Rating of
2/5
“Not the Norse Mythology You Were Expecting”
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/21/25
“Bramble: The Mountain King” (“Bramble”) is the second game from Swedish Indie developer, Dimfrost Studio, and their last game under that moniker, after recently rebranding themselves as Maximum Entertainment and becoming an Indie publisher as well as a development studio. Dimfrost’s first game was an ambitious dive into the not-quite-ready-for-prime-time world of Virtual Reality, and thus garnered little attention from anyone. For their second game, Dimfrost tried to garner more attention by focusing heavily on stylish visuals that play well in trailers, taking free* Unreal Engine money from Epic Games, and loudly announcing that their new game would be steeped in Nordic mythology and folk tales.
Seeing the game’s glorious renderings of authentic trolls in screencaps and the promise of Scandinavian folklore was all it took to get me interested, and I snagged the game on a deep discount for about $4. If I had paid full price, I would be very unhappy, as “Bramble” only delivers on its promises in the most legalistic sense, giving us a nonsensical mish-mash of Nordic folklore held together by a flimsy narrative and even flimsier gameplay.
Presentation
To give credit where it’s due, “Bramble” is a very striking game from a presentation standpoint. It’s built in the Unreal Engine and really takes advantage of the engine’s capabilities with textures, lighting, and shadows. Character designs are truly excellent, with the handful of monsters from Nordic folklore beautifully rendered in all their horrifying glory. The human characters are almost supernaturally “cute” and “innocent” looking, further invoking the stark divide common to most Old World European folk lore between tales’ youthful protagonists and monstrous adversaries. Environmental design is also extremely well done, but the game uses somewhat annoying fixed camera angles to force the player’s perspective to serve the art team’s purpose, which is “fine” as a technique, but frequently gets in the way of trying to explore or get an encompassing understanding of the environment during actual gameplay.
Audio is mostly well-done, but isn’t quite as impressive as the visuals. While the final boss battle does indeed employ a rendition of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” from “Peer Gynt,” that’s the only incident of recognizable classical music throughout the game. There are a couple of moments with excellent folk vocals, but they are too sparse to really make a lasting impression. The game is mostly without dialog, but is fully narrated. The female narrator is pleasant to listen to, but there ultimately isn’t enough narration to go along with the game’s narrative arc. The characters and monsters make a few noises here and there – enough to get them into the end credits – but never anything coherent, which is disappointing.
Technically, there’s nothing wrong with “Bramble.” It also has the honor of being the very first game I decided to play in Steam for Linux. In general, it performs well out of the box, with default controller support and frequent auto-saves. Upon completing the game, there is even an option to replay individual chapters for achievement hunting, though the final achievement of “Complete the Entire Game without Dying or Reloading” seems impossible due to intentional, non-technical gameplay flaws.
Story
“Bramble” tells the tale of a brother and sister named Olle and Lillemor. One night, Olle wakes up and discovers that his sister isn’t in her bed. After fumbling around in their shared bedroom for a few moments, he reads a storybook and gets the idea that she may have gone out the window. He follows suit, and after a walk through a dark forest and a mysterious ruin where he discovers a glowing stone, Olle finds Lillemor at the ruin of an old tower. The two play with the glowing stone for a short time (giving the player a tutorial on how to aim and attack with the stone, which is the game’s default analog for a weapon) before part of the ruins collapse, sending the siblings down into a surreal world of folklore, where size and scale no longer make any sense, and magical creatures – both good and ill – dwell.
After hanging out with some creepy gnomes who look and sound like human babies wearing traditional pointy, red, gnome hats, the siblings proceed on their way... home? However, they get separated, and Olle is horrified to see his sister captured by an amazing-looking troll, whose face is about 80% nose.
The rest of the game’s narrative revolves around Olle trying to catch up with the trolls and rescue Lillemor before she meets her ultimate fate. However, the road isn’t an easy one, nor is it really a good example of the Hero’s Journey, as Olle must overcome several monstrous creatures, including a trollwife, a violin-playing nixie, an undead infanticide witch, and the embodiment of plague – none of whom have anything to do with each other or the game’s overall attempt at telling a story. Instead, each of these episodes involving an iconic folk monster feels haphazard and stuck together simply for the sake of including more monsters. Most of them are very poorly explained, with a handful of optional, hidden storybooks scattered throughout the game doing most of the heavy lifting regarding the related lore.
After jumping through a whole bunch of hoops and running through a world that feels surreal and nonsensical in all the wrong ways, Olle and the player finally get some knowledge handed to them by a mysterious story-keeper, whose library reveals that the titular bramble is a magical flower that, when used judiciously, can cure any illness – even death – but if overused can transform the user into a monster. After this revelation, some of the preceding episodes start to make a little bit of sense, as lingering reminders of the bramble’s corrupting power, but for the most part, the end of the game feels very disconnected from the rest of it, and Olle’s and Lillemor’s presence in the story feels largely coincidental.
