10 Emotionally-Draining Video Games You Only Finished Once

10. Brothers: A Tale Of Two Sons

Brothers is a great little Tolkien-esque tale with some really gorgeous vistas and a fairly short runtime that wraps up the sporadically affecting narrative perfectly. Playing as the titular brothers simultaneously using a combination of - on a controller anyway - buttons and an analogue stick each, puzzles and movement revolve around trying to get both characters to interact with certain items at the same time; providing quite the cognitive rewiring before you then figured out what to do next. After some fairly whimsical and lusciously colourful initial levels that see you get a feel for how each brother interacts with the world around them, the story takes one hell of a dark turn near the finale when the older brother actually succumbs to a wound he suffered earlier - leaving the younger all alone to fend for himself, miles from safety. You then have to slowly bury your own kin using piles of dirt, before making the journey home, although the really memorable part comes when the split control scheme becomes one, indicating the lessons passed on from one character to another. It's a pretty big melting pot of varying types of emotion all coming together in the last stretch, but with some cutesy animation, expressive characters and the overall feel of the world around you, Brothers manages to do a whole lot with what could've otherwise been a controller-based gimmick.