it in 2013 still seem to hope there’s going to be a re-release. That fanart is from 2019, by the way.

: There’s also YIIK fans and I question their sanity.

: So here’s the big question: could Two Brothers be fixed? I think so. Maybe. I think it’s more fixable than YIIK is to the point where I don’t understand why they’re even trying to salvage YIIK.

: This game has issues that can be fixed with patches. YIIK has issues that can’t be solved without basically remaking the entire game from the ground up.

: The other thing I don’t get is why they haven’t just announced that Chromophore is dead. It’s pretty clear that it is, especially now that they’re focusing on YIIK again.

: The next time I do one of these, it’s going to be on the connection between this game, YIIK, and the lessons that Brian should’ve learned but didn’t.

[beast_of_burden]

I like to imagine that the only fans of YIIK is just parallel versions of the Allanson brothers.
These two games, they’re so fucking awful, that they’re extremely enticing. You can’t get rid of these failures from your brain. I want to see them fail a third time, honestly, just to see how worse it can get.

[drcakey]

I wish I’d worked with MMF or Unity in the past, so I could look at Two Brothers and YIIK and have some idea of what they might have been doing wrong to get so many softlocks and crashes. But my only experience is with Game Maker and RPG Maker, both of which have their share of issues but don’t, um…crash when you hit the fullscreen button. I do remember that in the FAQ on his website the guy who made I Wanna Be The Guy didn’t endorse MMF either, so it being buggy seems to be a common issue.

[LaZodiac]

@Timrod

: “What is this complex device…?”

: “A knife.”

This is a shitpost. This is a shitpost in video game format. They genuinely think this is clever don’t they?

The point of this scene is to dunk on religious people. That’s my best guess.

I’ve fiddled with MMF2 a bit, and while it is certainly buggy, there are definitely ways they could have fixed a lot of these problems.

[Timrod]

@drcakey

I wish I’d worked with MMF or Unity in the past, so I could look at Two Brothers and YIIK and have some idea of what they might have been doing wrong to get so many softlocks and crashes. But my only experience is with Game Maker and RPG Maker, both of which have their share of issues but don’t, um…crash when you hit the fullscreen button. I do remember that in the FAQ on his website the guy who made I Wanna Be The Guy didn’t endorse MMF either, so it being buggy seems to be a common issue.

The fullscreen thing is actually not ENTIRELY their fault. I managed to fix it a few updates ago - the reason it crashes is because of the Steam overlay. I could theoretically play in a larger resolution, but I figured that since I’d already done several updates with the standard 320x420 resolution I’d just stick with it. Not to mention that there’s nine different resolution levels, so I’d more than likely fuck up a recording by forgetting what I had it set at last time. I think it resets every time you load the game.

What is their fault is that they clearly knew about this, but didn’t post it anywhere. I had to find out through diving into the Steam discussion board.

@LaZodiac

This is a shitpost. This is a shitpost in video game format. They genuinely think this is clever don’t they?

The point of this scene is to dunk on religious people. That’s my best guess.

I’ve fiddled with MMF2 a bit, and while it is certainly buggy, there are definitely ways they could have fixed a lot of these problems.

Yeah, that’s something I was thinking about. Obviously, some of the problems are related to the movement system, and you can’t really fix those without redoing that from the ground up. But there’s definitely issues they could’ve fixed without even touching it - sure, combat would still be a buggy mess, but at least they could’ve removed some of the softlocking and save-breaking. I’m really not sure why they didn’t at least attempt some minor fixes like that and then maybe address the combat and movement in the remake.

@beast_of_burden

I like to imagine that the only fans of YIIK is just parallel versions of the Allanson brothers.
These two games, they’re so fucking awful, that they’re extremely enticing. You can’t get rid of these failures from your brain. I want to see them fail a third time, honestly, just to see how worse it can get.

I mean, I’d love for them to succeed and make a good game, but I don’t think it’ll ever happen. I haven’t heard anything from either of the Allansons about releasing a third game and I’m not sure they have it in them. I’ve heard interview Andrew did with a couple of podcasters after YIIK released and it does sound like he had a rough time of it.

That said though, I think they hit rock bottom with YIIK. Two Brothers is buggy and kind of boring. YIIK is actively bad to the point where when I LPed it, I had to shut my brain off for certain parts and just keep clicking the screenshot button. That’s why it’s a puzzle to me that they’re trying to fix YIIK by doing stuff like adding a new character. The problem with YIIK was that there was way too much pointless dialogue, and they’re trying to fix that by adding in more dialogue.

