A trail of bodies in your wake..

April 29, 2011 5:57 AM

Friday Flash Fun in the (temporary) form of Soul Brother, a retro style 2d flash game from adult swim. You character can jump into a fresh body when killed, which soon proves useful as all the inhabitants of this world have different talents, and thanks to you, very short life spans.

Reach the end with as few retries and the most amount of gems in the shortest time possible, and try not to feel bad about all those poor, defenceless creatures you led to their doom. Musing about the nature of existence (suffering, generally at the tip of spikes) optional.
If you really must there are some good walk through's on youtube, for when you can't find that damn last gem and you really should stop playing by now.

posted by Dillonlikescookies (10 comments total)

Slightly belated FFF it seems, but oh well.
posted by Dillonlikescookies at 5:59 AM on April 29, 2011

Sounds a bit like Space Station Silicon Valley.

Come to think of it, they should remake that for the Wii.
posted by mccarty.tim at 6:10 AM on April 29, 2011 [3 favorites]

Oh, and the designers went on to be Rockstar North and make the Grand Theft Auto games. Never knew that...
posted by mccarty.tim at 6:19 AM on April 29, 2011 [1 favorite]

Is this related to Psychosomnium?

mccarty.tim, if you want to trace the GTA family tree also look for 'Body Harvest' on the N64.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 7:23 AM on April 29, 2011

I love this game, I've been trying to beat the whole game without dying (it counts as a death if you die and don't transfer to another creature). I'm not hardcore at all in getting the high score or all achievements in a game, so it says a lot about the playability of Soul Brother. It's short enough that you can beat it in a few minutes once you've played through it a couple of times. It almost becomes a meditative experience.

lovecraft,
It's the exact same mechanic as Psychosominium, but is less of a conceptual game and more like Super Meat Boy.
posted by lemuring at 8:02 AM on April 29, 2011

Well, that was a rage-filled way to start my morning. It took me no less than 60 lives to get through Kobayashi's Unfriendly Adventure.

(Thanks Dillonlikescookies)
posted by kensch at 9:02 AM on April 29, 2011

Quite a fun game.

Grand Theft Auto came out a year before Space Station Silicon Valley. DMA also put out lemmings as well.
posted by Harpocrates at 10:33 AM on April 29, 2011

**POSSIBLE SPOILERS**

So, I played it through this morning, having fun but getting beat up so badly at certain points that I deciding getting all of the gems wasn't worth it. Made it to ascension, played around in the next few rooms, and fell into spikes, ending the game.

Played it through again a little later, deciding to be a completist. Wasted around 60 non-reincarnation deaths in "Kobayashi's Unfriendly Adventure," which is a beast of a room, finally got the gem there, and only had 30/33. Couldn't find the last three, and nothing on my map indicating any remaining rooms or gems.

Itch got into me a bit later still, and I just had to figure it out. Taking heed from the sign that told me there were still more hidden gems to the far east and west, I tried everything I could think of to get the bird over the wall until I finally tried using the cat instead. Boom. The western room seemed really obvious by comparison, and I'm ashamed I missed it the first few times.

Then... for the last one, Kobayashi's Unfriendly Fucking Goddamned Adventure. Wasted another 60 lives on that before reloading a new game, just because I wanted a full tally of how many of my total deaths that one awful room accounted for.

So I sped through everything else, dying a total of 14 times, before heading for the final gem in that godforsaken room. And died once.

Finished everything up in about 15 minutes and change, got the gold star and happy ending, and actually feel a bit of a sense of accomplishment.

**END SPOILERS**

Thanks for the link. Best puzzle platformer I've played since Continuity or Paradox Embrace.
posted by Navelgazer at 2:47 PM on April 29, 2011

For those discussing the 'take over other units' mechanism and its history, I believe the granddaddy of them all is Andrew Braybrook's Paradroid.

Interestingly enough, while the takeover mechanism shows up once every year or two, I've never seen anyone else steal the other part of Braybrook's version - the takeover minigame, which really added an interesting rhythm to the overall experience. Normally it was pretty easy to take over a a unit one tier up the power ladder from yours. But an expert player could do crazy stuff like take over the 999 command droid with the resources of a piddling little 247 servant robot. (Higher-numbered robots had more tokens to spend during the takeover subgame; the complexity of the takeover subgame's board was related to the level of the robot being taken over.)

The other game this clearly owes a lot to is Jet Set Willy, right down to borrowing a few enemies.

Anyway, back to Kobayashi's Unfriendly Adventure.
posted by egypturnash at 3:10 PM on April 29, 2011

Kobayashi's Unfriendly Adventure had me a few times but now I can do it with only losing a life or two. There's really only the jump over the second razor disc that's a bit tough. See how the walkthrough dude does it here.
posted by Dillonlikescookies at 7:23 PM on April 29, 2011