Bramble: The Mountain King Review – Little Nightmares meets the Brothers Grimm

Bramble: The Mountain King is a platforming adventure game set in the fantastical but dangerous world of Nordic folk tales. The game will take you through highs and lows of emotion as you are greeted by some of the cutest creatures and beautiful landscapes, only to immediately smash your heart against the wall with some of the most heartbreaking and shocking depictions of horror and violence I have seen in gaming. Bramble: The Mountain King is everything a Grim fairy tale ought to be, leaving me both in awe and shocked by what I saw on screen.

The sentence “Some of the most heartbreaking and shocking depictions of horror and violence I have seen in gaming” should give you some taste of what you have in store with Bramble, but you deserve a warning anyway. If on-screen depictions of child death, child harm, and children in distress is something you can’t handle, I strongly urge you give Bramble a wide berth. And I mean a wide berth, as depending on how uncomfortable the aforementioned subjects make you, you may not even want to look at screenshots of this title.

While I want to recommend Bramble: The Mountain King to everyone, as I did genuinely enjoy it, the aforementioned subject matter is understandably a deal breaker for some, and it is something that is featured FREQUENTLY in this game. Your character, who is a child, will be displayed in graphic and gruesome deaths when you fail a platforming segment or boss fight. Human and gnome children are constantly put in danger, make horribly realistic sounds of distress, and are depicted dying in cruel ways on screen. I am someone who has trouble seeing children in distress in movies and Bramble really tested my tolerance for the violence.

While I feel like readers deserved that warning before continuing into this review, I don’t want to make it sound like the depiction of child violence is a negative for this game. On the contrary, I think the danger children are put through is a necessary element for Bramble: The Mountain King’s storytelling. The game depicts the sort of dark world children would face in the old Grimm Fairy Tales. Stories such as Hansel and Gretel are terrifying and powerful specifically because of the danger the child protagonists go through, and Bramble fits right in with that special and powerful niche of horror.

I would also like to point out that Bramble: The Mountain King does not use child death or violence towards children lately. Each point in the game where children are subjected to the horrors of Bramble is treated with great reverence, and is a shocking and emotional moment. I applaud Dimfrost Studio for their dark and heart wrenching story, even if I feel the need to warn certain people before stepping into it.

Bramble: The Mountain King follows the story of Olle, a young boy who along with his sister finds himself stumbling into a strange, hidden world deep in the forest. Together, they explore the beautiful landscape, make new friends by the way of gnomes, and have fun together in this new landscape.

That is, until the sun goes down. When Olle’s older sister is taken by a hungry troll, the boy is left alone to navigate the dark forest, narrowly avoiding death throughout the troll’s hunt as he musters up the courage to save his sister.

All of Bramble: The Mountain King is played through platforming segments and the occasional minigame. You’ll navigate the terrifying environment by jumping, climbing, and sprinting along perilous terrain and deadly boss encounters. The platforming is good, with detailed animations that don’t get in the way of making your jumps. I only had one issue where I failed a jump that I clearly made, and beyond that is was solid and smooth.

What I really liked about Bramble’s gameplay is that there was never any real tutorial. You kind of just learned by playing the game, with the occasional text in the background telling you which button to press to do certain actions. This was super refreshing, as a lot of games I’ve reviewed lately lock you into tutorials that slow you down and make the experience kind of a drag.

The game will occasionally change from a platformer into several minigames, mostly involving spotting or throwing something from a fixed location. You’ll play hide and seek with gnomes early on, and its a fun little break from the running and jumping. Most boss fights are won by throwing something into the eyes of your foes, which fits with the David and Goliath feel they have.

Bramble: The Mountain King is a game all about presentation, and it does it phenomenally well. Not only does the game look and sound beautiful, with an indescribable fairy forest to navigate through and a score that builds awe and tension equally well, but it tells a story with few words. Most of Bramble’s story is told through set pieces, cutscenes and animation, and everything is presented with such cinematic excellence that it feels like an arthouse movie.

I often say that story-heavy, mechanic-light games like Bramble are hard to justify as video games. While Bramble definitely features cinema level visual presentation, it’s not hard at all to justify this as a game. Besides the platforming being solid, this is a story that really benefits from the personal touch you receive by playing through it — Creating a special kind of tension you’d be hard pressed to find elsewhere.

Bramble: The Mountain King was reviewed on the PC. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in the Game Reviews section of our website! Bramble: The Mountain King is available on Steam, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, and Playstation.