Burly Men at Sea is a delightful experience well worth the game’s low price point and short time investment. The game is a choose-your-own-adventure narrative that follows three burly brothers as the player guides them through a charming world evocative of fairy- and folktales. It isn’t really a game you “beat” and is better thought of as a collection of scenes you playthrough multiple times to see the different ways they can play out. As you progress through the story, the brothers are confronted with fantastical challenges, like being eaten by a whale, and the player chooses how they’ll deal with it from 2 or 3 options until finally leading the burly boys back home to start a new adventure. The whole experience is reminiscent of being read a picture book as a child, and I think the ideal way to play the game may be as a parent letting their little one guide the choices. That said, you don’t need to be, or have, a kid to appreciate the game’s whimsical tone that’s perfectly conveyed in its picture-book-illustration art style, jolly sense of humor and folksy sound design.

What I love about Burly Men at Sea
• The art style and animation of the game wonderfully simulate a picture book come to life. A standout aspect is a vignette effect that adds to the adventure by opening up at key story moments to convey scale or closing entirely to leave only text and your imagination.
• The game has a great sense of humor that it conveys through its text and visuals. The first comparison that comes to mind is The Muppets in how it uses a mix of slapstick, sarcasm, and snark without ever crossing the line into being mean or cynical.
• All of the sound effects and a good deal of the music are done acapella which adds to the game’s evocation of a story being told rather than played.

Why you might want to skip Burly Men at Sea
• There are a few instances where the controls acted a little wonky, but it never made it difficult to play the game.
• It takes about 20 minutes to complete a single story in Burly Men at Sea and all variations can be seen in less than three hours of play time. I don’t think a game’s length represents its quality, but I also understand some folks need to stretch their gaming budget.
• The game is essentially a point-and-click adventure game and does nothing new with the genre. It’s very simplistic and its merits as a game are in its art direction, sound design, and light-heartedness.

Completed with platinum trophy earned (all 12 routes completed). Burly Men at Sea is a somewhat simple game telling the story of a group of sailors in pursuit of treasure. Gameplay consists of moving the titular three 'burly men' left and right through the environments, then interacting with specific trigger points to progress the story. There are essentially just three important decisions to make in the game, with other actions being for the most part linear in how they progress the story. For its low asking price, it's decently entertaining to see how the strange experiences of each of the 12 paths through the game plays out, and the player is very much encouraged to replay the game to see the different alternatives (at the end of each path, the story effectively loops back on itself).

Burly Men at Sea é uma experiência que se desenrola em torno de pequenas fábulas marinhas. Encarnando três irmãos pescadores, você se depara com uma garrafa contendo um mapa enigmático nas profundezas do oceano. A partir desse ponto crucial, suas escolhas moldam o curso da narrativa do jogo. Sua simplicidade é uma de suas maiores virtudes, pois não requer qualquer experiência prévia do jogador, tornando-se assim uma porta de entrada acessível para novos jogadores. Além disso, seu fator de replay é cativante, incentivando os jogadores a explorarem diferentes caminhos após a conclusão da primeira jornada, desvendando histórias parcialmente diferentes. Contudo, é importante notar que, apesar dos 12 finais possíveis, muitos deles exigem repetições de partes substanciais da história, o que pode tornar a platina do jogo uma tarefa um tanto cansativa.

A direção de arte de Burly Men at Sea é notável, com cenas deslumbrantes desenhadas com um estilo minimalista e uma paleta de cores suaves. O jogo abdica de uma interface de usuário convencional, apresentando na tela apenas os personagens e o cenário. Tal abordagem pode tornar a jogabilidade mais intuitiva ao utilizar o toque em dispositivos móveis, em contraste com o controle. A narrativa é entregue através de textos que surgem em momentos específicos do jogo, mantendo assim a imersão na história.

Um aspecto interessante da obra era a possibilidade de, em uma das possíveis jornadas, o jogo fornecer um código que permitia a compra do livro digital da história diretamente no site do desenvolvedor. Essa opção oferecia uma experiência única, permitindo que os jogadores desfrutassem do jogo em um formato alternativo para ser apreciado em casa.

