Little Brother Jim ★★★☆☆

Little Brother Jim, and forever he remains just that.

Little Brother Jim and every other video linked to it can be seen on our Patreon, and if you’re wanting to know what other games we’ve played and have posts for, here’s our list of current games.

• AI-less
• Driving Simulator
• Emotional
• Family Friendly
• Hand-drawn
• Short Playtime
• Singleplayer
• Walking Simulator

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Not Now Mom Podcast Transcript

This is the transcript of our podcast episode for Little Brother Jim on Not Now Mom, I’m Gaming.

All links within this section do not pertain to the game itself, and don’t need to be clicked. They are affiliate links that take you to random products I think are interesting.

The title screen is pretty simple.

You’ve got a “More Games” link toward the top that’s not as intrusive as some other games are with their promotions of other games. I still think a “more games” link should be provided after a game has been played, like when it comes back around to the title screen.

I realize not a lot of people wait that long and may want to exit as soon as a game is over, but I’m still under the impression even if they skip the credits, they’ll still look at the title screen again. And an additional button would probably catch their eye.

Sort of silly to ask us to view other games like this when it’s not even been played yet.

The font they chose is bold and playful looking, so it highlights the title of Little Brother Jim, with a sort of little brother type of text, I suppose.

As far as the imagery goes, it’s polygonal art.

There’s a deer drinking from a small pool of water, with a mailbox beside it that shimmers. At first I thought the mailbox was a camera and it was taking pictures of the deer, but no. It’s a resemblance to the mailboxes within the game that you’ll be coming across.

Also, looking closer, it seems like the reflection of the deer is that of a bear, but it’s hard to distinguish.

Playing the game actually helps see it a bit better, but maybe it’s just me.

I will say, a lot of games by Tonguc Bodur have really good soundtracks to them, and the one on the title screen is a jammer that kind of makes you feel like you’re cruising through the south.

Within the settings, you’ll have five categories: General, Controls, Audio, Display, and Graphics.

In General, you can choose the language as well as if you want to have the crosshair on, which I don’t think I really minded. There’s force feedback, but I wasn’t sure what that meant and left it on. There’s also the option of headbob and DLSS.

A lot of times headbob doesn’t bother me, but in some games it can be a bit much. I don’t know what it’s like in this game because I took it off.

Controls are self-explanatory, you can see the keybinds and do stuff with sensitivity.

The Audio is for master, music, SFX, and voice.

Display shows resolution, what window mode you want, v-sync, and FPS limit.

Finally, the Graphics can go to an overall of Ultra in all the settings available.

Once you start a new game, you start out with learning how to drive a vehicle in a little course. You have three lives, and you aren’t supposed to touch anything within the course or the cones on the side of it.

There’s no music to the first level, which is a bit odd, but I think it’s so you don’t get too distracted. It wants you to focus on what you’re doing for the time being. The course is fairly easy to do for the first level, but I still took my time because I’m an anxious mess when it comes to any kind of course game where you have lives and need to do things just right.

I will say, the jeep sounds more like an airplane.

To end the course, you need to center the jeep on the parking symbol. And I do mean center it. It’s pretty nit-picky with how your car has to be placed.

Once complete, a bear gets out of the jeep and roars in victory, because it’s not every day a bear gets to drive a vehicle without leaving a single scratch.

On the second level, we get music.

It also states that you have a handbrake in this level, though it doesn’t give you the keybind for it, meaning you’ll need to find it on your own, either by checking the settings or testing different keybinds to find it.

Sort of silly to have someone go look for the keybind to a vital part of the gameplay.

I didn’t use the handbrake for the end of this course, but I do for the third. It’s a hard stop, so you can brake-slide into a turn, which is what I did when the parking symbol showed up to the right, but you could keep going straight for what I assume would be a dead-end, because this game does have those in these courses.

The fourth level is a bit more nighttime than the others and has some pumpkins laying around outside the cones. It also reminds you to use the handbrake.

I did it in increments, because I’m a chicken when it comes to accidentally hitting the out of bounds cones.

In fact, I forgot to use it and hit the cones anyway, which knocks off a jeep’s life from the top left.

This course tricks you with a couple dead ends, so if you hit those, you’ll at least get some backing up practice.

By the way, that cone was way too close to the parking symbol.

The fifth level is short and sweet, but there are coins you need to gather before the parking space will activate. You’ll know if coins are in a level because it will show if there are any to collect in the bottom right corner.

No Mario coin sound here. Just a little plop.

In level six, an area will be blocked off by cones until you get the appropriate coin to open it. I did a lot of pulling forward and backing up to align the car correctly to get back through the course, because I am not a fan of backing it up.

At least not that far.

Level seven proved that I’m not very good at unclear directions. There’s a red area on the ground and before it, it states “WAIT.” But I thought it wanted me to wait on the red tile. And so I kept stopping on the red tile, which would light up and place me back at the beginning.

And as much as it pains me to say this, I repeated this action so many times that the game came up with a prompt that asked me if I wanted to skip to the next level.

So hey, if you’re having a hard time with a driving course, you can always skip ahead. I’m not sure if the achievements trigger or not if you skip levels, because technically, you’re still going to reach certain levels that activate the achievements.

I didn’t skip.

Turns out you have to wait for the red light to come on, and when it turns off, you can drive over the red tile. Basically, don’t be on it when it lights up, or you get taken back to the start of the course.

I ended up going the wrong way and hitting a dead end, so I had to back up all the way to where the red tile was and, you guessed it, had my tires on it when it lit red.

In level eight there are two coins to obtain before you can park your way outta here. It’s also raining, but luckily that doesn’t add more stress to your driving skills unless you hate driving in the rain as much in a video game as you do in real life.

You have to collect four coins in level nine, and it has a whole lot of paths you can take, meaning a lot more chances to end up at a dead end.

I got a little crazy with backing up and hit two different cones, but I made it out with a single life to my jeep.

Level ten is interesting because it makes you back up after collecting the first coin, because it’s a narrow lane and the path you passed up was blocked up until the coin was grabbed. When I got the second coin, I struggled with backing up at an angle because my brain doesn’t like to work backwards for some reason.

There is a red tile in this level that you’ll need to wait on, and just when you think you can go around to the parking spot you saw in another location, the ways are blocked. You have room to back into a turn in order to go straight on the path you were just on, but man.

This driver’s test really likes to put you through it.

Once you get through this level, you’re in the actual game, which has cabins around us out on the lake.

At this point, you can tell if you’re going to like the crosshair from the settings being on or not. It is a little white dot in the middle of the screen, so I can see how people could get annoyed by looking at it. It doesn’t really serve too much of a purpose, honestly.

After moving a little bit, the game provides keybinds for either running or auto-walking, if that’s your thing.

In walking simulators I kind of like to take my time and walk around to check out the environment, but sometimes if everything is starting to look the same, I’ll move faster, or if I see something important up ahead and want to get there faster.

There’s a cabin with a mailbox that shimmers out on the dock, and music starts playing when we get closer.

For some reason, I didn’t think I could get to the mailbox. I guess I figured it was more of a landmark than anything, so I basically moved on until I reached the second mailbox, which activated a story.

Once I knew they told a story, I had to double-back to the first one.

Turns out I just didn’t see the path that would take me out to it.

When you get close enough to read the story, there’s nobody voicing it, and the font can be a bit hard to read. It’s white font and cursive on kind of a faded out background of the game. Maybe they thought it would make it easier to read, but I don’t think it does.

It reads:

Dear Paul, I have to tell you something funny about that game I’d been playing for my last few days here. You have to park these jeeps in their correct spots. But apparently it’s not the player parking the jeep, it’s this funny bear! Isn’t that unique? This big brown bear stuffs itself inside the jeep, hey I can’t stop laughing, he closes the door, and starts driving. The bear drives around, then finds a parking spot. I feel sad about getting stuck at the final level though.

There is an achievement for a final level, so it makes you think that might be the toughest one.

I’m pretty sure the only bear game I know of is Bear and Breakfast, which I have yet to play, though it is on my wishlist. Not sure if I can remember another one though.

Anyway, now you know what the beginning was all about.

There’s nothing within this cabin, but it’s still kinda cool to look around? I mean…if barrels and boxes are cool, I guess?

I’m trying to make it sound better than it is.

If you fall into the water, it does reset you at a certain point–not far from where you are, wherever that may be within the game itself.

I love the soundtrack so far, though the seagulls can become an annoyance, and the environment isn’t a bad thing at all, but man, that sun is blinding. Sun rays breaking through trees or buildings and such are great. Staring directly at it is not.

There’s a rocky path that takes you to the other side of where you need to go, and I fell off here at least once, but in my defense, I looked away.

But you can see up ahead that another mailbox is glowing in the distance. It’s here that I want to say I wish that they didn’t shimmer and glow. Like, yeah it makes them easy to see in the distance and know where they are, but I just would’ve liked it if maybe they had a beacon on them instead.

They just seem more like flashlights otherwise.

This mailbox reads:

Remember fireworks night? Surrounding us was a vast blackness. I felt the hard damp ground beneath my legs. In the sky were a million bright blinking stars. This was our last night together. After I’d jokingly asked you a million times when the fireworks would start, they finally did. Then you jokingly tossed the blanket over my head, not realizing that soon you wouldn’t be able to see me at all.

