The criteria for this is very simple, all of these games can be completed in three hours or under (without using exploits etc). The reason for this? Well I find that sometimes, often in fact, that people just don’t have time to play a longer game. So I thought I’d show some of the shorter ones some love!
Developer: Smallbu, Pillow Fight
Publisher: Smallbu, Pillow Fight
Rrp: £13.99 (Steam)
Released: 18 Sept 2019
Alligator City, a city that unsurprisingly is full of anthropomorphic alligators. You play as a private detective hired by a young alligator who believes he’s going to be killed on his birthday. Not to spoil it but he isn’t (it’s very obvious, that’s part of the joke), he’s just paranoid that his family are going to ‘off him’ because they keep talking about their ‘plans’ for him when they think he can’t here.
There are 30 different mini-games to play as you speak to the different family members. This game is wonderfully animated and has some very silly humour (which I appreciate).
Developer: Ustwo Games
Publisher: Ustwo Games
Rrp: £5.79 (Humble and Steam)
Released: 26th March 2020
This is a very cosy and quick game that’s all about helping people by fixing their day to day items, from watches to espresso machines. The whole game is very short lasting maybe an hour and a half assuming you listen to all the dialogue, which I recommend you do as it’s well written, acted and of course gives context.
Developer: Amanita Design
Publisher: Amanita Design
Rrp: £11.79 (Itch.io), £12.30 (Humble), £12.99 (Gog.com, Steam and Epic)
Released: 7th May 2012
Amanita Design seem to specialise in creating strange point and click games with a strong art style and Botanicula is no different in that regard.
You play as a group of sentient seeds (I told you they made strange games) who are trying to rescue the seed of a tree from evil spiders and plant it. Like with all of their games Botanicula doesn’t use dialogue to explain what to do but instead prefers to use pictograms or show you what they puzzle needs. Often the puzzles consist of ‘find x amount of y to progress’ but it’s not the puzzle itself that’s the draw but the strange things that happen in trying to solve them that’s the draw to these games.
Developer: Storybird
Publisher: LookAtMyGame, Plug In Digital
Rrp: £5.44 Itch.io, £5.99 (Humble and Steam)
Released: 3rd December 2013
Finding Teddy is a short point and click adventure game where you play as a little girl trying to get her Teddy bear back. It was originally released on iOS but was quickly ported to PC and that fact shows. That isn’t to say it’s a bad port, it’s actually an excellent one but the tell tale signs of touch screen control remains as much of the control is done through either clicking on the edge of a screen or swiping at it.
Developer: Ian Campbell
Publisher: Ian Campbell
Rrp: £3.99 (Humble and Steam), £4.16 (Itch.io)
Released: 3rd July 2013
When I first booted this game up I honestly wasn’t expecting a lot, I’d seen screenshots and it looked like any other cheap side scrolling shooter. I’m happy to report that I was wrong, not that it isn’t a side scrolling shooter or that it’s cheap (under £5 for a game is pretty damn cheap), but more that the cost of this game had anything to do with the quality.
While very short this game is quite difficult, or at least it was for me. The boss fights in this are a combination of bullet hell and side scrolling shooter and though they do work in fairly predictable patterns you don’t get long to react.
I do have a bone to pick with this game and its to do with the control scheme, specifically on a control pad. Why make jump (and dash) the [Right Trigger] instead of [A]? The amount of times I died because I was tapping [A] to jump was frustrating. And you don’t even allow the controls to be rebound! Very frustrating. However, despite that annoyance I did enjoy the game and found I kept going back even after completing it.
