Short Play: all the video games you can start and finish in a weekend

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.

A style of storytelling that’s really only possible in video games is gameplay as metaphor. It’s a form of narrative that happens through the interactivity and problem-solving of playing the game instead of through the typical avenues of storytelling like text or visuals. Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons did this by having you control two brothers cooperating to solve puzzles, with each represented by separate sides of the controller. When one of the brothers isn’t around you feel that loss not just empathically through the writing, but also as a hindrance to the gameplay since you effectively lost the use of half your controller.

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play, we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.

Often, when I’m not sure what I want to play, I go browsing the new releases on Steam, Itch.io, and the Nintendo eShop until something grabs my attention. Usually, it’s a game that fits my mood, which, like a lot of other people’s moods lately, is a bit more anxious than usual. While in such a state, I’m almost more interested in playing something familiar and relaxing instead of something new. That’s probably why I’ve put so many hours into Animal Crossing: New Horizons and also why Hidden Through Time got my attention.

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play, we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.

Growing up, I played a lot of educational games on the Apple IIe, like Oregon Trail and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? The games that actually taught me things were also the ones that were fun to play, learning how a particular subject aligned with how you needed to think about getting better at the game. The Carmen Sandiego games were particularly good at this: improving meant teaching yourself more about the locations or places in time where the thief could have fled to in order to better discern the clues.

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.

Sometimes what isn’t said in a story is just as important as what is said. Usually, that’s because it can help provide the audience with a deeper understanding of the characters and their actions, but it also leaves things up to the interpretation of the audience. And because human brains love to find patterns, with enough information, they’ll try to piece things together for the full picture.

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.

Tools like Twine have made it easier than ever to make interactive text-based games. But while they can be simple to make, that doesn’t make it any easier to tell an engaging story. As a writer, you have nowhere to hide: there aren’t graphical avatars for the player to control or music and voice acting to help tell the story. It’s just words and hyperlinks. Despite that, games like Lionkiller show just how engaging and powerful interactive fiction can be — even if they only have words to work with.

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.

Video games and film are fairly diametrically opposed mediums, despite attempts by game creators to emulate the visual medium of film. The issue is that games are interactive, while films are passive. So often, when games attempt to emulate film, it is with non-interactive cutscenes in a medium about interactivity. In big-budget games like Red Dead Redemption, The Last of Us, and Final Fantasy, this has become the way a story is told. But there are also games like Wide Ocean Big Jacket that take techniques from film and apply them to their interactivity instead of a cutscene. It’s enough to make you wish there were more games like it.

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.

Logic puzzle games tend to fall into one of two groups. Sometimes they’re like sudoku, where once you learn the basics of how to solve the puzzle you can just repeat that ad infinitum. Or they can be like the Professor Layton games, where each puzzle is discrete and requires you to relearn everything to solve it. In either case, it’s often hard to tell if you’re actually getting better at the puzzles as you play through them. There is often little sense of progress. But that’s not the case with The Pedestrian.

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.

I was really into playing open-world games when the genre was still new. While I didn’t complete everything in those early Assassin’s Creed games, or in the original Crackdown or Infamous, I did spend a lot of time doing pretty much everything the games had to offer. These days, however, I find it pretty difficult to devote enough time to finish the main quest line of an open-world game, never mind the additional stuff. But The Touryst scratches that itch, only in a much shorter time frame.

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.

There are a number of apps that are supposed to help with meditation and relaxation. The idea is usually to get you to step away from whatever you are doing to take a few moments, clear your head, and not think about all of the potentially stressful things in your life. But what if instead of that you walked around an apartment taking pictures of birds?

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.

Sequels are a difficult thing to make. The audience wants more of what they liked from the original, but they also want something different enough to justify its existence. Depending on the medium, that can be a new narrative conceit that challenges the protagonist’s growth from the original story, or it could be new gameplay systems that alter how the player experiences the game. Or in the case of the sequel to Frog Detective, it could be when a welcome parade for a mostly invisible wizard gets ruined.

The idea behind the Short Play column was to recommend games that anyone could finish in a weekend, because people finishing games turns out to be a surprisingly rare occurrence. And the longer a game gets, the more difficult it becomes.

We’ve recommended 26 different short games over the last year, but if you are looking for the best of the best, here are six games that have stood out from the rest for one reason or another. And they’re short enough that you might even be able to finish them all before the end of the year. (Unless it’s December 31st, then I can’t really guarantee that.)

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.

At the start of this year, I wrote about What Never Was, a first-person puzzle game similar to Myst or Gone Home, though on a much smaller scale. In the game, you are confined to a single attic room where all of the puzzles and storytelling takes place. Discolored is similar, except you are confined to an entire deserted and desaturated desert diner.

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.