Well first, why on earth would you remind us of that, good lord. I’m sure it’s something that we already won’t forget and now here we are remembering it all over again.

I will say, a lot of Tonguc Bodur’s games I’ve played do have depressing tales to them, but man, they don’t normally hit this hard this fast.

As far as fireworks go, I appreciate their grandeur from afar, but I hate how loud they are. Me and loud noises just don’t appreciate one another.

I didn’t mention it before, but you can stand by a mailbox to keep the text on the screen and as you walk away from it, the text disappears. So it’s not on a time limit, and you don’t click to make it disappear, you just have to continue walking.

The third mailbox is out on another dock of a cabin, and I really wish there was something more to these cabins. I realize there’s nobody living in them and perhaps by the look of them they’ve been abandoned, but anything would be better than just random boxes or barrels randomly placed.

Like, give us a reason to want to look around the cabin besides just putting a mailbox here to find.

The letter inside reads:

Our Mom and Dad told me about the first day they brought me home from the hospital. You grimaced and said I was a stinky bundle. But when you thought they weren’t looking, you came over to me and smiled. You tickled my toes. Then, you stomped away in mock anger. Apparently it took you one week to warm up to me, then you even started changing my diapers.

Fun fact with me, I’m not a fan of kids, clearly this includes babies.

I remember when my brother had come over with one of my nieces as a baby and while my mom was holding her, she asked me to hold onto her for a moment, and I was not a fan. They laughed at my scrunched up face while I held my niece but I was eager to pass her off to someone else when the chance came up.

Listen, they’re obnoxiously loud when they’re crying, they’re a stinking mess when they take their potty break, they’re never sleeping when you wish they were, you’re constantly waking up from them needing something.

I’ve got chronic migraines, and babies and children are a very good trigger for them.

Once a kid is around fifteen or so, I can probably handle them a bit better. You know, when they can engage in a proper conversation with you and have some wits about them.

Thankfully I have an older brother, so he had to deal with my whiny butt and not vice versa.

The next mailbox states:

Remember that family next door? We used to go and play with the kids. One time I was invited for lunch, but didn’t know our phone number. I had to run back to our house to ask Mom. She said yes. Then I ran back to the neighbor’s and stood outside their door. I didn’t know what to do! They eventually saw me waiting and let me in, then showed me how to knock and use the doorbell. I’d just begun learning the life.

Y’know, there weren’t very man kids in the neighborhood, either around my house or my grandparent’s house, that I’d really ever hang out with. I had a friend several houses down, but her mom was my babysitter when we were kids.

There was also another couple of kids down a connecting residential area, but I can’t remember how I became friends with the girl, just that my brother was friends with her brother, and they had a dog named Hershey that I was afraid of, as he didn’t have an air of friendliness about him.

My grandparents house though, where I spent a lot of my time as a kid, didn’t have anyone I hung out with.

There was a girl, but we didn’t hang out that much. Her parents were a tad strict with what she could do–they were the types to say that Harry Potter was satanic or something, and I liked the movies, so…I don’t know, it was kind of awkward.

Every other friend I met was either from my school or sixth grade camp.

I guess with how much time I spent with my cousin, finding friends wasn’t exactly a high priority, since my cousin lived next door to our grandparents house and she was always over there when I was, or I’d just go over to her house.

As far as not knowing to knock or ring the bell…I have forgotten doorbells were a thing in my thirties, since it’d been so long since I actually went over someone’s house. I’d always knock, and sometimes people just don’t hear knocking.

Especially when they’re wearing noise canceling headphones.

When we walk away from this mailbox, our character blinks and turns to face a giant door in the distance, as if emphasizing the point of the letter. Then we blink again and the door’s gone.

The next mailbox reads:

Do you remember our first vacation where we stayed at a fancy hotel? Our parents told us to keep it down and not run around. They told us to go on ahead and they’d meet us at the restaurant. So, we walked to the elevators by ourselves. Then we pressed EVERY single button. The elevator stopped at all the floors and everyone was mad at us. We were such a pair of menaces.

I don’t think we ever stayed at a fancy hotel before, but we’ve been to a whole lot of them, given our family used to go on vacation a few times a year. In fact, the most interesting place I remember staying at on vacation is when I took my family on a train vacation. We stayed in a sort of log cabin that looked really nice on the inside, and outside there was a fire pit.

Nothing like that in the hotels we’ve spent days in.

Just indoor and outdoor pools that we’d hang around in during our downtime.

As far as pressing every button on the elevator, I’ve definitely done that as a kid, but I waited until I got off on our floor to do it, when nobody would know it was me.

They definitely had to know it was some asshole kid though.

At the next mailbox:

We used to live in a big city, but sometimes we were allowed to visit the local park. When we were really lucky, we’d all get in the car, then drive out to the country. We’d be told to be careful with the barbed wire fence, that it was private property. We’d often head to the national parks, then we could run around all we wanted. One time I hid behind a tree for an hour and gave everyone a heart attack.

I can’t imagine actually hiding somewhere for an entire hour just because I could, or to see if anyone would actually find me.

Like, I have a good imagination.

I can stay in a single spot for a while with no issues because my brain will just make up scenarios, I’d be thinking of the future, present, past, I’d reconstruct events that had already happened and play the “what if?” game.

But to just hide and wait? Nah, I couldn’t.

We finally leave this area and enter another one, not that the previous was a bad place to be, I looked around a lot and found several screenshot-worthy spots, but it’s always good to change it up.

Unfortunately, the environment didn’t change all that much.

It’s still kind of the same foliage and flowers and whatnot, but this time we’re not by the waterside and there aren’t any annoying seagulls to listen to.

Up ahead, there’s someone waving their arms up on a hill we make our way to. The music slowly pans out as we get closer to the person, until we blink and they disappear.

It almost feels like we’re hallucinating things.

And while I’d hoped there’d be a change in music, it goes back to the guitar soundtrack from before, which was a little disappointing. Mainly because I know these games have good soundtracks, and to not change it up at this point makes this game so far one of the more disappointing ones as far as music goes.

But hey, at least we get a look at a waterfall that creates a stream we’ll be running along to get to the next phase of mailboxes.

And the first one we get here says:

I’m sure you don’t want to read all about kid memories, brother. I just want to jog your brain so you remember, and even tell you about things you didn’t know. I’m sure you know that I love you and always will. I know you loved me. We can’t take it for granted. Look at all those other families who don’t even speak to each other. When you have your own family, always remember to listen and love.

Clearly there’s some red flags in that letter.

Such as putting that fact that we loved him in past tense, while his love remains in the present. And then talking about how we should stay in touch with our families and show our love to them while never taking it for granted.

That just screams something happened to our younger brother and he’s no longer with us, which I suppose was obvious from the fireworks letter, but still.

Now instead of abandoned cabins by the lake, we’ve got ramshackle, broken down buildings that we come across, which could easily collapse at any given moment and bury us beneath the rubble.

What fun it is to find a mailbox under something that could end our life too, brother.

 It reads:

You know how I loved computer programming, and that’s what I was studying to do. What you don’t know is that I wanted to be a rock musician. Yes, I confess! All those times you yelled at me to turn the music down, because it was loud and blaring. I took guitar lessons, but I sucked at it. I’d try singing in the shower but it was bad. Well, a guy can dream, right?

While I can’t really relate to wanting to be a musician or being in a band, I have played the acoustic and electric guitar, as well as piano and flute for school. Piano I’d done for longer than the other instruments, with flute having the shortest amount of time.

I really like music. Certain songs can just touch the soul better than anything else can, and can also just really relate to your mood. Heck, sometimes songs can even switch you to a different mood, depending.

That’s how it is with me.

But I think after all that time of playing different instruments, it just felt too monotonous. There’s only so many chords to play, even though there’s a ton of songs to learn. There wasn’t really a sense of adventure or a higher calling for me.

Which is why I went to drawing, then writing, then gaming.

This time when we blink in-game, we see an electric guitar in the distance until we blink a second time.

We’re kind of moving away from the waterfall and stream at this point and just heading through a narrow path that doesn’t offer too much on the visual end of things, such as pretty screenshot material, but I’m sure it’ll get better.

For now, the next mailbox reads:

Do you remember Samantha? Probably not, she was in my grade, not yours. I had such a huge crush on her, but she didn’t know I existed. One day at recess I ran up to her and gave her a kiss! What a look on her face! I realized I shouldn’t have done it. I could have been injured! Ha ha! But later we started hanging out. But, the rule was, never ever mention the kiss!

I’ve never kissed anyone at school. I didn’t kiss anyone until late twenties, early thirties.

I don’t think I can even say I had a crush on someone while I was at school–I dated someone, but I wasn’t like, hooked on his attention or anything like that. The most I had was an interest in talking to certain people about certain subjects.

However, there apparently was someone that had a crush on me, because I remember on a Valentine’s Day a guy gave me a teddy bear holding a heart.

I didn’t know what to do with it.

I definitely don’t have it to this day.

