Pilot Brothers

With this game looking like a Russian cartoon from a few decades ago, I hoped I'd get some insight into the two main characters. They seem like a pair you'd grow to love fairly quickly. But seeing as the duo barely speak, in an effort to make the game as easy to translate to as many different languages, I imagine, it's hard growing attached to them. They might as well have been copies of each other. They do perform some gags from time to time, when you try to get them to do something they can't or won't do, but those gags repeat themselves so much, they lose their humor, however little there was to begin with. The plot doesn't matter, since you'll solve many puzzles unrelated to it, and quickly move beyond the zoo you start in. All you do is move from screen to screen, with a total of 15, solving puzzles using the few interactable items in each screen. Some screens take a few seconds to get past, while others may take ten minutes, due to some screens having several puzzles, with others only having one. Most of the time it isn't difficult knowing what to do, instead the difficulty is in finding out the correct order in which to do things. More often than not it will cause each puzzle to devolve into a trial and error session, mainly because of how rigid this game is. It seems that in order to justify having two characters, sometimes one character can use an item another can't, and sometimes one character can't even pick up an item - for some reason, while still being able to use it once it's picked up. It's a very forced way to lengthen the game. But my biggest gripe with the game is the lack of puzzles. It seems like several mini-games are interspersed between the puzzles, and those mini-games are more annoying than challenging and rewarding. Finishing this game, I felt ripped off by how few puzzles this game offers. Each screen is an individual experience - solve the main puzzle there, and move on to another screen. I just wish the brothers weren't so basic.

This is a simple point-and-click style puzzle game, with a few quirks. First thing to know is that every puzzle is self-contained. You'll enter a screen, have some goals, complete them, then start fresh on a new screen. It's not a "find an object on screen 3 and save it until screen 12" kinda puzzler. This makes it fairly easy as everything you need is always in your little area, but there were a couple of trickier, borderline moon logic puzzles that can take a while to crack. It is also a short game. It is only about 2-3 hours long on first playthrough, so it is nice if you want a game to piddle at for an evening or two, but it isn't going to take you days or weeks to beat. Not that you could play it over days or weeks anyway as...it has no save option. If you want to beat the game, you kinda have to commit the time to go through the whole thing at once (or be willing to leave it running in the background between playing sessions). The game does have a really neat core idea, though it never really delivers on it in a truly fulfilling way--you play as two characters, Chief and Colleague, and each of them can interact with objects differently. Chief is more serious, while Colleague is goofier--and occasionally that does result in some interesting, character-appropriate object interactions--but generally it seems almost random who can or cannot complete a task--and why one treats an object one way and the other doesn't seems almost an after-thought. It's like they make one character refuse to pick up a hammer or something simply because they promised the characters would act differently, NOT because it actually makes sense for that character to avoid picking up a hammer. Overall, I'm glad I played it and it served as a nice palate cleanser between more serious titles. I also understand it is viewed with nostalgia by many from former Soviet bloc countries. But given it's shortcomings, and short length, I'd only passively recommend it (a good deal when on sale).

Played this growing up. Still lots of fun and worth a few bucks :)

I'm not seeing much to like here. The animation is hideous (not because of the age, just the style), the puzzles are moon logic, there's almost no dialogue, and essentially no plot. Random stuff just happens, resulting in a kind-of puzzle for you to solve, mostly through trial and error. I got stuck on a puzzle and found that the hint didn't help, so I turned to the video solution that outright shows you what to do. Before it even got to the part of the puzzle I was stuck on, the brothers in the video just stopped solving the puzzle and stood there for about three solid minutes, doing nothing, as though the person who was recording the video had forgotten about it and decided to go take a shower or something. Either that or the solution was so obtuse that the developers themselves couldn't remember what to do. If the game were more engaging or appealing I might spend a little more time trying to figure it out, but it hardly seems worth the effort.