A Way Out

Here's the latest from Josef Fares, whose Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons was one of my all time favorite indie XBLA/PSN titles, a staggeringly sad game with so many memorable scenes and moments and an ambiance all of its own. That game was perhaps best described as a single-player co-op game, a game where you control two different brothers - one with each thumbstick - as they go to the ends of the earth seeking a cure for their ailing father. I can't stress enough what a cool experience it was, subverting the notion of the "co-op" experience by making your own left and right hands work together to solve puzzles.

A Way Out has a similar gimmick in that it can only be played cooperatively via split screen. Local, online, with friends or with straners - it doesn't really matter. You and one other person control Vincent and Leo, two prisoners in adjoining cells, as they try to break out of prison and settle the score with their mutual enemy, Harvey.

Keith and I played this one over the course of three different sessions spread across four or five days after vaguely dancing around being available at the same time for the previous month. And I'm glad we finally did so, as I've wanted to play this game for a long time. Alas, sadly this did not feel like something made by the creative team behind Brothers. This felt like a very run-of-the-mill modern adventure/shooter game with a cliche narrative, all "been there, done that," and very little "hey, wow, that's really cool."

The split-screen action is occasionally played up for great benefit, never more so than when the pair are still in prison (yeah, spoiler alert, they get out of prison) and one player needs to distract a guard while another sneaks around collecting tools, or something. But for too many long, long stretches of this one, the two players are hanging out in the same area, taking the same journey along the same linear path, and the split-screen concept is redundant and unnecessary.

And the story? It just doesn't really make any sense. Character motivations are almost entirely absent. Leo wants to get revenge against Harvey because he was double-crossed, or something. Vincent's case is even more nebulous - Harvey, or someone in his gang, killed Vincent's brother. But both men have wives and children at home, who they freely visit after escaping from prison (wait, what? Cops aren't posted on those families twenty-four seven?) which makes their drive to get revenge against Harvey all the more implausible. Wouldn't a better narrative arc have stemmed from one or both men having nothing at all to lose by seeking vengeance? It all just felt so misguided. And, sure, don't get me wrong, "video game plot" is still a bit of an oxymoron even in 2018 - but it doesn't have to be!

I dunno, at the end of the day this felt like a less impressive and buggier version of Uncharted or The Last of Us, like it was aping those games' tones and cadences and beats without ever really hitting on what made them so memorable and unique. Not a bad game, really, but a pretty big disappointment after how much I adored Brothers.

Now, for some spoilers, because the late-game twist is a problem entirely of its own that I need to talk about.

Right, so, [SPOILERS!] Ahead. For the rest of the post.

Okay. Vincent and Leo successfully infiltrate Harvey's Mexican fortress (because, of course a guy small enough to "double-cross" a two-bit criminal like Leo has a Mexican fucking fortress) and kill like three dozen henchmen on their way to murdering Harvey and reclaiming some stolen diamond. (It's one of the coolest slow-motion villain deaths I've seen in a video game, to its credit.) Now, all game you've been working together with your co-op partner, likely your friend, to problem solve and to flank and kill bad guys and to determine the best course of action. Only now, Vincent and Leo return to the U.S. only to be met by an entire squadron of police officers, FBI, whoever, whatever, and,  shocker, Vincent is one of them! This whole time, Vincent's been a cop, using Leo in order to find and kill Harvey and recover the big stolen diamond.

Let's put aside how misguided and stupid this plan is, how much more sense it would have made for the cops to cut a deal with Leo for his help, how much more sense it would have made for more than two people(!) to storm Harvey's stronghold in Mexico. I mean, all of that aside, the whole thing just doesn't fit at all within the tone and vibes of the game. I was Vincent, in our playthrough, and Keith was Leo. And when it was revealed that "I" was a cop all along, Keith and I just started laughing, like it was a bad movie. And so as the final chapter played out in a twisted knot of circumstances, with me ostensibly "chasing" Keith down to try to arrest him, and Keith ostensibly trying to escape by any means necessary, I just let him get away. Or at least, I wanted to. It was clear as day, now, that this would be a multiple-ending game. Rather than gun Keith/Leo down after we'd bonded by escaping prison and visitng each other's families, I was content to let him ride off into the sunset.