Reaching the crest of a hill, we get another mailbox:

I still miss Fluffy. I know you and Mom and Dad said Fluffy ran away, but I knew you were lying. I know he was hit by a car. You were trying to spare my feelings. It’s okay. He was 19 years old and lived a good life. If you go into my room, I still have all his photos and videos on my computer. It’s great that I get to see him again!

Again, that last statement basically confirms that our younger brother is gone and now gets to be with his equally deceased pet.

Speaking of, 19 years old is a dang long time for an animal to live–either dog or cat. I’m starting to think it maybe wanted to die and just ran in front of a car to get it over with.

One of my cats had gotten hit by a car, I think, because he came home at the back door and his back leg was all mangled and bloody. I, of course, was crying and panicking because my parents were out of town at the time, one of my uncles was allergic to cats so couldn’t help, and something about other family members not being available.

I finally got a hold of someone to take him to the vet and they put him down.

Super depressing for a kid and quite traumatizing if I’m being honest. I didn’t have anyone to help me out through it aside from my family member that took us to the vet, since it’s not like my parents were home.

Aside from my cat…we’d caught a wild turtle and it managed to get out of its bowl we had it in outside, and it ended up walking out into the road and getting hit.

Not a huge loss, but more of a, well-that-sucks moment.

Also, to change the subject, I think the music changes here, which is really weird that it would shift on reading a mailbox letter rather than shift to something different on an environmental change. I don’t really see the logic in it.

In case you’re wondering, Fluffy was indeed a cat, because we blink and a giant white cat appears in the distance. It’s more like a kitten than an adult, but that’s okay. Sometimes we’re more fond of their cute and cuddly phase.

The next mailbox is inside of a circle of stone pillars that kind of remind me of Stonehenge, but clearly not. And before you reach it, there are crows on the pillars that fly off as you approach. It almost made me think there was a carcass in the center or something.

There’s not.

There is a pretty mountain in the distance that has a trail going through it though.

This mailbox states:

There was that one nice winter day when Mom and Dad drove us into the cold country. We bundled up coats and mitts and then built a snowman. I was all warmed up so I donated my scarf to him. We gave him pebble eyes and a twig nose. Then we had a snowball fight! That was the best winter, ever! But those snowballs hurt more than you think when they hit your face. Even the snowman was sorry for me.

I don’t recall a time when I made a snowman as a kid, even though I do know I did, and probably even made multiple, because for some reason I liked the snow as a child.

Not so much these days.

I also don’t have any knowledge of snowball fights, so I guess my winter memories are slim. If you have a fun winter story, I’d love to hear it in place of my own missing stories.

It is drizzling a bit as we make our way through a gap in the tall rocks, and it’s a little reminiscent of Drizzlepath for me, another one of Tonguc Bodur’s games, though it can be probably described as their least impressive at this point in time, due to it not having aged very well.

In this next mailbox, we find out why we’re confronting a whole lot of mailboxes in the first place.

Remember my obsession with mailboxes? I wondered why we didn’t have one at the house. We had a slot in the door where the mailman dumped our mail. Or, she left parcels on the doorstep. So, Dad made me my own small mailbox. Wasn’t that cool? I expect it’s long gone now. But we used to have fun putting letters in there to each other, do you remember? This is why I’ve sent mailboxes on your path now.

I think I can understand how someone might become obsessed with something that they don’t initially have. Such as a mailbox.

You’ve got all these other houses with them, but not yours, and it’s kind of a bummer and might make your place stand out a little too much in your mind, so you look at them more often when you see them, and then you start wanting that one, and that one, and that one.

And given the looks on some of the mailboxes now days–and I’m speaking of ones that aren’t your typical every day, every house mailbox, it’d be fun to go through with buying several of them.

I mean really. Just check out some of the unique mailboxes on Etsy. Or just Google unique mailboxes.

You’ll wonder why yours is so ordinary.

As you progress forward, you’ll notice there are some fluffy clouds that spell out the numbers 3234. A little weird, but just coming from a letter that spoke of mailboxes, it makes you think that was the number to our house address.

The next letter reads:

Did you ever wonder why your LEGO pieces went missing? That’s because I would steal them to complete my own projects. You complained, but I’d just blame the vacuum cleaner or the cat for stealing them. Mom would tell us she’d take it all away if we didn’t behave. You never said a word of it to me, even though you’d see my LEGO structures set up on my desk. It was rather obvious, wasn’t it?

Why is it we always decide to blame the pet for something that we’ve done? They’re always the one to get thrown under the bus, and you’d think one would start to realize the ruse that when someone says “they did it” it means the person doing the finger-pointing clearly did it.

Parents are probably more liable to see through thinly veiled blame technique, but not a whole lot of the younger generation as long as you can back your story up in a somewhat manipulative way.

At least as the older brother we didn’t actually rat him out, preferring to bicker about it, probably to make our younger brother feel sorry about what he did.

If that even worked in the end–doesn’t look like it.

The only time I was good at stealing things from people is when I was the banker playing Monopoly. Nobody liked it when I played the banker.

At this point, we’re coming up on a cabin that’s not actually dilapidated and falling apart, but first, we’re checking their mailbox.

I have to make a confession. When you weren’t home, I’d go into your room and snoop around. I knew you were out on call for your job, or you’d be out gaming with your friends late on Sunday night. So, I’d sneak out of bed so I wouldn’t disturb our parents. I’d use a flashlight and go into your room. I especially liked looking through your books, and going through your desk.

Oh you better believe I’d snoop through my brother’s room when he wasn’t home.

He was more of a socialite than I was, always going to parties and hanging out with his friends and doing things that were frowned on by our parents, though they never really said anything.

Which means I’d go through his drawers and pick through different things he had stashed away.

I found a photo of him with a fake tattoo on his arm, and I do remember my parents clearly telling him no tattoos. I didn’t say anything to them, but I kept it as leverage if he ever ticked me off enough.

I was that kind of sister.

I still kind of am, if I’m being honest.

Now we approach the cabin and notice that there is a padlock on the door. It requires four numbers to open it, so we’ll be using the cloud’s message of 3234 to open it.

Inside, there’s at least a few different furniture pieces, like a chair sitting at a table that has a red and white checkered cloth over it, and a couch off to the other side as well as maybe an older TV box, or table-side desk, I’m not entirely sure, because there’s a mailbox in the room.

This time it’s not your typical letter you’re receiving, but rather a question that needs answered via multiple choices.

I don’t know what happens if you choose options for these other than the one you’re clearly supposed to go with. I chose all the proper answers for these questions, and there’s no achievements for any other type of ending, so maybe you’d just be sounding like an ass.

The question is:

Do you wish that Jim would have been the type of brother that you would have wanted to hang out with?

An odd question, because it’s clearly breaking the fourth wall here, right? It’s technically not asking us as the already big brother, but rather the person who’s currently playing the game.

I went with “Yes, he’s cool!”

A butterfly symbol glowed in the top right, and then we’re back on our driving course with Brother Bear, this time starting on lap 12.

From the get-go you’ll notice there’s a lot of areas that are marked off that you aren’t able to access yet, and other paths that are open, including a straight forward path. I think this course is trying to make you take a wrong turn and doubt yourself on where to exactly go in these turns, but the parking spot is straight ahead with no turns required.

Sneaky.

—

Level 13 is the first driving course where you’ll run into a deer–literally–as it dashes across the road in front of you. And it’s almost like real life, because you’re so focused on driving, you won’t notice the deer standing at the side of the road before it makes a mad dash.

It’s kind of funny if you don’t notice the deer, because the landscape is bare–almost like a desert with rocks, dead trees, and bits of dead foliage.

But the level is here to show you deer exist in this universe, as the path is straightforward otherwise.

Level 14 tricks you because you’re clearly going to drive forward, but when you do, you end up at a dead end. The parking spot was actually behind you from the get-go.

Level 15 has a ton of turns in it, and includes several strips of red where you’ll need to stop as well as an icon you can grab that seems to be a life-replacement, if you’ve already lost a life by hitting a cone or something.

If you’re full on health, it won’t help you.

Aside from those two things it shows you, it’s just a lot of sharp turns until the end.

I had the most trouble so far with level 16 and ended up restarting so many times from touching parts of the course too much. In my defense, while there are a lot of turns like the previous level, these turns are harder to take due to water barrels being close to the turn, meaning you’re going to need to be a lot more careful.

But I do like how it’s dusk out.

I think because of the red lighting is just a nice visual aesthetic.

Aside from all of the obnoxious barrels, there’s no other surprises.

Level 17 is kind of the same deal as before. A lot of water barrels, a lot of turns, but because you dealt with the previous course, you should be more prepared for this one.

You will need to find a coin before you can take the parking spot out of here, and luckily at some point there is a health orb if you’ve taken damage, and then another by the actual coin. Get ready to do some backing up to turn around and make your way back to the parking spot.

Level 18 was one of the shorter courses for me, as I didn’t take any of the false paths that were offered. There is a large red panel right before the parking spot.

Level 19 is an absolute pain in the butt.

You start out already on the parking spot and there are four directions you can take, as well as four coins you’ll need to grab. Two paths have two coins to them, so there’s a chance you might take two wrong turns and will have to backtrack.

