My brother ate my pudding (Android) review "Where entertainment and confusion intersect"

Peculiar titles grab our attention because they're out of the ordinary. They break the monotony of everyday life by presenting us with unfamiliar content that's often either silly or pleasantly confusing. Such games beg to be noticed. Clones are a dime a dozen nowadays, so it's important to have a stand-out quality. Weirdness is a handy selling point.

As a frequent app downloader, I tend not to notice game titles that use words like saga, jewel, craft, survival, RPG, sniper, roguelike, shooter or zombie. However, an odd moniker like My brother ate my pudding usually gets my attention. Sadly, odd games don't often deliver quality content to go with their name, and sometimes utilize strangeness to mask their shallow nature. Thankfully, My brother is a delightful product, and well worth the thirty minutes required to complete it.

Right off the bat, the game exudes charm. It sports a simple, hand drawn style reminiscent of flash animation or web comics. It's nothing mindblowing, just what you'd expect from a free-to-play, humorous romp. My brother's background music, on the other hand, consists of the same song looped continuously. It obviously draws from retro video games, as it hits lively and almost too sugary 8-bit-like tones. At first, it merely fills a void, but it eventually grows tiresome to hear. All the same, it fits the game's adorable theme and that's important.

My brother is a parody of the "room escape" genre, which blends point-and-click adventure with puzzle elements. You play a young boy who committed the crime of devouring his sister's refrigerated snack. To escape her wrath, the unnamed kid bolts into one of this family's impossibly numerous rooms, decked out with everyday items: bedrolls, dressers, closets, ponds, a small bamboo thicket, a basketball court... You know, things most families put in their houses.

In each room, you utilize the environment and any nearby event items to give your irked sibling the slip. Early puzzle solutions prove to be pretty tame, allowing you to fly through the first handful of stages effortlessly. In level one, for instance, you pull back a curtain, position yourself against its adjacent window and pull the curtain shut. Your sister rushes into the room, fails to notice the obvious feet jutting out beneath the drapes and runs away. You press onward.

After a while, solutions become more complex or outright strange. One stage requires you to nab a cardigan sweater and wrap it around an old man in order to hide, while another level features a plate on the ground. A fridge lies in the background, containing a carrot. If you mosey to the next screen, you see the enormous legs of a giraffe. By this point, the game steadily diverges from reality, and thus it beckons you to continue so you can witness all the weirdness it has to offer.

Before you know it, you jump down a well in the middle of the living room, summoning pigeons to cover your body, challenging someone to a one-on-one game of basketball and opening a giant orange to find it is inhabited by an enraged cat. My brother showcases such strangeness that you can't help but laugh and enjoy the minimalist ride. The game isn't pretentious or needlessly artsy; it's just a puzzle-adventure that wants to give you reason to chuckle and help you have a good time. These feats it accomplishes with flying colors.

My brother also sets you up for failure a time or two, and you won't be bothered by it. During one challenge, you see a wallet lying on the ground. You think it's an event item, so you tap it to add it to your inventory. Right away, cops materialize and arrest the little brother for picking up a wallet in his own house, prompting the "game over" screen. I couldn't be mad at game, even though what it did was so blatantly cheap. Rather than a low blow, my failure felt like a harmless prank orchestrated by a good friend. Well played, My brother.



My brother only offers twenty levels. You should be able to clear most of those without utilizing a guide or an in-game hint (which you earn by watching an ad video) in about a half-hour. However, you come away feeling that every second of those thirty minutes was worthwhile. Besides that, this is one of the few point-and-click games that realizes when it's about to overstay its welcome, and thus wraps up its campaign. It doesn't try to wow you with clumsy social commentary or overextend its longevity in a vain attempt at depth. It shows up for a laugh, tickles your funny bone and leaves.

I don't know that I could ask for more from a free mobile adventure game. I'm certainly glad I downloaded My brother ate my pudding. It occupied a brief portion of my afternoon and introduced me to mobile developer hap Inc. As it turns out, they've got a whole line of silly mobile titles starring many of the same characters seen in My brother. In other words, I plan to kill about ten or fifteen more half-hours in the near future, courtesy of hap Inc.

Staff review by Joseph Shaffer (May 29, 2018) Rumor has it that Joe is not actually a man, but a machine that likes video games, horror movies, and long walks on the beach. His/Its first contribution to HonestGamers was a review of Breath of Fire III.