The suggestions just went on and on and on, but many were repeated, perhaps because multiple Steam Curators advised me and hundreds of thousands of other players to play them. Again, trying to avoid games I knew I'd get to at some point, for one reason or another (no, honest, I will get to some of these games, I know it's a Spring Cleaning event), I eventually settled on a title that I knew got all the attention a few years back, and that is Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons.
If memory serves, I got this at a heavy discount - an absurdly heavy discount, for what is a modestly priced game in the first place - but still had no need to urgently play it, even when I knew it was a short game.
If Steam wants to give me the kick up the rear I need to play it, then I'll spare a couple of hours and play it.
Brothers tasks you with controlling two brothers as you travel across the lands to find a magic doohickey in order to save your sick and dying father. Each brother is controlled by one analogue stick and one trigger button, and that's all you'll need to interact with the weird world they inhabit, full of puzzles to navigate and dangers to overcome.
While you play as both brothers at the same time, you're mostly playing as the little guy. I don't know his name, as all the dialogue that takes place is spoken in a gibberish language that exists only to convey the mood and emotion of the characters. It largely works, and mostly because the animations do far more of the work than the speech.
The game is lovely to look at, and the puzzles that you're asked to solve in order to progress are not difficult at all. With only two buttons to use, you've just got to put the right brother in the right place to perform the right action, and you usually lock that in by holding the trigger and moving the other brother into his place to perform the next step.
You'll be helping each other up tall cliffs, lowering bridges, distracting dogs... the amount of stuff you do is a nice demonstration of single-player co-operative play, which is bizarre.
There were plenty of times where I fell off a high object to my death because I forgot which brother was assigned to each side of my controller, but if you go through the game with the big brother on the left, you'll have few problems. Restarts are quick and checkpoint quite favourable, and the game really isn't that taxing anyway. Once you figure out a puzzle solution, implementing it often takes no time at all, allowing you to just enjoy the view.
It's quite the view, too. There are benches dotted around to let you soak it all in (and I bet there's an achievement for sitting down at them all), and having these environments splashed across an ultrawide monitor makes for some wonderful viewing - until letterboxing takes over whenever a cutscene comes looming in.
It's distracting when played on a normal monitor, even though it is a visual clue of 'don't worry, you don't need to do anything in this bit', but when played on an ultrawide set up it's a bit too much, and even crops off heads from time to time.
You go through all kinds of interesting locations, each with their own gimmicks, you might say. Some make you question just what the heck kind of world these brothers live in, and other's are simply a joy to look at.
When it comes down to talking about the gameplay, it's a case of a simple concept well executed. The story told is nothing earth-shattering, and the way it is told is perhaps not groundbreaking either, but the fact that you control two brothers on their shared journey is used to great effect come the end of the game.
Without wanting to spoil anything (but going to anyway), it is ominous shots like this, and the control scheme thereafter that let you know that Brothers is recommended often for a reason.
It is a cheap game that will take you an afternoon to experience, and a weekend to get absolutely everything out of it, should you want to. It's taken me two years to get around to finding that out, but I can finally cross it off my list.
Brothers is a game that needs to be played to be fully experienced. A video will show the story, of course it will, but it's the gameplay that shines the most.