Which is exactly what happened to me.

When you start on level 20, you can see the parking spot directly behind you.

There are five coins in total you’ll have to collect and the first two will open up the path to the left at the beginning, so at least those are fairly easy to find and grab.

The coins aren’t that hard to find, thankfully, but the road you’re traveling on is very tight considering the objects placed on it to make it thinner. There is going to be a health orb if you have taken damage.

Level 21 adds two new additional features.

An invisibility area, which simply makes you completely invisible when you touch it, and then a couple of colored boxes that you have to smash your way through. It’s something to be wary of when smashing through the boxes, because the parking spot is right after them and if you’re not careful, you can drive over it into the cones.

Okay, now we’re back in the world where we’ll be following the stream as I mentioned before in the last walking section.

I like this area a lot because there are houses up on the side of the rock to either side of us and it does provide a nice screenshot area. And in this new area, we do get another musical track to listen to.

The first mailbox we approach reads:

There was that one day our parents took us to the lake. We’d no sooner set up the canoe and were out paddling, when it started raining. I’d have thought our parents would call us back to shore, but they didn’t. It was fine. We had a great time getting wet! Before the canoe overflowed with water, we paddled back to shore, where our Mom was waiting with dry towels. Being reckless was fun to us back then.

Well, I can’t say that I was a reckless child in my youth or even now days, because I definitely was not. Maybe I had as much anxiety about things back then as I have now, if a little less, which made me always err on the side of caution.

Plus, I wouldn’t get into a canoe.

I don’t like being in any kind of open water in a small vessel like that, though I did go out on a boat once upon a time with my family and went fishing with them. I was the only one that was able to catch anything, and I think I hooked a small shark, which wasn’t uncommon, but cool.

Definitely made me seasick while traveling out to our location though. I didn’t get sick or anything, but it wasn’t fun.

We tread along the water, not caring that our shoes and socks get wet, because there’s no way we’d be walking barefoot, right? Not with all these freaking rocks and pebbles digging into our feet, unless they’re already calloused and can take a beating.

A statue of a man sitting down and looking out into the distance is on the left, looking like he’s sharpening a crude stone blade.

Further ahead is a mailbox that reads:

Many of these letters are about us when we were young, but I knew back then that we wouldn’t be young forever. It was like I had a premonition or something. If you ever wondered why I joked around so much, while you remained the serious one, that’s why. Life is short, might as well enjoy yourself, right?

There has to be some kind of diagnosis for him coming up that made him terminally ill with a set deadline for when he’d pass.

I mean, as far as him not exactly knowing there was something wrong, but putting on a happy face in a world of serious people, it does remind you that people know their bodies better than anyone else, so maybe there were signs that our younger brother couldn’t identify, but it still didn’t feel quite right.

Sometimes that’s how I get before my blood pressure drops.

Something won’t feel right but I can’t pinpoint what it is until my whole body goes into a momentary numbed state.

The environment is starting to open up and become pretty to look at again, what with the lighting and all, but there’s more to look at in the distance when we get to continue.

Until then, the next mailbox.

Do you remember how we sent that bully packing in grade 10? He said I was fat, I said I know that. He said I was pale, I said it was because I drank ale. Everything he said to me, I made a rhyme right back at him and laughed. You were so clever and right! Make a joke of it, like their comments don’t hurt us. They soon stop!

I’m not sure if this would entirely make a bully back off. It’ll certainly make them mad that they can’t get a rise out of you and that you’re making them look like a fool, which, depending on their age, I suppose, might initiate a physical reaction, like a punch or a shove to the ground.

Something that could actually hurt, since their words aren’t doing the job.

I myself never had a bully confront me.

One of my friends walked into the bathroom while my nose was bleeding and they threatened to beat the crap out of whoever did it to me. I want to say they were joking, but they were also probably serious, so no bullies for me.

But yeah.

Judge what kind of bully you’re dealing with, if they’ve been in confrontations before or they’re all bark no bite.

Well, I thought I was headed for a windmill, but it turns out, we get another environmental change. The trees are really pretty though. They look like weeping willows but their tendrils are a teal and white coloration.

There are two paths you can take at the start, and when I took the wrong path the music stopped. Completely.

There’s no mailbox back here, but you do see the front of a jeep on top of a ledge, making me think it’s supposed to be the jeep that the bear is driving in the little gameplay sequences, which is fun.

Music can also be fun though.

With nothing else back there, I took the other correct path where we can actually see mailboxes glowing as if to catch our attention. Which they did, but I wanted to go the other way first.

The first mailbox states:

When you were hanging out with your big university friends, you didn’t want them to know you had a younger brother. So, I showed up and you told them I was your Uber driver. At first, I was confused, then you winked at me. But I was mad. So, after your friends packed up their books and headed for the door, I said to you, “Mum wants you to vacuum the house before dinner.” The look on your face!

Uh, I think it’s rightly so that he got mad.

I don’t know what the point was to hide the fact you have a younger sibling, unless it’s because they’re a nuisance in your life, perhaps. But either way, the truth is going to be found out eventually. Especially if your parents show up with your Uber driver for some reason or another.

I’d get mad, but I wouldn’t really make a fuss out of it. I’d just roll my eyes and consider him immature for trying to hide the obvious. Most siblings look a little like each other, after all.

The next mailbox is when the music finally kicks in again.

I’m unsure why there was so much downtime, but there was, and then the letter we read says:

You taught me how to ride a bike. We’d often go out bike riding after school, but before we had to help our parents make dinner. One day my bike went missing (probably stolen by that grade 10 bully), but you scoured the neighborhood and brought it back to me. And we never told our parents! I mean, you can now, if you want!

I think that’s one of the main things kids would worry about–especially if they’re leaving their bike outside the house, maybe leaning against the porch-side or wall or fence or something. It always amazes me that people do this in video games, and for the most part, video games do tend to reflect some truths to reality.

We have a really long driveway, so even if we do leave things laying outside the house, most of the time people won’t be able to see it anyway, and nobody bothers to find out if there even is anything for them to snatch.

Although we did have neighbors that rented the house next door and they had a kid that would try to look in our cars to take stuff.

I heard the car door shut late one night, and then another day my door wasn’t shut all the way. (I didn’t bother locking my door since this crap never happened before.)

Lesson learned when ghetto folk live next door–and they were nasty–by the time they were kicked out, the entire house was a mess with trash strewn everywhere, toilets overflowing with crap, dog poop smeared in places.

The entire place had to be reworked.

Continue forward in the game and a gigantic blue bicycle appears above us in the sky, gone in the blink of an eye.

Again, there are two paths to take, and I decide on the right path. Surprisingly, there is absolutely nothing there that I could find, so we continue to the next mailbox.

Remember when I fell out of the tree, trying to build a tree fort, and you practiced First Aid on me? Mum had to take me to the hospital, but the doctor was impressed at how well you wrapped up my arm. Only bruises, fortunately. I expect that’s where you got your career idea from. And you called me the smart one!

I don’t recall a time when I ever went into a tree house, but I do remember that I used to climb one of the trees in my grandparent’s backyard. The same tree they always threatened to grab a switch from to swat our butts, though that never happened.

It’s also weird that a couple times now, he’s written Mum and not Mom as he had at the start. Now I’m unsure if we’re British or American.

Yet another left or right path up ahead, and I take the one that doesn’t immediately show a mailbox.

There was no mailbox on that side, however it did loop in a circle, so I had to go back to the start of the circle where I was to read the mailbox I would’ve missed.

It reads:

Saturday morning was the best. We’d get up at like 6am and go and watch the cartoons. Do kids today even get to watch cartoons? They sleep in until 11am and then get on their smartphones! Looney Tunes and Rocky and Bullwinkle are the best! Reminds me, dig through my DVDs and save those for your kids. Or watch them again, there are no age limits!

I’m going to say that yes, kids today do get to watch cartoons, but the real question is do they even bother doing so when there’s TikTok and YouTube and gaming apps on their smartphones to play around with.

My nephew will grab his phone as soon as he wakes up to start playing games on it and it’s like good lord, have restraint.

Even I’m not that bad.

Also, those two kid’s cartoons are from way back. When I watched cartoons as a kid, it was Hey Arnold!, Rugrats, The Fairly Oddparents, and The Wild Thornberry’s.

I don’t even know what cartoons exist now.

Moving on to the next mailbox.

I admit it now. There was that girl, Charlene. She called multiple times, but I told her that you were talking to Maria. Boy was she mad! I tell you, something wasn’t right with her. Trust me, I saved you a lifetime of grief with that one. Since I’m not here anymore, stay focused and finish your university! Trust me, you’re the one with all the time left in the world.

I wouldn’t say that ending line is exactly true, just because a doctor hasn’t given us a deadline. Anyone can die at any given time while thinking themselves invincible to a longer life.

It just doesn’t happen like that, unfortunately.

As far as saving someone a lifetime of grief by blocking a girl from entering their life when it’s better if they didn’t pass that line…I remember liking one of the girl’s my brother dated more than the others, but they were always getting into fights and yelling, like all the time.

It was kind of like with me and my first boyfriend, but I just wasn’t that into him and stayed because…I was afraid to back out and girls just had boyfriends and it was a thing.