In the early days of online multiplayer gaming, there wasn’t the now-ubiquitous matchmaking that automatically connects you with other players. Instead, in games like the original Quake, Unreal Tournament, or Counter-Strike, you would be presented with a list of servers; some of those might be empty, requiring you to wait around inside an empty level for someone else to show up. No Players Online turns this moment into the perfect fodder for a creepy interactive short story.

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.

When we talk about production values in video games, it usually means big-budget titles like The Last of Us or Red Dead Redemption 2. The kinds of experiences where the studio can put additional time into seemingly minor things like making sure characters walk up stairs in a way that looks normal, or having horses realistically poop. They aren’t things that greatly affect the moment-to-moment gameplay, but instead help to create an illusion of realism, allowing for more immersion. In Tangle Tower, there is so much production value put into the game’s animation and voice acting that I actually forgot I was playing a game for about the first hour.

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play, we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.

A certain amount of frustration in a video game, especially a puzzle game, can be a good thing. Depending on how it’s utilized, it can help to create much more exhilarating moments of success when things finally click together and you understand the solution to the puzzle in front of you. Kine, in its best moments, has that sort of good frustration, but those moments also feel impeded by the game’s camera. Yet, it’s still great despite that.

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.

Shorter games are often able to tackle themes and ideas that would be more challenging in a big, blockbuster production. That’s one of the main reasons I decided to start this column: to highlight those smaller experiences that offer something new, inventive, or experimental. Missed Messages, from solo developer Angela He, is the perfect encapsulation of this.

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play, we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.

For a game that’s a little experimental or offers a particularly unique take, it is often easiest to explain it by finding something to compare it to. That way, in a few words, you can roughly understand what sort of game it is. A Short Hike is like Animal Crossing plus The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Pear Quest is like an adventure game crossed with a Where’s Waldo? book. But for Mutazione, it’s difficult to find that comparison point.

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play, we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.

About two minutes into puzzle game Wilmot’s Warehouse, I had an “Oh no!” moment. It was the sort of moment that comes from playing a lot of Sid Meier games like Civilization or SimGolf where you blink and a whole day is gone. It’s the kind of moment where, even when you recognize the feeling, you still say to yourself, “Okay, but just one more turn.”

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.

Starting a game with a cold open — no title screen, no options — is risky. It’s something that could very likely be confusing. But in Far: Lone Sails, it sets the expectation that you, the player, are the impetus for everything. Nothing will happen unless you do something first, and you are going to have to do everything yourself. It’s fitting considering the lonesome post-apocalyptic landscapes of the game’s setting.

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.

Claire is on a camping trip with her Aunt May, but she’s also waiting for an important call. Unfortunately, the only reception in the park is at the top of the island’s giant mountain. Claire’s trek up the mountain is the core of the game A Short Hike, and how you get her to the top is pretty open ended. You could go straight up the path to the top of the mountain — but then you’d be missing out on the point of the game.

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.

In a city builder like SimCity or Cities: Skylines, traffic inevitably becomes a point of frustration. Your budding metropolis simply gets too big to handle the congestion. There is usually one intersection where, for some reason, the cars just don’t behave how you want them to. You end up cursing the terrible AI drivers or whatever system manages the traffic lights. But before you tear it all down in an attempt to fix it, there is a moment when you feel like if you had more control over the drivers or maybe the lights, you could make it work. That’s basically Traffix.

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.

We live in a time where an abundance of media is nostalgic for the 1980s. Some of these works are steeped in specific cultural references to the period, like Ready Player One, which used viewers’ positive feelings about the time as a sort of crutch to get them to feel good about the work itself. Others, like the art in Simon Stålenhag’s Tales from the Loop or the film It Follows, play on this nostalgia to twist it into something else. 198X is more the latter than the former. It’s effectively an interactive movie, one where the interactivity is both diegetic and important to empathizing with the character.

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.

Gato Roboto opens with what has to be the worst possible outcome of a cat stepping on a keyboard: the misstep causes a spaceship to crash into a mysterious abandoned planet. For players, though, it’s a great outcome, because you get to play a streamlined Metroid game as a cat in a mech suit.

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.

A level of Perchang in motion looks like a Rube Goldberg machine. You might see little soccer balls flying around the screen being blown by giant turbines, or maybe they’re hit with paddles out of a pinball machine. Playing Perchang puts you in control of that Rube Goldberg machine. Though it feels a lot like a simplified version of the classic puzzle game Lemmings, and it’s just as difficult.

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play, we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.

The screenshot above contains the entirety of the game Pear Quest. It is both the whole island where the game takes place and your only view of the game itself. No matter where you are on the island, you can see every other part of it. This makes the whole place feel more alive and responsive to what you do, and it creates some interesting solutions to the often frustrating nature of adventure game puzzles.