Burly Men At Sea Review

Set in the early 20th century in Scandinavia, three large bearded brothers set out for adventure. In this folktale game we follow the three brothers in an exploration of mythical creatures, expanding in twelve different endings. The game loop is very short, and consists of the bearded brothers starting on the ‘main island’, where they need to fill out a book case with maps from their travels. They embark on their adventure by setting sail, and is immediately swallowed by a whale. Here the branching begins. You have three ways of getting out of the whale – you listen to the Nyhmps sitting around a fire within the whale, fall asleep, and is set free with your ship. If that is not to your liking, you can either equip some barrels, tickle the uvula of the whale, and be spat out, or thirdly, negate the barrels and still tickle the whale’s uvula. Whichever you choose leads you on a new branched path where you can get 4 endings from each.

These endings consists roughly of the brothers meeting a version of Charon, whom they will race, and escape from. Another has them meeting a giant talking mountain, a third one a giant jellyfish. Through the adventures the brothers escape death in several ways – they get turned into seals, they get help from a musical wizard or they simply outwit a giant crocodile. Regardless what you do, the branch ends with the brothers talking to a giant sea snake (the god of the sea). The sea snake indicates that the brothers has more adventures to go through, and they set out for another game loop untill all the endings has been achieved.

The game is fairly short, and getting all endings is rather quick. When you boot up the game, it is very evident that it was developed for mobile (which in fact might be a lot better of an experience than playing it on a PC). The controls on the PC are tedious, and mostly consists of holding down a button for a set period of time. There is very little gameplay, and basically no existing puzzles. The story works sort of as a visual novel, where you interact a little here and there to move the brothers or click on a few items or persons. The story of the game centers around the sea snake ocean god, whom keeps track of your adventures. Although the game is said to be a folktale from Scandinavian folklore, I am not very compelled by it (I am scandinavian myself), and feel like it could have been expanded on a lot better – a great example of how this is done right is Year Walk. The story of Burly Men at Sea is rather dull, tending on boring. The game loop is boring, and has you go through an almost identical story twice each time to get the endings. Very little changes, and almost half of all the endings have you go through the same gameplay loop up till the branching of the story.

Being very annoyed by the controls of the game, the gameplay (lack thereof) and unimpressed by the story, we do need to give credit where it is due. The artstyle of the game is rather interesting and unique, very cute and minimalistic. It is reminiscent of the flat-designed trend in web development that happend some years ago, and it works quite well. If anything, this is the game’s biggest draw point. The musical score is sort of meh, it’s simple but it works with the design direction. So the big question is – is it worth playing through? On PC I’d say no, the game is quite made for mobile devices, so if you are looking for a short and simple relaxing game, this might be up your alley. But as a PC port I cannot recommend it.