Not the best explanation but there’s not much of a better one for our predicament.

Our next mailbox states:

I don’t think our parents were supportive of my computer programmer career choice. They felt there was too much competition. And in gaming? No way, they said! I’d starve to death before I ever found a job. Your brother is going to medical school, so, maybe you can go to law school? I just laughed. I was going to do what I was going to do, with the time I had left.

I hate it when people think something else would be a better choice for you, career-wise. Like it’s not even up to you anymore, they just want to get you into a job that makes a higher amount of money right off the bat.

That’s like telling someone to not be an artist because too many people are artists out in the world.

Yeah, but everyone has their own interpretation and style of artwork. Just like a computer programmer for gaming is going to have different ideas than others that have already been down the gaming path.

Don’t tell people what they can and can’t do.

They’ll prove you wrong.

Now there are three paths to choose from. The right path was a dead end, and then I started to go the left path, but that seemed to loop all the way around to the middle with no mailboxes in it, so I just went back to the middle path where the next mailbox was.

I want you to know that I’m not perfect, brother. As posted earlier, I went through your things when I was a kid, and I borrowed what I wanted, until you got home. I also blamed you for eating all the pie from the fridge that time. I told Dad you had done it. Not sure what happened after that, but hey, sorry! There were way too many salads for dinner and I was a growing boy.

At least he admits he’s not perfect, and we’ve already seen the flaws ourselves, and none of us are perfect either. I’ve certainly blamed my brother for things that I did, but we never got into a big amount of trouble for anything.

On another note, I love salad with Olive Garden italian dressing.

When we start walking a ginormouse cake appears up ahead. Not a pie, a cake. I would know, because I’m not a fan of pie all the much, but I do love me some cake.

Continuing forward, we’re met with a cute abandoned house that we can’t go inside, but thinking back to all the other buildings, there probably wouldn’t be much inside anyway. Instead, we’ll read what’s in the mailbox.

There was that time you rescued Squiggles from the university’s laboratory. You didn’t have time, so I looked after him. I still remember that rat! What a character! When I walked into the room he’d stand up on two feet and wiggle his little nose at me. You even got them to stop testing on animals, that was quite an accomplishment, and I’m proud to be your brother!

There’s animal testing done in schools?

I know that you dissect frogs at some point, which is just gross, mind you–when am I ever going to need to know what and where the insides of a frog are? I didn’t think there was any kind of animal testing going on though.

Most of the time a rat’s just going to be a pet for a classroom.

I’ve never had a rat, but I used to work at a pet store where I’d handle rats and clean out there cages. I liked them, but they always kind of scared me since I didn’t know if they were going to bite or not. We didn’t always handle the animals all the time like they’re meant to be if you’re going to own one as a pet.

Their claws caused my arms to itch like crazy whenever I got them out and handled them.

With a blink of our eyes, Squiggles appears above us in all his ratty glory. Serious Kaiju moment going on.

I take the path in front of the house and we get to see the jeep again, and then fog settles over us, but nothing else. It’s a dead end. I turn back and finally get a good look at the front of the house and it looks really nice. I wouldn’t mind living in a place like it, though it’s probably a little too big for just one person.

The next mailbox reads:

You taught me how to drive a car, as you had your driver’s license first. Of course they insisted that I take pro driving lessons too. But I still remember when you flipped out, cause you thought I was going to trash your Honda Civic because I put my foot on the wrong pedal. Then I quickly righted my foot. I’ll bet that bear can drive better than I can!

I can’t drive stick shifts.

My dad tried to teach me going down our gravel driveway. He told me which pedal to press down and to accelerate, but when I started accelerating he told me to take my foot off the other pedal and when I did, gravel started spraying from the back tires due to the amount of gas I was putting on and we swiveled a bit.

So yeah.

My dad’s a terrible stick shift teacher and I don’t ever want to do it again.

I’m met with another dead end, and I have to say they’re starting to become a little annoying. At least offer a little something at the end of them, even if it isn’t a mailbox.

Speaking of, the next one states:

You bailed me out one time. I’d spent all the rent money on a party. Honestly, I just did the math wrong. But, you lent me the cash. That was so brotherly of you. You never told our parents. I’d have been so embarrassed if you had! I remember they were proud of both of us, so it was a good thing my big brother looked out for me.

I’m not sure if I’d be the person to ask someone for help if I screwed myself over like this. I think I’d probably just end up freaking out and crying and then my parents seeing me stressed and me having to come up with something to say about it.

Maybe my brother would help me out in this case, but if it was vice versa, it’s really hard for me to say no in certain circumstances, and I think I’d feel bad for him and give him the money.

As much as I hate some of the problems that have been stirring within the family, whenever I hear my parents talk about how he needs money for this and that, I want to help him money-wise, but I just stop myself, because it’s just going to continue being an issue.

Why keep trying to fix something when it’ll never get fixed.

Also, I’m sorry, at this point I’ve kind of been neglecting the music side of things, so let’s hear what this place is all about right now.

Now that that’s out of the way, the next mailbox.

—

I really missed you when you started your first year of medical school. That was your 30-hour a day venture. But we still kept in touch through text, email, and Skype. What did siblings do in the past when there was no tech? Call on the phone? That seems so yesteryear! Anyway, when I missed you, I’d head into your bedroom and you guessed it, snoop through your things!

I remember having a landline and calling people on our corded phone, which had a very long cord mind you. I could never stand or sit still, so by the end of the call, I’d have the cord wrapped all around me from ceaseless pacing.

Also, I can’t imagine going through my siblings things after so many years, because there are some things that change from kids to adults that I just don’t really want to look into.

This time we come across a small shack with another lock on the door, but the answer is not in the sky. It’s through one of the windows on the wall where you can see a mailbox on the inside.

5972.

Aside from the usual slim amount of furniture, a locker has been added in, of all things.

The mailbox has a question for you to answer, and that’s:

Knowing what you know now, would you have lived your life any differently?

Golly, that’s a question.

I don’t regret all the time I spent drawing and writing and reading, but maybe I regret all the time I spent learning music that I just brushed off a lot of times, even though I enjoyed that my parents loved listening to me play for them.

If I knew gaming would be so much fun and I’d get to know like-minded people that like the same weird games I do, and that I could do podcasts and reviews and have people actually watch and listen to such things, I would’ve done it earlier.

It’s so much fun for me to do, but it also takes so much time, especially since I work a full-time job.

Not that I wouldn’t have if I reversed time and all that, but I’d definitely be further ahead than I am now.

As far as the actual answer to the question I chose:

No, you can’t change destiny.

And thus, we’re back on the roads at level 23. Which makes me think maybe it doesn’t really matter what answers you choose, because I figured the first choice would be more appropriate. Maybe it is just up to you to answer honestly with yourself.

This driving course is just a lot of tight turns, slim roads, and a single health pack if you’ve made an error. Nothing more to it, which is perfect to get you started driving properly again.

Level 24 had a deer run out toward me, but I actually missed him because I was driving so fast, so there’s that. Sometimes you just get lucky in a video game just like real life.

There is a trick to the route where going straight will lead to a dead end, when you should actually turn left.

You’re introduced to the jump mechanic in level 25. It’s a red bar that you’ll be jumping over, so if you touch it, you’re thrown back to the beginning. Past that, there’s a left and right path before the parking spot where you can grab the two coins you need.

On level 26 I had fun swerving to the right, and backing up into a coin in order to turn left and continue forward to grab the other coins, get past a red space on the ground, and even crash through a double set of boxes.

The boxes do explode into pieces, and they can block the screen which might block how well you see the parking spot.

At level 27, you’ll want to back your car up and rev up for a jump over the bar, because you can’t do it at a dead stop. There is another one that leads you to the correct path while the other is a large dead end that allows you to back up easily. Maybe for more speed as well.

You’ll need two coins on level 28, and thankfully the game gives you a perfect chance to back up easily when getting that first coin. After that, just head to the parking spot and you’ll have everything you need to leave.

I don’t know why it took me this long to start having fun with doing slide turns with the hand brake, but I can’t tell you how many times I had to restart the level 29 course from slamming into things.

Not only that, even if you’re being careful, there are a couple chances for you to hit some deer.

Don’t worry, I got through it only after around 8 deaths.

Level 30 was a lot easier with just a jump and a lot of different breakables to smash through.

I think level 31 wanted me to back it up after collecting that first coin, but there was no way I was even going to try, so I backed up best I could in the small amount of space provided in order to double back.

It was just a matter of getting the other coin on the way to the parking spot.

And finally we have level 32.

This one introduces you to the speed orb, and this is one you’re going to want to be careful with, because if you’re going fast and grab one of these, you’re going to go faster and it’s easier to wreck into something or make a dumb mistake.

Here you’re going to grab the speed boost while jumping over a red line and there is a barrel ahead, so don’t tilt the car toward it when landing.

There’s a second speed boost and red line before getting to the end.

