Max: The Curse of Brotherhood is the sequel to Max & the Magic Marker and opens with a scenario that seems strangely similar to the plot of the movie Labyrinth from 1986.  An older sibling gets tired of their annoying younger brother and wishes they would disappear, only to immediately set out to rescue said brother when their wish comes true.  In this case, Max is forced to enter a world of bizarre monsters in order to save Felix from the villainous Mustacho.

The game has a nice art style, though the desert in which the entire demo took place didn’t really do it justice.  Max seems like a fairly basic side-scrolling platformer, though you do obtain your magic marker around the demo’s halfway point, which helped to make the gameplay just a bit more interesting.  While it would seem the magic marker gains more uses as the game progresses, all you can do in the demo is create pillars of varying heights for platforming and light puzzling.

While the whole concept of using the magic marker to manipulate your environment could probably be interesting, I found my 20-30 minutes with the demo to be pretty slow-paced and boring.  Reviews for the full game seem to be mixed, as some people said the game gets much better later on, while others say the magic marker concept (the main feature that makes the gameplay unique) doesn’t work very well and gets repetitive after a while.

Max: The Curse of Brotherhood is $14.99 and available on all major consoles and PC and can take roughly 6-10 hours to complete.  Despite the pretty fair price tag, I have very little interest in playing the full game based on my experience with the demo.  Even though the magic marker idea was intriguing, the demo just wasn’t very fun, and it didn’t help that it included a rather frustrating chase sequence that I kept failing because I didn’t know what I was doing wrong.  I also didn’t really like the character of Max, who just seems like the same sort of stereotypical school-age boy that I’ve seen in media far too many times.  In short, the game feels like an obscure platformer from the early 2000’s that was obscure for a reason.