By Alec Meer on April 22nd, 2011 at 4:53 pm.
I would make a gag about a game concerning resurrection being entirely relevant today, but someone religious will probably come and shout at me if I do. So I won’t. Superflat Games’ Soul Brother is another one of those delightfully crazy webgame gems which regularly pitch up on Adult Swim’s site, and is perhaps best described as a 16-bit platform game about strategic suicide.
When you die, your soul jumps to the nearest host so that you can continue. I guess Kirby is probably a good touchstone, in that each type of host has different powers – the cat can double-jump, the bird can fly, the sort of worm/rodent thing can fit into small spaces. So dying is actively encouraged; necessary even, as you’ll need specific abilities to make it through the level.
It’s smart, offbeat and charming with an agreeable soundtrack, and wastes no time in getting mildly tricky. I liked it a lot, even though it involves making a cat repeatedly plunge to its death – something I spent two hours nervously trying to prevent yesterday, when my cat climbed out the window and got itself stranded on a ledge three houses down the street. Stupid bloody animals.
Soul Brother, however: not stupid, and nor is it bloody, despite all the death. Good stuff.
Via Hello Games’ Twitter, which I shall link to even though we hate them to death because they won’t release Joe Danger on PC.
22/04/2011 at 16:55 nayon says:
Sounds like an 80′s funk band.
22/04/2011 at 16:56 nayon says:
Sounds a lot like that Cactus game called Psychosomnium.
22/04/2011 at 17:01 RobF says:
Every day is a good day to play Soul Brother. It’s happy gaming. More happy gaming, please.
22/04/2011 at 17:01 terry says:
It’s very fun and reminds me of some Amiga game where you transferred your skills between strange blobs. That is all!
22/04/2011 at 17:03 JonasKyratzes says:
This game is great fun, and I adore the graphics.
22/04/2011 at 17:24 magnus says:
‘but someone religious will probably come and shout at me if I do.’ Let them, they’ll always find an excuse!
22/04/2011 at 23:19 BarneyL says:
Just as the anti religious will find an excuse to accuse them of doing it even when they haven’t…
23/04/2011 at 14:16 BAReFOOt says:
And just to be fair to everybody: Religion is a form of schizophrenia, and therefore a mental illness.
A type of mental illness, where people reject the real world, and instead of building their inner predictive model of rules on observation, try to explain the events of the outer world based on a delusional made-up inner model. Example:
And because our inner model is our reality to us brain havers, they of course want to annihilate everything that creates a conflict with that model. Otherwise their reality would break down. Which is equivalent to the end of their existence. But often they can’t explain it away any more. Then they start to get aggressive, because they start to panic, and want to remove that mind-thorn.
So while we should help the infected ones to get healthy again (which only works by offering them a nicer reality that can be made compatible with their current inner model), it is also normal to assume they rather attack us than to adapt their inner model, and we should never ever let them enforce their delusional reality on us.
24/04/2011 at 00:29 Thants says:
We’re all trying to understand reality based on our delusional made-up inner models, give em a break. And I think you may have watched The Matrix one too many times.
22/04/2011 at 17:27 tomeoftom says:
Obligatory Karoshi mention
22/04/2011 at 18:53 Aerothorn says:
That was my first thought.
23/04/2011 at 14:18 BAReFOOt says:
Super Karoshiiiii!
22/04/2011 at 17:36 Brumisator says:
I’m gooving to the tune!
Aaaawww yeeeeaaahh!
22/04/2011 at 17:36 PleasingFungus says:
An extremely lovely game.
Here’s a launch day perfect playthrough, by the notorious Ortoslon.
22/04/2011 at 19:53 Balm says:
Reminds me of two NES games i used to have, “Little Nemo: The Dream Master” and some other one about pink shapeshifting alien wich name i don’t remember.
23/04/2011 at 05:12 Wulf says:
A boy and his blob?
22/04/2011 at 21:22 Berzee says:
Dear Sir,
I reserve the right to shout at you whatever you do, independent of my religious affiliation.
23/04/2011 at 14:19 BAReFOOt says:
And we reserve the right to hit you with a giant squeaky blow-up hammer whenever we feel like it. :P
22/04/2011 at 22:59 Benga says:
Same site “house of Dead Ninjas is great fun!
23/04/2011 at 05:07 Wulf says:
I will have to play this when my time isn’t consumed by a billion other things! It looks very interesting indeed.
23/04/2011 at 11:00 edwardoka says:
The core concept reminds me a little bit of a classic old Master System game called Wonder Boy 3 The Dragon’s Trap, except instead of being reincarnated, you transmogrified into different creatures with differing abilities and weaknesses.
23/04/2011 at 14:39 Wulf says:
I loved that game. So much.
23/04/2011 at 11:47 Saldek says:
Could learn a lot from this one. No longer will my suicides need to be random haphazard affairs. Now, excuse me while I somersault out of the window.
23/04/2011 at 13:32 stahlwerk says:
maybe my threshold for frustration is lower than usual today, but in my opinion the difficulty curve took a sharp upturn in the “cloud” levels
23/04/2011 at 22:00 geldonyetich says:
Hell platformer game is hellish. I gave up after failed reincarnation #101. Kobayashi’s Unfriendly Adventure did me in. That said, I can’t very well malign them for creating that type of game as it does interest some players. There’s people who actually played through the entirety of I Want To Be A Guy, a feat almost as awesome as it is masochistic.
That said, the other notable thing about Soul Brother is its unique style, a sort of an ironic hippie mysticism thing going on.
24/04/2011 at 07:19 Ginhyun says:
I was enjoying the game, but then I got stuck in a glitched endless death cycle at 30/33 gems.
24/04/2011 at 19:04 Tom Camfield says:
31/33 fun!
25/04/2011 at 05:35 Davie says:
I was rather sad when I found out this game did not feature a smooth-talking African-American man with a Hendrix fro channeling Sam Jackson. This is what the title brings to mind.
I want that man as my protagonist.
25/04/2011 at 09:48 aerozol says:
Sweet Soul Brothaa (JSRF) flashback