—

Another new environment, and this time it feels like we’re actually walking along a hiking trail. Just…one littered with mailboxes, with the first one saying:

When we were young kids, we lived in an apartment building. Then, when we were both in school, our parents bought a house. Our first winter there was spectacular. A fine layer of snow fell to the ground. We almost raced out of the house in t-shirts and slippers but Mom yelled at us to put our winter gear on. Then we ran outside and built a snowman. It looked more like a bear, but that’s okay, we made it together.

Well, I don’t have a story like this because I’ve lived in the same house with my parents since I was born. My brother was the only one to go to a college dorm and get his own place with his own family.

Also, here Jim is writing Mom with an O instead of a U again.

I’m not sure if he realized he was doing it at the time.

Lo and behold, when we step away from the letter, there’s now snow forming on the ground. It might look pretty, but I’m still not a fan of the cold and never will be.

The next letter says:

It was spring time and Dad wanted to clean out the basement. The first step was to carry everything up the four small steps to the yard, dump it there, then go through it all later. Wow! You were so strong, carrying your load. I had trouble carrying things, so got relegated to carrying the small boxes and stuff. Finally, it was all out! Dad sure tossed out a lot of stuff that day.

I wouldn’t be able to carry a lot of boxes myself, since I’m such a small, weak little girl with the arm strength of a baby child.

I’m also the kind of person who wants to carry ten grocery bags at once into the house because I don’t want to make several trips out to the garage to bring them in.

But if there ever comes a day we clean out the garage…heaven forbid.

I have no idea what we’ll do with all that stuff in there. There’s no doubt it would look so much better and more roomier though.

The snow on the ground is now gone–we’ll just blame global warming on that one–and when we look up we can see a giant floating box with who knows what inside. Although it looks more like an office supplies box than a junk box.

In the next mailbox:

After the yard cleaning, we had this big garage sale. I was so tired from cleaning out the basement, I could barely move. I took the money that people handed to me. I hope I counted properly, because by the end of the day I didn’t care anymore. Still, we raked in a lot of cash. Do you know what our parents did with it? Probably paid my medical bills?

I’m not sure if cash obtained from goods in a garage sale would really put a dent in paying off medical bills, but it’s a nice thought to have. I’m sure their parents spent it towards their kids, maybe more specifically toward Jim, but there’s no way to know for sure.

I don’t think we’d ask for anything knowing our brother was on a downward slope health-wise.

We used to have several garage sales going on at our grandparent’s house, since the driveway is a whole lot shorter than our own place. I remember selling some of my books, and I think we might’ve even got rid of our SNES when all’s said and done since I certainly don’t have it anymore, and I stopped going over there as often after my grandma became sick and bedridden.

If that was the case, I definitely didn’t get the amount of money I should’ve from it.

Oddly enough, after those mailboxes, the scene shifts again.

Instead of a forest and dirt path, we’re now in a higher elevation area where one slip might send us careening down a cliffside, so there’s a fun thought to have. I don’t think it’d actually happen in this game, but I don’t think I tested it.

You can definitely fall from great heights in some of their other games, so who knows.

At the edge of said cliff is a mailbox that reads:

I can’t quite recall, but I think the first film we ever saw in a movie theatre was Spiderman. It was terrible. Not as good as the modern Spiderman films today. Still, it was exciting getting pop to drink that we normally weren’t allowed to drink, and a big bag of popcorn to crunch on throughout the film. I accidentally dropped my bag and it spilled all over the place.

I was actually thinking the letter wouldn’t have been completed because the person fell off before they finished writing it, but this is Jim we’re talking about and I don’t think his life ended on such an unfortunate slip.

Anyway, as far as movie theatres go, I won’t try to remember the first one I went to see, but I do recall when I was getting my ears pierced at a young age, the first one hurt and I didn’t want to get the other ear done. So my mom bribed me to go see The Lion King in theatres if I got the other one pierced.

Now days I don’t even wear earrings.

I enjoyed the fancy ones with feathers coming down, but it was always a hassle to take them out before bed, then put them back in, and rinse and repeat.

I hate repetition. Even when I’m the one doing it.

The next mailbox says:

I remember when you weren’t so perfect, yourself. You decided to collect dead bugs, remember? You’d make these elaborate settings and put them into display cases, along with the name of the species. Mum found them and screamed. Ha ha! Boy, did she ream you out for bringing dirty bacterial things into the house! Dad had to moderate, and the resolution was to let you keep the bug displays at the back of the storage shed, where they likely still are today.

It takes a certain type of person to want to have display cases of bugs spread out around you in a room. Like, some bugs are interesting, don’t get me wrong, but on another note, some bugs just need to be disintegrated by a fire.

And if spiders were part of that collection, even though they’re not bugs? Oh no.

That’s crossing the line.

After that letter, we get another scene change.

I wish I knew why we’re going from one place to another so quickly. If we were entering different phases of Jim’s livelihood then maybe I’d understand it a bit better, but for the most part he’s been talking about their childhood and nowhere really place-specific aside from a lake.

Before we read the first letter in this section, here’s a clip of the music.

I enjoyed collecting things too. I collected Lego, as you know, as I’m sure that you were missing plenty of it. I didn’t even do anything with half of it. After I was gone, I’m sure that Dad found about ten plastic containers of it under my bed, or in the closet. I hope you donated it to charity, or something. I’m sure some kids somewhere would love it! Some might even be worth something.

Is that collecting Lego, or is that hoarding? Because I get the feeling what he was doing is more along the lines of hoarding.

I can’t judge him. I used to buy a notebook every time I saw one in a store, even if I already had fifty notebooks with only a couple pages written in each one. I was the same way with sticky pads and annotations tabs, because I like to highlight and write things in the books I read.

So many highlighters and sticky tabs…

The next mailbox states:

I always seemed to get sick more often than you. But it was fun in a way. Stay home from school, get pampered by Mom or Dad, depending on who was off work that day, get lots of hot soup and hot cocoa. I didn’t even have to get dressed! And we were quarantined from each other so we didn’t pass our germs around. It was kind of a mandatory resentment period.

I got sick a lot as a kid. A lot of it was that my cramps were terrible, but also I started getting headaches a lot, which I now realize I have chronic migraines.

I was lucky that my mom worked from home most of the time I was in school and she had to pick me up. No hot soup or cocoa for me though. I’d just pass out in bed for several hours. The same thing I do these days as a cure.

Interestingly enough, we will now be entering a house.

Whose house? Not sure. Maybe ours? I assume it would have to be ours, but it does actually have some kind of lived in feel to it. We’ve got a kitchen, a living room, bedroom, and an upstairs area. Atop the balcony is our mailbox.

Weird place for the mailman to reach, but whatever.

Remember when Dad taught Fluffy tricks? Who said you can’t teach a cat tricks? We’d go out into the yard and he’d run around in the green grass. Then we’d call him to come, and he would. He’d play fetch with his fake bone toy. We had him do sit, stay, jump up, lie down. What a cat! We adopted him as a kitten and he sure lived a long time for a cat.

I think my coworker’s cat lived to 18 before she had to put it down. It’s crazy that they can actually live that long, but maybe I’m more used to dogs and their shorter lifetimes, especially medium to large-sized breeds.

I don’t know how old our oldest cat was. We got him when he was already five years old or so and he just lazed about all the time. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say he was around fifteen or so.

That’s the oldest one of my cats has ever been.

Next up we’re heading toward a church. I don’t think those are crows I’ve been seeing around throughout the game, now that I got closer to them gathered around the outside of the church, they look like magpies. But I think they sound like crows when they take off?

I’m not exactly sure what magpies sound like, but don’t they mimic?

The mailbox says:

There was that brook behind the house. Kind of like a river, but much smaller. In the summer, it would dry out. In the spring or fall, if you listened hard enough, you could hear the sounds of the water slowly dribbling over pebbles and stones. Sometimes there was even a fish or frog in there. It was refreshing to take off socks and shoes and stick one’s feet in there.

We have a creek in our front yard that I’d always try to catch frogs or find tadpoles in when I was younger.

Embarrassing story, but there was also one time where I got my shoes stuck in the mud and I had to go to the bathroom so bad that I just stood there crying for a hot minute. I don’t remember the outcome, but my bladder was unruly back then and something might’ve happened outside of my control.

Behind this church is a small cemetery with a cluster of headstones.

And just like that the game became a bit darker, despite the already somber mood with sprinkles of happiness added in from Jim’s letters. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that this game revolves around our deceased brother as a sort of celebration of life.

Or maybe it’s just me that kind of forgets the subject matter, considering how the pretty environment can steal my attention away.

The next mailbox states:

I wanted to win the lottery, do you remember? I wondered what the point of going to school and finding a job was. If I won the lottery, I’d be set for life. I wouldn’t have to do anything. But then you reminded me that even billionaires work hard, sometimes twice as much as us. So, back to computer programming I went. Doing something I enjoyed very much was all that mattered to me really.

Wouldn’t it be nice if winning the lottery and never having to work a day in your life was that easy? I wonder what’s the average amount of money people waste on trying to win the lottery, because I’d love to win, but I’m not going to throw money on something that gives such a slim chance.

And half the time the winners are in freaking California where all the rich people already live! Like, come on.

Next mailbox.

