PlayStation Plus Subscribers Should Play This Short Inside-Like Platformer

Picture a cinematic platformer starring a young protagonist. This small boy has to move through a mysterious and deadly world and bear witness to things no being — child or not — should ever see. It’s a brief journey tainted by darkness and developed by a Scandinavian studio. And while those details describe the 2016 classic Inside, it also defines Dimfrost Studio’s Bramble: The Mountain King. While it doesn’t rise to Inside’s level — an unfortunate inevitability given Inside’s quality — Bramble is an underplayed game that makes for a solid addition to PlayStation Plus’ catalog.

Instead of taking place in a clinical facility based in a demented facsimile of our own reality, Bramble is set within a fantastical world rooted in Scandinavian mythology. Players come across cute little gnomes, freaky big trolls, bog fairies, nasty witches, and other types of fictional beings, many of whom have a predilection for bloodshed. Regardless of who crosses his path, Olle, the young protagonist, is almost always on the menu. Many of the game’s more cinematic platforming bits have him scurrying away from some titanic beast who is trying to swallow Olle in one gulp. They’d be deadly to him as a normal-sized boy, but Bramble goes one step further by shrinking said child down to only a few inches. It’s a thoughtful way to ratchet up the tension and make these threats even more scary.

Bramble: The Mountain King’s Scandinavian Lore Serves It Well

This knack for gore gives Bramble its Mature rating, a title it tastefully pushes as far as it can. Olle desperately clambers over loose, rotting meat infested with maggots. He stabs one boss for as long as the player mashes the button, God of War 3 style. There’s a burial scene that is particularly heart-wrenching and touches on something most games don’t even attempt to deal with. It uses this darker tone to convey its lessons in a way that doesn’t sanitize them, carrying on the tradition set by Aesop’s Fables and Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio. Not all of it is explicitly violent — some parts are more haunting than filled with blood and guts — but even these scenes demonstrate its maturity and how it isn’t dumbing itself down to tell its story just because there are children involved.

While awash with all sorts of hideous violence, Bramble also contains flashes of joy. Some of the aforementioned gnomes play around with Olle and give him something more gleeful to focus on. The darkness of the night gives way to the light the sun brings, highlighting how pristine the natural scenery can be when it’s not being perverted by twisted trolls and nefarious witches. It bounces back and forth between oppressive bleakness and serenity, a symbiotic dichotomy where each side benefits the other. The darkest moments mean the brightest ones are more effective.

Bramble: The Mountain King Takes Inspiration From Inside

Bramble’s tone and presentation are its best components and are able to compensate for its relatively standard gameplay. Players run, jump, climb, and hide, as is the standard for the genre, and do little else of note. Because it is a platformer of the cinematic variety, all of these mechanics are purely functional and not meant to be the core of the experience or that rich; Super Mario Odyssey it is not. And when combined with some of the more tiresome trial-and-error segments, it’s clear that Bramble isn’t a gameplay-first experience.

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Its weaknesses highlight how it isn’t going to stand up to the genre peaks occupied by Inside and Reanimal. The expertise from those teams is near the apex of the entire industry, so it makes sense how most other games wouldn’t be able to quite hit that benchmark, a reality titles like Stela, White Shadows, and even Little Nightmares 3 have all had to grapple with in the past. 

But Bramble still has something to offer with its Scandinavian folklore-infused adventure that doesn’t outstay its welcome. Bramble uses said rich folklore well to convey a dark fable that, despite the age of its pale protagonist, doesn’t handle its subjects with kid gloves. Its original release may have been overshadowed by Star Wars Jedi: Survivor (which came out the following day), obscured by its admittedly unintuitive name, or how it came from a small and unknown studio with no pedigree to tout. Regardless of the exact reason or reasons, games like this are a great fit for services like PlayStation Plus where they can find a new audience and get some well-deserved recognition.

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