Burly Men at Sea is an odd sort of game, with it's simple art style, repetitive music, simple story threads, and child friendly tone, it feels less like a game and more like a bedtime story that gets read to a child every night to help them fall asleep. Things get even less complicated when talking about the gameplay, you have move left, move right, and interact. Things never get more complicated than that. Each playthrough takes about 20 minutes give or take and while that sounds ridiculous what BMAS does have is it's unique story branches. It's not ridiculously expansive but every choice you make in the game leads you down a completely different narrative path, which is pretty dang ambitious for a game of this caliber.

While I wouldn't call any of the narrative paths engrossing there's a certain childish charm to them that I found myself wanting to stay in (enough so to 100% the game). The only downside to it is that once a narrative path has been exhausted there really isn't any reason to return to it (aside from if you'd just like to play it again?).

I can see this being a great game for parents to play with really young children and it's admirable that a game essentially for toddlers can still manage to be enjoyable for an older audience. While I don't see myself returning to it anytime soon, Burly Men at Sea has enough charm and uniqueness for me to recommend it.

Burly Men at Sea is a folktale about three large bearded fishermen, named Hasty, Steady, and Brave, that has recently been released on Steam after appearing on iOS and Android. The brothers set out looking for adventure after finding a map and your choices and direction will decide how the story plays out. While it can control like a point and click adventure there is no inventory, no puzzles, and no fail state, just the continuing story that you tell. The game will start and end with the same event but you are able to run into two different events in between them, and each one allows you to play things out in different ways. Even when repeating the same situation on a new journey the brothers might end up doing something else, possibly changing the outcome or situation in events you thought you had already fully explored. Repetition is avoided both by the possibly of events playing out different and by the brothers remembering their past adventures and commenting on their previous experiences. The game has a simple but very fitting and charming art style and the sound effects are made entertaining because they are all done by human voices.

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.

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.

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.

So like this indie game is super wholesome, and hecka interesting. While I personally don't like the title as it feels very bland, the overall simplistic style of the art reinforces a lot of the game itself. This is a game about going a little adventure, and making choices to get different endings. It's a lot like the Stanley Parable, but far more wholesome and genuine. If you like choose your own adventure games, then I strongly suggest you give this one a look as it's rather short, and kinda an easy platinum. It's super quirky and fun with all the noises that are made each turn.

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 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.