Nope! The game explicitly ultimately pits Leo against Vincent in a fight to the death. You can both hang around not attacking each other for as long as you want, but, you're only prolonging the ending. You can explore the warehouse you're in for a way out, but, ironically, there just isn't a way out! The game can only end with Vincent killing Leo or Leo killing Vincent. So Keith and I agreed to let Leo kill Vincent, and to ride off into the sunset. (Again, so many problems with this. Leo was being chased by helicopters and police boats and like fifty cops overall when, somehow, he and Vincent alone ended up in a warehouse. And now, by killing Vincent, Leo can escape easily and undetected? Come on!) So Leo kills Vincent, and with his dying breath, Vincent is like, "please.. give this letter to my estranged wife..." And in ending cutscenes we see Leo do just that, and see Vincent's police officer funeral complete with twenty-one-gun salute, and we see Leo collect his family from their shitty trailer park and just ride off into, yes, the sunset.

As far as we're concerned, this is the canonical ending, the better ending. We fired the game back up as soon as it ended and had Vincent kill Leo instead, and do you know what happens? Vincent just goes to Leo's trailer to tell his wife about how he killed him. Then Vincent goes home to his estranged wife and their new baby, and meanwhile Leo's wife and son are mourning at his gravestone. There's less weight to it, less gravity, and it's clearly the less emotional ending, the afterthought, not the one the creators were proud of.

But again, the whole final chapter just spits in the face of the game's essence! There should have been a way for both men to make it out alive, even if that way was convoluted or difficult to pull off - hell, even if it had required a precise combination of events to occur throughout the game. I've wrestled with the ending of The Last of Us for a long time, but I've ultimately come around to the camp that says, "it's good!" I struggled as that game ended to come to terms with the idea of the hero, Joel, just going completely rogue and dooming humanity out of selfishness. I wanted the game to give me an option not to do that, but I've accepted that it was simply the only ending to the story that the game makers wanted to tell. Fine! But this felt different. If these men were doomed to betray one another from the start, I dunno, make me feel that. Make me realize that. Don't let me pick apart all the ways in which things could have gone differently.

My mind of course went straight to Double Dragon, the '80s co-op arcade beat-em-up in which, after you and your partner beat the final boss and save the girl, you then fight to the death over the girl. It's played for laughs there, obviously, darkly comic and twisted, almost an Easter egg of an end-game joke scene. But thirty years later, it feels hacky and shitty to make such a downer of an ending inevitable n a game about how these men built a bond and a relationship. Like, the natural conclusion here is for Vincent to let Leo get away, and then face the music. Or, for more gravity, to force Vincent to kill another cop in order to enable Vincent's escape - maybe those are your tow alternate endings right there. Or maybe there's a third alternate, where the guy playing as Leo can turn himself in, preventing Vincent from making that decision. Isn't that so much better? Here, there's still a conflict between Vincent ruining his life to save Leo's, and Leo ruining his life to save Vincent's. And, sure, for the jokers and the nihilists out there, you can still allow Vincent to kill Leo or Leo to kill Vincent. Four endings! Two outright sad, and two bittersweet. Maybe drive it home harder how much Leo's family loves and depends on him, and contrast it to just how badly Vincent has botched his relationship with his wife. Then when the game ends on a cell slamming on Leo, while his family is at home and starving and distraught, and Vincent has no one to go home to anyway, that's a special, deeper kind of tragedy. Or alternatively when Leo does ride off into the sunset with his wife and kid, and the cell door is slamming on Vincent the cop-killin' cop, Vinent goes out almost with a Tale of Two Cities type of honor.

Life is Strange is another recent game where you're asked to make a monumental and monumentally important decision at the end of the game - more or less, "save the world, lose the girl" - and when I made my choice (save the world and lose the girl, of course), the girl's funeral made for a wonderfully bittersweet stomach-punch of a final scene. "I did this," I thought. "But I did it to save each and every person here today to mourn."

Just feels like a great big missed opportunity for a game about cooperation to end on such a flat either/or like that. Boo.

Anyway, I've rambled more about the ending now than I've talked about the game itself.

Bottom line, play Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons if you haven't yet.