It’s been a couple of months since the Xbox One’s launch. We’ve entered that period in which we’ve sucked the marrow from the bones of most launch games we wanted to play and we’re not so patiently awaiting a new big release for our expensive games machines. This would seem the perfect time for a few downloadable gems to arrive on the Xbox Games Store and tempt our post-launch games budget from our sticky little fingers.

Enter Max: The Curse of Brotherhood, a cartoon-styled and puzzle-packed platform game from Danish developers, Press Play. It’s not exactly jostling for attention alongside a plethora of downloadable competitors on the store, but is this the perfect antidote to those post-launch doldrums or is it an avoidable speed bump on the road to whatever’s next?

The first thing to note about The Curse of Brotherhood is the art style. Its environments are gorgeous, chunky, cartoon backdrops packed with a subtle vibrancy and depth which belies this game’s rigid 2D side-scrolling play-space. There’s no screen overlay either, so there’s nothing to distract from the action or pull your attention out of this colourful little world.

The set up is fairly simple, as can be the case for the most successful games of this genre. The eponymous Max wishes his little brother Felix away, reading aloud a spell he finds on the internet in the process. As soon as he is finished reading this, a nefarious portal opens in the bedroom wall and his sibling is plucked from our world by a humungous hairy claw and deposited in the amusingly named Anotherland. Max, being the plucky but indecisive type, immediately leaps through the portal to rescue the brother he had just condemned.

Upon arriving in Anotherland, Max encounters a strange old lady who imbues his pen with mystical powers, making it quite literally a magic marker. With this marker, possessed of the spirit of the mysterious old lady, Max must make use of an ever-growing number of abilities to manipulate certain magical nodes in order to navigate the land and retrieve Felix from the clutches of the evil Mustacho, who wants to use his youthful body to gain immortality.

The magical powers you’ve obtained –  fittingly, given their vessel – allow you to draw into existence elements of the landscape that were not previously there. You begin with the ability to pull forth towers of earth, creating a platform on which to land or an improvised elevator to a higher ledge you could never hope to jump to. As the hero’s journey continues, he conquers more lands along the way to an inevitable showdown with the evil kidnapper, with each ading further powers to his marker.

By the end of the game, you’ll be able to draw out branches, vines, water plumes and fireballs to aid your progress and you’ll need to become quite adept with the mechanics of drawing them – with the right trigger to activate the pen and then a face button and the left stick to draw whichever environmental element applies. It’s all colour coded by the magical aura around the node you’re drawing from, so there’s no selection to be made, but you will still need to think laterally to solve some of the game’s imaginative puzzles.

Those puzzles are a definite strong point, with only occasional recycling of concepts involved along seven game-worlds and several hours of play. Unfortunately, the often finicky drawing controls are also regularly required to navigate safely through timed sequences or instances of urgent peril, which result in the game’s most unwelcome moments. You’ll need speed and precision to succeed and that’s not a combination that is naturally obtainable with a trigger-stick control system. Basically, the drawing mechanics would work wonderfully on a touch screen but aren’t quite intuitive enough with an analogue stick.

Each of the seven game worlds contains one level that’s a kind of boss encounter. You’re running away from the large beast that pulled Felix through the portal and you’ll need to use your growing array of magical skills to avoid capture. It’s typical platform game fare in which the danger constantly approaches from the left, giving you a limited timeframe in which to escape to the right. There’s a “liquid rising platform climb” too, shortly after a “lava flow from the left” section, in case you were missing some of the most heavily leant-upon platform game clichés.

These pseudo boss sections are often well designed around the pen’s abilities and your own growing knowledge of the world’s rules and mechanics, but they also rely heavily on trial-and-error and will occasionally send you back to harsh checkpoints when the game arbitrarily kills you. As if to compound the frustration, they’re particularly stingy with their time allowance so end up being the most unfair, infuriating sections of the game.

Playing the main story of the game took me roughly five or six hours, with around half the collectible Evil Eyes (Mustacho’s CCTV system) and Amulet pieces collected along the way. Aiming for 100% would likely take another couple of hours. Unfortunately, my time with The Curse of Brotherhood was beset with some technical problems.

One minor but recurring issue was the fact that the game refuses to allow you to keep playing if the wireless controller turns off at any point – even when you turn it back on and can successfully navigate elsewhere, the message to reconnect remains on screen and the game is unresponsive. This can be worked around by quitting and restarting, but you lose progress back to the start of the level. On a couple of occasions, attempting this workaround also surfaced another issue for me – the game simply crashed back to home screen upon start up.

It’s difficult to know just who this game is intended to be for. It’s clearly styled, scripted and voiced for a younger audience, but entirely lacks the knowing double-meaning and layered appeal that is so prevalent in many of the most successful modern animation films – to make a slightly unfair comparison. So it’s styled for youth, but the controls are finicky enough to make me believe that it’s a little too dextrously-demanding for younger players. The puzzles, despite some eventual voiced-over hints, are often tricky enough to seem out of reach for younger players.

Imagine if Limbo was made by Nickleodeon and you would be halfway to knowing what The The Curse of Brotherhood is like. It’s often, but not always, a trial-and-error puzzler with a young male lead who succumbs to regular and occasionally gruesome deaths. However, where Limbo’s protagonist was atmospherically silent, Max is a chatty, gurning derivative of cable cartoon networks, stricken with Pixar-like overstated facial expressions. It became more and more irritating as the game progressed, missing the presumed destination of “charm” and instead arriving at “extroverted brat”. It certainly felt more asinine than it was endearing, although I’ll happily concede that as a matter of personal preference.

So, while it has some great puzzle design and some gorgeous scenery, it’s got just as much working against it thanks to a frustrating control system, some technical glitches and irritating character realisation.

Score: 5/10