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 controll …

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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 …

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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 location …

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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.

The Bookshelf Limbo is a game ab …

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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 …

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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 i …

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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. T …

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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?

Toripon is a game where you do just that. It looks incredibly aliased, as …

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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, …

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