So, apparently Pilot Brothers is based on a cartoon series from the Soviet Union that was on TV in the ‘80s or ‘90s (my research yielded contradicting answers), and that apparently had quite a big following in the day. As a result, we have an iPad adventure game that is a new story for these two oddball detectives to go on.

The art style of Pilot Brothers puts you in a cartoon world with inconsistent proportions filled with people and animals that all feel like something out of a child’s show, so basically the look and feel of the show the game is based on. While I found the visual style somewhat unnerving, I will say that I liked the style. It seemed to compliment the unusual nature of the main characters, the problems you have to solve, and the unexpected solutions to those problems.

While the game’s graphics seem to fit the feel of the game, the music doesn’t. The frantic tunes quickly got on my nerves and became a constant noise that kept me from thinking my way through the puzzles the game presented. Thankfully, that can be easily turned off. Pilot Brothers does have some light dialogue, so you will need the sound turned on, but thankfully the characters’ somewhat annoying voices aren’t heard all too often.

Pilot Brothers has the detective duo tracking down an unusual theft. It seems the prize elephant from the local zoo has been taken. The brothers will track the thief through several locations and each one is filled with the most bizarre series of puzzles that I’ve ever encountered in an adventure game, and to put it mildly, I’ve played a lot of adventure games. Actually, to be fair, the problems the game poses aren’t the crazy part of Pilot Brothers, its the solutions that, more times than not, I simply couldn’t come up with.

Pilot Brothers feels like it’s trying to take cues from another pair of crazed detectives, Sam & Max, but quite frankly doesn’t do the trick. While you have to come up with some pretty crazy solutions in any Sam & Max game, it was always possible to work through the problems at hand. Here, the series of steps that leads to you clearing out a location and advancing the story has no rhyme or reason. An early puzzle has you trying to get a key out of a kangaroo’s pouch. While the series of events that leads you to obtaining said key do eventually involve the kangaroo, nothing leading up to it seems to be connected. Before you retrieve the lost item, you will have to fiddle with a fountain, water a banana tree, and make a rhino run into a rake that is laying on the ground. It might sound like I am being vague just to keep from revealing the puzzle, and I am, but these seemingly unconnected and random events are what needs to happen in order to get past that scene. Mind you, there isn’t anything that really points the player into this particular series of events. You pretty much just have to play around until you find things that you can interact with.

Outside of the bizarre inventory-based puzzles, there are a few mini-games as well, but like the rest of the game, I found the solution to these puzzles typically came out of left field.

Pilot Brothers isn’t an easy game, at least for me it wasn’t. Even for the demented characters that make up Sam & Max, I can put myself in their mindset enough to realize how they would solve a problem. I simply couldn’t do that here. The actions that the two characters have to take in order to progress in the game simply don’t make any logical sense.

That being said, Pilot Brothers offers two kinds of hint systems. One highlights the main goals of a particular screen. In the case of the kangaroo puzzle mentioned earlier, this button simply circled the kangaroo and the fountain controls. Mind you, it didn’t say anything about bananas or rakes or rhinos.

The other button plays a video showing how to get through the entire scene from beginning to end, and I am not ashamed to say that I used this feature. This hint button takes you through the events of the scene from when the brothers first walk onto the screen to them leaving and moving on to the next section of the game. You can stop the playthrough at any point, which is nice if it shows you something you missed or shows you the portion of the puzzle you are currently stuck at. It also helps you not totally abuse the feature and just watch the entire scene play out just to advance the story, unless of course, you are completely fed up with that particular part of the game.

Pilot Brothers attempts to do something not often seen in adventure games - it has two active playable characters at all times. Sure there are a lot of games that will have you switch between characters at certain points in the story, but there aren’t a lot where they are both together all the time. Heck, even in Sam & Max games, you control Sam pretty much all the time.

As you might expect from this type of setup, the characters react differently to the different items in the world. Where one character might simply look at a trash bin, the other will dig in it. Where one character will just stare dumbly at a banana tree while you have the watering can selected, the other will actually use the can. Quite frankly, this mechanic only added to the complexity of Pilot Brothers.

There were legitimate times when having two characters was necessary in order to solve a puzzle, but the fact that one character can’t use an inventory item with an object and the other could felt ridiculous more times than not. There are even occasions where both brothers will actually do something to the item in question, and you basically have to figure out the right combination of actions in order to solve the problem. A prime example of this is in an early scene when one brother can turn the music sheets sitting on a piano while the other brother plays it. It just makes Pilot Brothers feel more complex than it really needs to be.

Couple this feature with the unknowable solutions and its either go to the hint buttons or use each character with each inventory item with each in-world item until someone actually does something other than tell the player that the action didn’t make sense.

I can’t see anyone enjoying Pilot Brothers. Maybe I just don’t know the source material well enough to be able to get into their heads, but I found each step to be like pulling teeth and simply not worth the time and effort. It’s rare that I say I can’t find an audience that would like this game, but that’s the case here unless there is some major following of these two characters and the shows are just as out-of-the-box as this game.