This was a quaint little game. I had the thought that it was almost like a children's book played out in a video game format and I believe that was wholly intentional because if you go to the URL they say in the game, you can actually buy the story you experienced as a digital book (the hardcovers are apparently sold out which makes sense as this game is 7 years old at this point). In the end, it was a short experience that would be a good first game for someone young or who has never played a video game before.

Burly Men at Sea is a lackluster and uninspiring adventure that falls far short of its potential. Its simplistic gameplay, minimalistic visuals, and uninspired storytelling make it a forgettable and frustrating experience. While it attempts to offer a unique narrative structure with multiple branching paths, these choices often lead to underwhelming and unsatisfying outcomes. It lacks the depth and engagement required to hold the player's interest, resulting in a disappointing journey that fails to leave a meaningful impression.

For starters, I should state that this game is only really good if you plan to complete it. If you only want to do a couple paths of the story, then wait for a price drop as each story path only takes around 5-10 minutes if you know what to do.

The art style is really cute. The simplicity of the characters and environments work very well with the puzzles and overall relaxed vibe the game is going for. The gameplay also works well, although I can definitely feel this being primarily a mobile game with how you pull the screen to move and do basically everything. The dialogue is hilarious upon first read, although when going for 100% completion, it can get tiring reading the same things over and over again. As far as anything I'd change, I'd definitely make it more obvious how you lose the jellyfish fight since you have to for certain paths. I swear I watched the 3 men just run in circles for like 20 minutes before I found out how to lose.

Overall, worth the $10 price tag if you're going for 100%, but if you're not, then I suggest waiting for a sale.

Played 2 routes out of 12 before realizing this hipster trash was so unaware of how games worked that it had reinvented the concept of a visual novel without a chapter select feature. For this cardinal sin, it receives a D rank, 1 star, get over yourself.

I have no idea who this was meant to be for. Too simple and twee for adults, but juuust too cultured to be accessible for kids. Who is supposed to be laughing at the titular Brothers Beard for not knowing what single-origin espresso is? How is that the assumed frame of mind?

The Switch version is pretty terrible, as navigating a cursor with a joystick is always a negative experience, but somehow, this game also chugs. Was rending a dozen puffins on screen at once enough to tank the frame-rate to approaching single digits? The game legit froze at one point and forced me to close the software to get it to run again. I couldn't tell if the men being stuck in barrels at sea was some artistic statement about the futility of control in games or something - nope, just bad coding.

The twist reveal that this was all a marketing ploy to sell physical books of the games routes boggles the mind even more. They're still charging $4 for copies of a .pdf! With no discount for getting all 12! With art that looks just a little weirdly different than what's in the game! How did TIME magazine list this as one of their top ten games of the year? (rhetorical)

Shaking at the realization that lumberjack hipsters are becoming a dated look that might stand alongside pirates and gangsters as future Halloween costume themes instead of socially signifying urban cringe.

Burly Men at Sea is a short (emphasis on short) choose your own adventure game available for PS4 and Vita. It follows a trio of bearded men who find a map in a bottle and take to the seas on an adventure. The game presents a series of three decisions for the player to make that decides the ending of the story. Note the precise number: three choices. Simpler than most flash games, and possible to summarize with a small flowchart.

You can easily get all the endings in a couple of hours if you don't fall asleep, and I say that because the game is sluggishly paced and really uneventful. Plus, although there's twelve endings to reach, there's really only two end states, both of which have the same result of looping back to the beginning for a new adventure. Apparently, the whole point of the game was for it to become a book: once you completed one of the game's paths, you were shown a code that you could input on the official website to order a hardcover book with the events of that path. For thirty dollars.

It's a novel idea that could have been interesting on a bigger, much more fleshed out game -- imagine being able to buy a graphic novel version of your Mass Effect playthrough -- but I can only get the appeal here if you're playing together with a very young child. And let's face it, I don't have kids and probably neither do you: the reason we've played this was either because it was free on PS+ or because it had one of the easiest platinum trophies ever -- likely both. On that note, it should probably have been barred from having a platinum trophy, as it pops one trophy for every time you interact with it.

Its merits are... looking kind of charming; the book idea being novel, if wasted; and being better than whatever schlock of dead multiplayer games Sony's been pushing on to PS+ these last few years. What's it going to be this time...? Fallout 76...? Jesus Christ. Anyway, you can easily get better value on point-'n-click adventures than Burly Men At Sea, so prefer those games.