I remember that day. I was so proud of you, brother! You volunteered to donate blood in my honour! You had just reached the minimum age! You had that rare type too, what was it? O negative, that’s it! I wish I could have donated blood too. Honestly, if I could right now, I would, to make up for what all those amazing blood donors did for me. It brings a tear to my eye thinking about it.

Once upon a time, I used to donate blood.

But I stopped at some point, and I think there was a reason I couldn’t one year, but then also because I’d have a vasovagal response to blood. Looking at blood being drawn makes me feel faint. Even talking about blood or anything of the sort makes phantom pain appear all over my body.

I hate it.

Though the whole ordeal is for a good cause, of course.

Continuing to the next mailbox.

You were the sports-minded one. I was fine playing football on the computer. But you put all of that aside after you decided you wanted to go to medical school. You know, one day you’ll have your own clinic. Perhaps you can start your own team and invite all the medical staff to join in or something. Probably just a dumb idea, never mind.

I wouldn’t say it’s a dumb idea, but it’s thinking in the bigger picture that might not actually happen unless we, as the older brother, work really hard to create our own clinic. For the most part, people in medical just join an already established place to make it a better place for patients.

My brother actually works in a hospital, in respiratory.

I told my mom he just has to remind people to breathe and everything’s good.

All these mailboxes are basically back to back right now, so the next one reads:

I remember Mom and Dad arguing about something. Was it about me? They’d locked themselves in the bedroom and were yelling. Normally they didn’t fight. There was no point in arguing, as there was nothing they could have done. There. I said it. Seriously. Don’t blame yourself. This is life. We make of it what we can. Personally, I’m happy with how things turned out. You should know I’m in a better place.

Is he in a better place though? Isn’t that the whole mystery around dying and all the arguments of what happens when someone dies.

Sure, it’s nice to think people you know have gone to Heaven, but what if there’s just an endless amount of nothingness and you’re stuck within it. What if that nothingness also doesn’t exist, just like the deceased person’s life? How about reincarnating into a worse life?

We don’t want to think of the unpleasantries that could be…but they’re there.

But it’s good that Jim accepted his fate, knowing there was nothing he nor anyone else could do, and just vibed as best as he could during the time he had left. A lot of people would stress. I would stress. Heck, I stress just thinking about the possibility of a countdown to a set date.

I’d rather not know.

During your walk to the next mailbox, they added in a new mechanic, seeing as there’s a gap in the ground before you reach your destination.

You can now jump.

I don’t know how many times you’ll use this during the rest of the game’s walking simulator portion. You’d think it would be used more than once, but even in Drizzlepath you were only meant to jump one time I think, and that might be the case here.

Yeah it’s…weird to implement something like this once, I know.

—

As for the mailbox, though…

Remember that time I collapsed at school? The teacher made a big fuss and the ambulance came? The students surrounded me. You were called out of class to join me. They called our parents, who met us at the hospital. That was my first ride in an ambulance. So cool! I’ll bet you get tired of seeing lots of ambulances at the hospital where you work now.

I actually went out in an ambulance one time during school. I was having severe menstrual cramps and couldn’t handle the pain and felt like I was running a temperature. Can’t say I was very excited to get into an ambulance.

I know they put an IV into me and I was so tense they reminded me I could relax my hand that was in a fist.

I fell asleep there and when I woke up my mom was next to me in a chair. I guess they said I was dehydrated, and given the fact that I hate water unless it’s flavored, I can believe it.

And now we’re at another house that needs a combination to the lock, and looking in both of the windows yields us nothing. The code is actually on the rock wall behind the house–8016.

This house’s layout makes a lot less sense than the previous nice one we had entered. I mean, there’s a fridge in the living room next to a bed.

Like…what?

They didn’t even try with this place. Just threw some assets in and called it a day, since the only real reason we’re in here is for the mailbox that asks us another important question.

Do you feel comfort in reading letters from your brother, or should he not have bothered sending them?

I chose, “Yes, and I’ve learned a lot more about my brother and myself,” which isn’t a lie. We have learned a lot about our brother, some things that we may not have known before. And that kind of expands on how we see and feel about ourselves as well, especially with moving forward from this point on.

If I were to guess, we’d be a little happier, more headstrong in what we hope to achieve, and live life in the way our brother would’ve wanted us to.

Of course, answering that question means we’re now on level 34 of the driving course.

Welcome back to hell on wheels.

The first level here is going to make you do a bit of maneuvering at the start, because you’ll need to break the boxes on the right in order to give yourself some room to accelerate and jump over a red line, which also happens to have boxes before it.

Once that’s done, you’re good to go for the parking spot.

You have to be careful in level 35, as you’ll need to acquire two coins, and each of those coins has a speed boost in front of it. Go too fast, and you’ll accelerate into the cones.

Level 36 is so bright and full of colorful trees I swear it looks like it might be someone’s birthday being celebrated up in here. I haven’t been in this colorful of a place since freakin’ Discovery Zone, if any of you can even remember that.

There’s a red line you have to jump and boxes that need broken to reach the end.

Oh, and a deer. Don’t forget to notice the deer.

There are several invisibility fields you’ll be driving over in level 37. I don’t really understand them, unless they’re just there to make your life a little harder with driving, because you can’t specifically see where you are, making it more difficult to go around turns or speed up for red zones.

You need four coins to get through level 38, and while they weren’t a problem to get, I did get a little lost on where to grab them. Not to mention there’s a speed boost before a red line you jump over, before the parking spot.

Level 39 was a little confusing to me. There’s a long stretch of red on the ground in front of you and you’re able to back up into a section. I thought there might be something back there, so I went ahead and looked, but it’s a dead end in all directions, meaning you don’t have a speed boost or anything to get you through that red zone.

Just your own speed and a prayer.

Basically, it’s all about timing.

You want to be at a high speed when you get to the red path when its light goes out, which means there’s some mental planning going on before you jet forward through some boxes, a speed boost, and the finish line.

I do not like backing up while on an invisibility field, but that’s exactly what’s going to happen more than once in level 40. There are quite a few of them, along with a line to jump over, which lands you on another invisible field.

Whee.

Level 41 had me hitting a deer, just because I took the speed boost that was offered to me, so thanks for that, game.

Level 42 is a straightforward path where you’ll be breaking boxes one after another and getting coins in the process, though toward the end there’s a red line to jump over, so don’t get too distracted by all the pretty colors on the screen.

Don’t trust any of the speed boosts in level 43, because you will be hitting deer due to not stopping in time. And those deer are actually being hid by the environment pretty well.

And finally, the open–or somewhat open–world.

This segment is really short, having only one mailbox in it, but it’s got a very pretty section that’s perfect screenshot material.

Basically, you have a bunch of cabins up ahead and they’re all lit up by different colored lights on the outside of them, ranging from reddish, yellow, teal, and purple. You can’t get close to them, because they’re on the opposite side of the cliff, but they’re pretty to look at.

Kind of like during the Christmas season when you go through a neighborhood just to look at everyone’s different light shows.

Walking around the trail is a deer that you could also get a shot of before it runs away, never to be seen again, presumably having fallen off the cliff just like the deer that didn’t make the jump in the beginning of Death Stranding.

RIP deer.

Around the bend is a mailbox that reads:

I got so serious in my last set of memories, so let’s go back to lighthearted letters, okay? These days I imagine your daily life as you’re at home after a long shift at the hospital. You’ll wash up, then toss a fast food meal into the microwave. You may feel lonely, as there is no time for relationships when you’re an intern. That’s why you love spending 16-hour days at the hospital, so you can connect with people.

Yeah, people get lost in their work for different reasons and sometimes it’s to avoid the inevitable loneliness of going home, or knowing there’s going to be another fight when you get home that you don’t want to deal with, or some other thing that’s far more depressing than your job.

I like getting lost in my work because it’s less time for me to have straying thoughts when I’m focused on something in front of me.

We continue on to what looks like another house we might be able to check out, but the environment changes around us to one of a babbling brook and a long line of mailboxes that are going to be back to back more than they have been.

So consider this the home stretch section where we’ll be reading the letters one after another as they’re served to us.

—

I believe there are 12 more letters to go.

The first reads:

If I could see my parents again, I would. We had a great set, didn’t we? Wow, you hear all the stories, but we got a good lot! Ha ha, sometimes we’d get mad when they wouldn’t let us climb that tree (anymore), or allow us to get a learner’s permit when it changed to age 15, or not allow us to eat the whole cake in one sitting. But they taught us right from wrong. Like every generation does to the next.

This one made me a little emotional.

I have some of the best parents myself–I mean, they never kicked me out of the house, they always accepted my brother coming home when he had a rough night, they always joke about stuff–but there’s always the times when you’re going to get mad at them over stupid crap.

Then the regret kind of kicks in because the anger overshadows the better times due to depression getting in the way of what you should really be thinking about.

I’m glad I still have them around, though I try to skirt around the truth of they won’t be here forever.

The next mailbox is across the water.

I loved school up until grade 10, then grade 11 and 12. I think I heard that bully is now a flight attendant. How ironic! Now he must put a smile on his face and withstand complaints from others! Anyway, we had some great teachers over the years. Remember Mr. Warcola and Miss Brownstone? They were so supportive! And that extra time when we didn’t understand stuff, they didn’t have to do that!