It took me about 5 hours to get through “Bramble,” and this was after waiting nearly three months to really dig into it, simply because, after impulse buying it, the more I read, the less interested I became. From a story perspective alone, “Bramble” isn’t particularly enjoyable, as its structure feels very ramshackle and the events rarely make sense. “Bramble” actually reminds me a lot of what you’d get if you put “Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons” and “LIMBO” in a blender together, but unlike either of those games, “Bramble” isn’t even a metaphor for anything deep or poignant.
Gameplay
Remember a second ago when I said that “Bramble” reminds me of an unpleasant mix of “Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons” and “LIMBO”? Well, that applies to the gameplay as well, plus an excessive dollop of Walking Simulator thrown into the mix.
“Bramble” is MOSTLY Walking Simulator for the first 60% of its existence, with only the barest of anything resembling “puzzles” or “platform-hopping.” And, sadly, “Bramble” is at its BEST when it’s being a Walking Simulator, as neither the puzzles nor the platforming are anywhere near the vicinity of “good.”
The puzzles are hampered by being overly simplistic to the point of mind-numbing, with the best puzzles involving looking at a glyph on a magically-sealed door and figuring out what ingredients to mix together based on the glyphs on their labels to get a matching final glyph. This is a far cry from the excellent puzzles that made up the bulk of “Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons.”
The platforming feels very inspired by “LIMBO,” with trollish (sometimes involving actual trolls) traps and frequent insta-death situations, made worse by the fact that Olle’s controls are incredibly clunky and sluggish, while the control layout is definitively non-standard. There are a couple of overly-long stealth sections where Olle must toggle between crouching and standing with the Left Bumper button. He can also toggle between his normal dawdling pace to a slightly less-dawdling trot by hitting the Right Bumper button, but it’s very difficult to tell the difference between the two speeds until it’s necessary to make a jump while sprinting. and it turns out that Olle wasn’t actually sprinting. The worst of these episodes is a stealth section in a trollish forge where the noise of the auto-hammer hitting the anvil will kill Olle if he isn’t behind something to muffle it. At the same time, he needs to (slowly and awkwardly) climb up onto a giant bellows and, while sprinting, jump off the top handle as it rises in order to land on top of an adjacent wall. I spent at least a half hour and dozens of deaths on this section, simply because the precision required doesn’t align with the game’s controls. Other tedious segments include two areas where Olle must climb up onto safe rocks protruding from pools inhabited by unknown lurking monsters. However, without fail, these sections require Olle to make a leap of faith off the last platform and wade to the end before the lurker catches up to him, resulting in a very tiresome trial-and-error experience.
Bosses are an aggravating combination of the puzzling and the platforming, with telegraphed attacks that the player WILL NOT be able to respond to correctly on the first attempt combined with sometimes-vague weakpoints that the player must manually aim at in the brief – BRIEF – window between telegraphs (and good luck seeing the telegraphy for an attack while in aim-mode tunnel vision). And, of course, each boss has multiple phases, though thankfully the game puts a checkpoint at the beginning of each phase. On one hand, boss phase checkpoints reduce frustration a tad, but on the other hand, they destroy the ambiance the developers obviously worked so hard on. The final boss’s accompaniment by “In the Hall of the Mountain King” does indeed use the increasing tempo and intensity of each verse of the tune for the three phases, but dying a dozen times between each phase makes it so only classical music nerds will actually notice it. On top of it all, it’s very strange that some of the bosses are tooth-gnashingly, hair-pullingly difficult and frustrating to deal with (often relying on random luck in which of their BS telegraphed attacks they decide to use), while others are so stupidly easy that they barely feel like they’re part of the same game.
Overall
“Bramble: The Mountain King” promises old Norse folklore and mythology, but doesn’t give us anything involving the Old Gods or the sagas. Instead, it’s a game that throws a mish-mash of folk-monsters into a story about two siblings that makes little sense and doesn’t seem to have any ultimate narrative points to make. It’s an Indie game that feels like an unfortunate mash-up of “Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons” and “LIMBO,” taking none of the good aspects of the former but all of the bad aspects of the latter. If you enjoy boring, un-puzzling puzzles; tedious, clunky platforming and stealth; and boss battles that are a combination of reacting to telegraphed attacks and getting lucky in the order in which these telegraphed attacks come out, you’ll probably love “Bramble.” If you actually want a meaningful narrative that employs ancient folklore and mythology to make a point; enjoy clever, thoughtful puzzles; and expect tight, responsive controls in platforming games, along with bosses that can be defeated on the first attempt, stay away from this one.
Presentation: 4.5/5
Story: 2/5
Gameplay: 1/5
Overall (not an average): 2/5