[Timrod]

Click Here for Update 9

: There’s actually nothing we need to do down here, but there’s an optional weapon at the hot springs south of the graveyard, so might as well.

TYPO COUNTER: 42

: How did Brian expect anyone to take this game seriously when he couldn’t even run it through a spell checker? Seriously, I get a game having a couple of typos but this is ridiculous.

: “Unless… are you the new guard? You’re here to keep men out right?”

: “Aye captain!”

: “I’ve heard enough. In fact… I heard you like tridents.”

: I like how that line almost sounds like something Sae would actually say in Persona 5. “I heard you like tridents… where did you learn to use one, and how!? Someone must have told you how to use a trident! There’s no way you could have learned how to use one any other way!”

TYPO COUNTER: 43 (Can we please get through more than three lines without a typo? Please?)

TYPO COUNTER: 44 (Apparently not.)

: I also stopped for a bit to test out the Reaper Scythe. It’s not good. You might notice that blue skeleton - the scythe turns any hearts you get into skeletons that wander around randomly and damage enemies on contact.

: I’m also pretty sure you take more damage with the scythe equipped.

: Oh, PhisPhace is here.

: There’s a soccer field here which I think was supposed to be a mini-game at one point. The game gives you a prompt on how to kick the ball (you run into it) but you can’t do anything with it.

: “Yeah. There is something I’m looking for up there.”

: “Then you must be looking for despair and mental anguish. This place is CURSED man! There is a reason it has it’s name!”

TYPO COUNTER: 45

: Nah, I already played YIIK, thanks.

: “This isn’t my first time going here.”

: “Yeah? And I’m sure it sucked the first time you went.”

: “…”

: “Look, if you’re serious about going up there you’re going to need the key.”

: “Where can I find that? Last time I was here there wasn’t even a gate.”

: “The guy who owned this village locked it up after his kids went missing. They went playing up there one day when he was working late… poor guy.”

: “Where can I find him?”

: “The pearly gates or the depths of hell? I don’t know. The guy went crazy out of grief and they say he killed himself. I bet only the dead can find out where that key is now.”

: What the fuck is this dialogue? Seriously, what? It sounds like Andrew trying to be David Lynch and just failing miserably.

: “Hey, I haven’t seen you up here before. When did you get here…?”

: “I’ve been wandering up here for a while now… I have no idea how long I’ve been up here.”

: “May I ask how you got here?”

: “It’s all a blur. I don’t rightly remember.”

: “I think I’ve heard of you before.”

: “Oh, is that so?”

: Seriously though, what the fuck is this dialog?

: “Did you live in the Cursed Village?”

: “Are you the devil, sir? Have you come to torment me and remind me of my loss? Damn, you sir! Damn you.”

: Pfft. I’d make a Loss edit but this game doesn’t deserve that kind of effort.

: “Please, forgive me. I shouldn’t have been so direct.”

: “No, it’s fine. Who are you?”

: “I am Roy Guarder. I’m a scientist looking for information on this after-life. I believe the Cursed Lands contain a piece of information I need. And I believe you are the only one who knows where the key is.”

: “Haha! I locked that place up for good. I never intended for anyone to get back in there again.”

: “I understand that your kids are in there. What if I promise to look for them?”

: “There is no way they are there anymore. Surely they’ve died. I’ve been waiting here for them to pass through. But they never come.”

: “Wouldn’t you like to know for sure?”

: “You really are persistent, aren’t you? You used my kids to try and get this…”

: If you’ll remember from the start of the game, Roy claimed to have spent months traveling through here with his wife.

: The Cursed Lands are effectively Two Brothers’ version of Essentia’s mind dungeon in YIIK.

: Tagline for YIIK right there.

: This feels like baby’s first horror game in so many ways.

: There’s a long boring stretch of nothing for a while.

: This puzzle. This fucking puzzle. I’ve seen Voidburger’s videos on some of the bullshit puzzles in Silent Hill 3, but this tops most of them.

: This tells us that we need to “mirror the Square Moon” to get in. The other sign tells us something about Full, Crescent, and Eclipse, which is presumably the phases of whatever the Square Moon is.

: The spheres down below Roy have three states that cycle when hit - you can see all three in the screenshot. So logically, the answer should be the opposite of that: Black for Eclipse, Crescent (because a mirrored crescent moon would still be a crescent moon) and then White for Full. Or so you’d think, anyway.