My favorite classes and teachers were in 10-12, I think.

In one of our classes, we could buy candy before class started, and puppy chow, maybe some other goodies. Our teacher had a soft slow voice that could easily put everyone to sleep. One of my English teachers would read my writing and make comments on it, so that was fun.

I enjoyed a lot of the teachers, even though some of the classes weren’t my strong suit.

I went to a vocational school for a couple years to learn art design.

Moving on to the third mailbox, you get to see a plane in the sky, which is terrifying because it’s aimed downward on a crash course for earth.

We had many friends throughout the years. The ones in the apartment building, the neighbours, and at school. I hope you looked up some of the old bunch and let them know what happened to me. Maybe reconnect? I’ll bet you have nothing in common, but at least you’ll have something to talk about, right? Talk about me! Look for my address book. You’ll find all the contacts you need in there.

Wouldn’t it be a little weird to reconnect with past friends you haven’t talked to just to bring up your brother that passed away? I mean, I get that they were his friend too, but it just seems like a weird thing to bring up, unless they ask about him specifically.

It would be fun to go out somewhere with everyone and do a celebration of life for Jim.

Fourth mailbox.

Our relatives were on the other side of the continent. I remember only two trips to the west coast. And maybe, a half dozen relatives visited us over the years. I still remember our grandparents. I’m glad I had a close immediate family, as we never saw anyone else. Anyway, I’ll bet you saw them all last month, right? A big family reunion. I wish I had been there!

This is kind of weird, because it makes me think Jim knew almost exactly when he’d be passing. Was his health that bad that the doctors, or even he himself, could predict the month he’d pass away in? Because what he wrote here means we’d read it at least a month after his passing.

I’m not sure, it’s just a little odd to know something like this and be so sure of it.

Fifth mailbox.

We had a lot of pets over the years, dogs, cats, rats and rabbits, but I’ll always remember Fluffy the best. He was so big and flouffy, and acted more like a dog than any dog I’ve ever known. He used to sleep on my bed at night, even though Dad said he shouldn’t be there, as my asthma would act up. But then I’d secretly open the door in the middle of the night and in he’d come.

My doberman Athena was my baby and the one dog I’ll always have good memories of, despite us having gone through a lot of dogs. My mom’s favorite was Gordon, her cavalier king charles spaniel. I always thought he looked dopey and dumb.

I know, it’s mean.

As far as cats go, S’mores is everyone’s favorite, because she a crazy cat that we got as a feral kitty. She doesn’t meow, but sort of chirps. My dad says her mom forgot to teach her how to meow.

She’s got a foot fetish too. You’ll be sitting there and she’ll saunter over and just grab your foot and start attacking it out of nowhere. If you try to push her away she’ll jump at you.

Such a hellion. But she’s adorable.

Walking toward our next mailbox, we see Fluffy looking down at us from above, and now we know what a mouse feels like when a cat traps them in a corner.

It’s terrifying.

Looking back if you ask me which memory I’d like to live again, I’d say the first winter in the new house. The one when we built a snowman. And the craziest was kanoeing in the rain. Communing with nature has always been my favorite. Now that I think, what makes the world so beautiful is the wealth of the nature.

I don’t even know what memory I’d want to go back to. Something that had me and my parents in it. I’m not sure if it would’ve been our fishing trip, (though probably not, since I didn’t feel well during it), or the train vacation.

I think I’d pick the train vacation because it was a once in a lifetime event and we had so much fun with it and our tour guide Jessie was great.

The next mailbox reads:

I could never learn how to approach ones like Charlene. I guess they get eliminated by unnatural selection. In fact sooner or later you see that everyone has a match. The deal is to find the one. I hope that Charlene has…

Maybe everyone does have a specific match out there for them, but sometimes one has to work on their attitude first in order for it to click. Otherwise you’re just stuck within a riptide of turbulent emotions and sometimes can’t get out.

Plus, you have to actively get out for the match to connect with you.

Someone like me probably won’t find their match because I’m too busy staying inside and working on podcasts and reviews and games to bother with finding a special someone. The idea of being interrupted when I’m working bothers me.

The next mailbox–leaving four more left.

People’s imaginations leads to such comedies. A huge bear has gotten into the jeep and is seriously driving it, parking and stuff. But the real comedy is the fact of how short life is. And that the people ignore it or don’t even notice. In where I am now, everyone boggles at it.

And where exactly is he right now at the time of writing that letter? Curious.

I don’t really have anything more to say about it, but yeah, the imagination of people knows no bounds, as suggested by many games–especially like something like Date Everything.

Walk away from this mailbox and there’s a bear roaring at us from the heavens.

So much for being comedic.

The next mailbox states:

I’ll give you a secret, but keep it well; from here, we also see the future of the living. Some of us can even interfere with it. You’ve been granted a wonderful life. A very long life, full of health and peace is upon you. I hope you get the most out of it.

One part of me wants to say that Jim is under some kind of delusion, but this is a video game and there’s a chance that maybe Jim has written these letters while he’s in the better place he spoke of in a previous letter.

Maybe it’s open to interpretation.

Maybe it’s not even for us to judge, but to accept that he’s right and we’re going to live a long and happy life. Heck, maybe that’s all it takes to live the perfect life, to believe it will be just that.

Our next letter reads:

I can’t say much for the world. Everyone is in a different place. What works here won’t work there. Basically, mind your own business. Change what you can, fight for what you can. Don’t fight if it’s not worth fighting for. Rinse and repeat. Don’t read the news, turn off your devices, particularly when you’re with loved ones. And this is coming from a computer programmer. Oh and vote. That’s a big one!

I feel like that last suggestion was coming from the game dev himself, because it’s a bit silly to tag on.

But I mean, he’s right on all accounts. Mind your business, do what you gotta do and what you wanna do and just keep reaching for what you want in life.

The news does suck.

And I’m particularly bad at putting down an electronic device even when I’m with my parents. It’s just a force of habit to keep myself busy. A bad habit, mind you.

Getting closer to the end with the next mailbox letter.

I’ve enjoyed my life, and my life with my family, and particularly my big brother, Paul. It’s been quite the learning experience. Sometimes it’s been fabulous, sometimes frustrating, sometimes painful like when Suzy turned me down for prom night). I’m also happy and proud to have lived my life. And look at this cool game I made. I’ll bet you couldn’t have done that! Oh, just kidding, you can if you set your mind to it.

And there we have it.

This is all a game that Jim had created for his big brother Paul to play, but I wonder when we were actually supposed to play it. Like if there was a certain time after Jim’s death that we were allowed to, or if even we knew about the game before Jim’s passing.

Maybe he kept it a secret the entire time until he was no longer here.

I’m also wondering if there’s going to be another game that Paul makes now, as the last sentence may have hinted at.

And now we’re at the final mailbox and the last letter.

It’s best to not look too much into the past. Look at me, I’m now where I can’t park the jeep anymore. Live in the present, and plan for the future. Look forward to the future. Remember what I said in a past letter, sometimes there is nothing you can do. If you have a faith, practice it. Be kind to people, my brother Paul. Now if you don’t mind, Fluffy wants some treats, so I’m going to go find his treat bag. Jim the stinky bundle.

I think that last part was him signing off to a previous letter where he talked about Paul saying he was a stinky bundle as a baby, which is kind of a gross but endearing way to end the final letter of a game.

It’s also kind of upsetting that this is it.

This is all we’re getting from Jim because he’s gone, and there’s nothing we can do about it, so we just have to move forward and cherish what we have of the people we no longer have.

With that being said, we do continue forward to the hill that was talked about, where we spent the last day with Jim watching fireworks, and there’s a scene with a small amount of voice acting to it.

[scene]

And now, let’s take a moment to get through the credits scene, before we jump back into the jeep for the final level.

[scene]

All right, we’ve landed on level 45 of the driver’s ed course. The one that Jim had trouble completing, so let’s get into what we’re in for.

First off, I had 3 deaths.

The first one was because I didn’t properly jump over a red line, the second was because of a stupid deer, and the third was once again from the jump that I couldn’t quite do correctly.

It’s a course with a lot of things going on in it, including jumps, stop portions, invisibility fields, speed orbs that have the ability to screw you over, and about three deer in a row to ram into your car if you’re not paying attention.

I wouldn’t say it was a tough course. You just have to have your wits about you.

And that’s the end of our podcast review of Little Brother Jim, and what a long fun podcast it’s been. I’m happy I did it with this game, despite it being a not well-known walking simulator. It’s got a lot of letters in it that I was able to talk about and give my own little stories on in regards to my life.

I know a lot of people didn’t appreciate the driving portion, that it felt like an entirely different game, and I understand that, but I also understand why it was implemented–because it was Jim’s favorite game.

And this is a game about him, not you.

But yeah, I gave this game three stars just because the driving portion can be a bit hectic on people who would’ve liked a simple cozy game, but mainly because of the script of the letters. It’s one of the main aspects of the game–the core of it, even–but it’s just too hard to read at times.

Other than that, a pretty solid game with a nice soundtrack to listen to.

Thanks for watching everyone, and don’t get in too much trouble when you say not now Mom, I’m gaming.