A legend of heroic figures, the powerful magic they wielded, and a betrayal among their ranks leading to the loss of magic is how Dimitri Batov’s The Little Brave begins. It’s a lovely drawn, beautifully voiced sequence that helps introduce us to the game’s main character, Keely, and the world he lives in as his mother recites the tale to him as a bedtime story and his sister teases him for using one of her large needles as a sword for his pretend adventures the next day. Of course pretend adventure turns to real adventure extremely quickly when Keely’s little sister, Weyka, is snatched away by the fearsome bat creature, Shirak, and he must venture beyond his village to the woods to rescue her.
You start Keely’s adventure with the ability to run, jump, double jump, dodge, attack with your needle, and attack with rocks from a slingshot. Fighting enemies and completing plot points will get Keely levels which grant ability points used to unlock upgrades to the ,elee and ranged attacks, as well as other abilities that are the game’s stand-in for movement upgrades to allow Keely to progress into blocked off areas of The Little Brave‘s sadly, quite limited map. These, however, are only available for a small portion of the game’s very short play time and I did not find them terribly useful outside of their use to open up the map and briefly in boss fights.
Movement in The Little Brave feels fairly fluid, except for the moments when it very much doesn’t. Sometimes, for reasons I could not determine, all of Keely’s forward momentum would just die, mid jump, or he would fail to jump and run straight off a ledge into one of the game’s far too many bottomless pits. Fortunately, there’s no penalty for death at all, which made these minor frustrations instead of infuriating. The game has a dodge roll, but I honestly found it more effective as a medium of travel than a combat mechanic, given the speed and distance it covers, but also given that it cannot be activated in mid air, and quite a lot of the game’s combat is best done while hopping back and forth to keep enemies from hitting you.
The Little Brave does have a few puzzles, mostly relating to turning cranks, finding cranks and turning them, pushing platforms, or some combination of all these, but the basic gameplay loop is to find two items (rune scrolls) to unlock a boss room, navigate the traps in the room, defeat the boss, get that boss’s magic, unlock that magic in the skills menu, and use that magic to open up a blocked path of some sort, which grants access to more areas of the map with more scrolls.
Enemy variation is pretty scarce as well. There a fewer than 10 enemy types in The Little Brave, not including the bosses… of which there are four. One enemy drops torches – a temporary weapon that you lose on a room transition and is necessary to use to remove obstacles in most of the game’s rooms – which effectively stunlocks most of the non-boss enemies with a health bar. The boss battles, the first three at least, are quite clever, each one has an attack pattern and a weakness that can be hit to stun the enemy, freezing it temporarily and leaving it open to more damage. I presume this is the same for the last boss too, but it reacted wildly differently each time I fought it.
I softlocked at least three times while playing The Little Brave, and considering I have a listed playtime of under four hours which includes playing the entire game twice, that’s saying something. Once I simply never got control back after riding an elevator between rooms, and twice I got trapped inside terrain that required magic from the third boss to destroy. I also once used a dash technique to see how it worked as a movement option and simply fell off the side of the level terrain. I at least managed to land in a different room when that happened. I also once loaded a save and was stuck under a platform I could not jump up from, but I could navigate out of the room into another one and fixed that way. Another bug I encountered was purely visual, but distracting. When you attack, there’s a small arc of effect that should follow the swing, but in my playthrough this almost never lined up with the actual hitbox of the sword and was often displayed nowhere near Keely, much less the weapon.
The magic you get in The Little Brave is fairly lackluster. Aside from its use to cross otherwise fatal barriers (which vanish after the first crossing), destroy some terrain for passages and upgrades, and to use on the bosses, it’s not worth using magic, especially because it takes so much magic energy to recharge it to a point where it can be used again. It doesn’t help the same button for magic is also the button used to interact with objects and pick up enemy weapons, meaning you can very easily waste magic needed to progress the plot and require searching for enemies to defeat for more magic energy drops.
Lastly, remember that legend about the heroic figures? While I won’t say it doesn’t apply – the characters in it appear and are important – it also feels like it’s not relevant enough, as it namedrops a villainous character who winds up not being any sort of antagonist to Keely at all, and makes the plot of the game feel incomplete. Which is kind of an apt metaphor. The Little Brave isn’t inherently bad, in fact it’s quite charming, but it’s very unpolished and it feels like it’s barely the prologue of a much longer adventure that it just simply doesn’t provide.
Tim reviewed The Little Brave on PC with a provided review copy.