: Naturally, there’s also no explaining which way it should be oriented, but I figured that it went from left to right.

: The answer, for some reason, is black, black, white. I have no idea why.

: There’s three directions we need to go in, and each one has a wall that closes behind Roy once he passes it.

: The enemies here don’t really attack you so much as they just kind of wander around. I don’t know if their AI is broken or what.

: Here, we encounter the same enemy, only taller.

: The smart thing to do would’ve been to just run past them, but since they’re not immune to arrows I just shot them to death.

: There’s a couple of very abrupt screen transitions.

: And finally, we have the small version of whatever these things are. The small ones die in a single arrow.

: There’s a small side path you can take to get the Photograph of the Cursed Lands, which is a sidequest item.

: A few screens later, and we run into a giant shitpit of enemies. There are so many enemies here that it actually causes the game to lag.

: I killed a few of them, and then got to the point where I just said “Fuck it” and ran past everything. The enemies do pretty minimal damage and the lag helps stop them wandering into your path.

: This is the central hub area for the Cursed Lands. We still need to do the West and North sides, but I chose North first.

: Basically, this is a dumb ice puzzle, kind of like the one in whatever that late-game area was in Pokemon Red/Blue.

: This one’s really easy. What we have to do is move that one that’s just to the right of Roy down and then to the left…

: And then it’s just a matter of pushing the “princess” up, left, and down into the middle. I feel like this entire dungeon is just a collection of stupid, overused puzzles.

: That puzzle is the entirety of the North area, so let’s go to the last one.

: This is supposed to be related to that sign about faces or whatever, but the answer is to use the smiling face at it. Using the wrong one takes damage, and I got it on my third try.

: We then go through a thing that looks remarkably like that fish building in Egg Harbor.

: Oh right, I forgot to mention - this entire dungeon has this dumbass “scary” chiptune music that has three repeating notes in the background and it’s just insanely bad.

: Now we go through this room and beat up on this heart. There’s no clear indication that it works - you have to just keep doing it. I thought there was some kind of puzzle involved, but no it just has a lot of HP.

Typo Counter: 46

Typo Counter: 47

: A lot of this last area (and honestly a lot of this game) feels like busywork. There’s no reason for this dungeon to be this long.

: We go back, and there’s this random NPC who just kind of numbers stations at us for like… 12 textboxes. The first couple textboxes are hexadecimal but I put them into a hex to text thing and nothing came up.

: I hope you’re ready for an intentionally broken boss fight… as opposed to the two unintentionally broken ones we’ve run into.

: I probably would’ve quit here had I not had the guide to explain this fight to me, because it makes zero fucking sense. There’s this kid who opens that door and shoots a fireball out. He’s unimportant.

: I had to really work to get a shot of this, but what you’re supposed to do is go to the other doors and this random enemy will appear when you open them. You have about three frames to hit it before it closes the door.

: Once you hit the door enemy enough, you get warped onto this one-tile border area and can’t leave. I thought the game had softlocked again.

: Instead, you get into an RPG battle with a Missingno. How original. I’m not sure if the QR code on it does anything.

: Once the Missingno attacks, we can then attack it on the regular game screen. Each attack will cut to an RPG screen.

: After a few attacks, the game dumps us back in the boss arena, only now there’s a weird zombie boy or whatever.

: Attacking it causes it to teleport, but doesn’t actually do anything to the boss’s HP gauge. After a few hits…

: We get dumped back on the border and have to fight Missingno again.

: This is so fucking stupid. So fucking stupid.

: Once it uses “creepypasta”, the the entire screen fills with garbage. You have to find the real one (it’s directly above Roy) and attack it.

: The next phase is more teleporting bullshit. “Sadnessa” spawns behind you and tries to hit Roy with an axe, and the teleport has no animation or anything. This entire phase is basically “stand still and mash attack”.

: This last phase is by far the worst. It’s basically pure RNG.

: You’ll notice that the boss’s health bar has gone up. This is because this phase of the fight consists of a bunch of enemies spawning. The enemies drop hearts, and can eat the hearts to heal.

: Every so often, what happens is that the game will flash and you’ll be back in the middle of the arena with a couple of hearts pre-spawned. If you don’t grab them, the enemies will. This fight took me several minutes due to bad RNG, and I couldn’t initially figure out how they were healing.

: This is the final part of the fight. You get three options - in this form, you want to attack the boss.

