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It’s been a while since I’ve played a game I wanted to like as much as this one.
I mean, it’s basically Zack and Wiki made to look like a cartoon...this is a game I
should’ve been doing freaking cartwheels over, and I might’ve.
If I had any idea what the hell was going on.
A new release to the App Store, Pilot Brothers is one of those point-and-click puzzle adventure
games with a pretty cool visual style. You play as the renowned detectives Brother Chief
and Brother Colleague—I wonder who mom’s favorite was—as they’re investigating
the disappearance of a rare elephant from a Russian zoo.
With a premise like that, how could you go wrong?
Well, I’ll tell you how. By stretching logic like it’s freaking Silly Putty.
So it generally works like this. The brothers show up on a screen, and you have to figure
out some puzzle before you progress. So in the case of the first screen, they’re trying
to enter the zoo to start their investigation. Now, cause and effect are really the driving
forces behind the gameplay...you do one thing, another thing happens, you piece those things
together to solve the puzzle.
I’m a huge fan of this genre, but sometimes...I think it gets a little too cute for its own
good. What I mean is the puzzle solutions become more obtuse than logical. If you’re
designing the puzzles, I guess it’s natural to want to be clever...but at some point,
the cleverness completely outweighs the logic and it just doesn’t make sense.
Fortunately, after a while, you can actually watch a video that shows you the level’s
step-by-step solution. I watched that for almost every single one, and honestly, if
the puzzles made sense...why would that even be an option?
And the reason I got kind of frustrated by that is...again, I really wanted to like this
game. In fact, I still do, in a sense. I love the way it looks, I think it’s a fine game
in concept...but sorry, how the hell is anyone supposed to figure this out?
I mean, an alligator in the bathtub? Come on.
Then again, maybe it’s just me. If you’re a huge fan of these games and can think outside
the box, you might fall in love with Pilot Brothers as much as I wanted to.