: Once it turns into Proto-Jane, you want to use the shield option.

: Well, that shit’s over. Thankfully. Holy fuck that sucked.

: Now we get to go through the same area that we were in at the start of the game, because boy does this game love repetition.

: “Is this… is this the one you told me about? The reason you and your wife traveled this far into the Cursed Lands?”

: “It is… when we last arrived here…”

: “Human, please tell me your name.”

: “I am Roy Guarder, and this is my traveling companion Mark Humeny.”

: “I believe that I owe you an apology. Tell me Guarder, how do you come to walk with the living?”

: “When you attacked me, I found myself in another dimension. A place that men call the ‘Afterlife’. Unlike others, I was able to return to this world.”

: Game, I think we already know who Roy is and how he got here, please stop repeating it.

: “Indeed… and what of the one who restored my life?”

: “What… what do you mean?”

: God dammit Allanson, Roy saw what happened! Stop acting like everyone’s a fucking goldfish!

: “I too was in this afterlife. Something called me here… someone perhaps.”

: “I don’t recall much of that day. I remember… the trap… and Jane.”

: “Why have you come to this place? What do you seek? Did you not find the answer you were seeking many months ago?”

: “I did not… if anything, I just found more questions. I came here to try and find evidence of where the fishmen originated. And then… the trap… you awoke, and I died.”

Typo Counter: 48

: “I’ve come here seeking an object. An object of a strange color.”

: “…I know what you are speaking of.”

: “Do you know where I can find it?”

: “Yes, but first tell me about the fish people. What have my children become?”

: “They are a proud and fascinating race. Their intelligence has helped our world progress rapidly.”

: “Is that so…? I am proud of them then. When we came to [this side] I was skeptical of what we’d become. But I knew we would spread life around this earth.”

: “[This side]? Where is it that you come from?”

: “I thought you had abandoned your quest for this knowledge? Is it not the [Spectrum Shard] that you seek now?”

Typo Counter: 49 (technically, that first sentence isn’t a question)

: “I…please. I would like to know both answers.”

: “Haha! All in good time, Guarder. You came to the one with knowledge of your creation… and you ask me about shards of color! Haha!”

: “You are a curious race… humans. Always concerned with the next world, never with your own.”

: This could almost be good writing if it hadn’t been done to death.

: “Are you implying that these shards of color are from… the afterlife?”

: God dammit! The fucking bird chief or whatever fucking told you they were! We know this shit already!

: “I don’t like this term you use… afterlife. You do not possess the words to properly describe a realm… so you pretend that it is not as important as what you experience now.”

: That’s the exact opposite of what you just fucking said! The entire thing about humans only caring about the next world! Fuck!

: “That is not so. That is just the word we use for…”

: “But I do not come from THIS realm… I come from your afterlife. Is THIS not MY afterlife?”

: “Do you mean to imply that the fish people… come…”

: I mean, yeah, unless they reproduce asexually or are all hand-created by their dipshit fish god who can’t even keep his own story straight.

: “I do not mean to imply anything, Guarder. I grow tired of this chatter. I knew you’d return.”

: “I had to…”

Typo Counter: 49

: “Instructed…? BY WHO!?”

: This entire exchange is around 60 text boxes, and I feel like it could’ve been maybe a tenth as long and still gotten the point across.

Typo Counter: 50

: “Can you tell me what it is…? What is this object?”

: “I do not understand myself. You should take it now. It is not safe here.”

: “What has become of these lands?”

: “They’re horrible. You’re smart to stay here.”

: “Indeed. This isn’t exactly the most pleasant of places to visit.”

: “As I expected… Enter, Roy. Take the shard and leave quickly.”

: “But I still have so much to learn from you!”

: “We will speak at a safer time. Things have changed… we are entering a new era.”

: Oh boy, time to go inside a giant animal for the second time this game.

: We now have four out of the seven color shards, and this game still doesn’t really have a plot.

: Next time, we’ll tackle a sidequest that is probably going to give us a shitty weapon and get the fifth spectrum shard. Hooray.

[drcakey]

Well it makes sense for Missingno to be there, Pokemon Red & Blue came out in 1998 so…wait wrong game.

@Timrod

What the fuck is this dialogue? Seriously, what? It sounds like Andrew trying to be David Lynch and just failing miserably.

Probably because it’s him trying to be Haruki Murakami and failing…I don’t know about ‘miserably’ but definitely failing.