I’ve had tears in my eyes for the last few weeks. I often go into long periods where I start lots of games and play them for varying periods of time but never finish them. Thanks to my job, I rarely have the time to spend too much time on one thing outside of a professional obligation. Luckily, the last few games I bought were just the right size, allowing me to see them all the way through and marvel at their construction and ingenuity. I am now more convinced than ever that we need shorter games.
At the simplest level, just shorter games feel better. Or rather, I I feel better in the end. Games are not just experiences but also something to beat. Finishing a game is supposed to be a triumph, and often it’s that feeling of victory that carries me from one game to the next. Even if a title doesn’t have a real story, we have our own narrative arcs with rising and falling storylines, climaxes and a conclusion, and that’s a satisfying rhythm for a game. Your impression of a film, book, series or album depends on how much time you spend with it and how immersive the experience is. So it’s somehow incomplete if you never hear the last song or see the last shot of a movie. Likewise, games that I don’t finish remain a half-finished image in my head. As most notable publications have grown in size and now require dozens of hours – time that is becoming increasingly difficult to find in my life – I am finishing less and less of them, but now there are more barely developed impressions of them in my head than ever before. Do you know what this all means? This means I’m playing less than ever before and, as a result, experiencing fewer new titles, and that’s just as frustrating as it sounds.
The run I’ve been on over the last few weeks contradicts the industry’s ill-conceived notion that bigger is unilaterally better. It started when I was examination AstroBota 3D platformer that thankfully lasts about an hour about a dozen hours to beat and persevere until 100 percent completion. Soon after, The brave squire was released, and I managed to beat this ten-hour-or-so game over two consecutive evenings. When I couldn’t sleep the other night, I woke up Thank God you’re here and wrapped it up within about three hours.
Even when I look at some of the games I’m excited about, arranger Sounds like a fantastic game that I can complete in a weekend Throw away explicitly communicates how much of a bite-sized adventure it is. I am your beast is a comic-style speedrunning first-person shooter that’s a few hours long Arco seems to be about the same length as most of the titles above. Look at what a wealth of different experiences I could possibly have without exhaustively giving up entire days of my time.
I don’t support these games just because of their length either. Each of the games I’ve beaten over the last few weeks is different from the others and they all feel like a breath of fresh air. AstroBot is the wholesome, polished AAA 3D platformer that people have been longing for, when it seemed like only Nintendo and Sega were still in the business. The brave squire is perhaps a loving homage to gaming’s past a little to practical with its leadership, but often jumps between genres and dimensions, taking you into its best moments. Thank God you’re here At times it feels more like a series of interactive comedy sketches stitched together than a fully featured game, but it’s also one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever played, and unlike anything I’ve picked up before .
All three games feel like things that could only have been made by smaller teams with clear visions, unencumbered by the industry’s tendency to fruitlessly chase trends. They avoid the parameters of success outlined earlier, and yet I would consider every single one of them a resounding victory. Crucially, none of them ever grow stale or stagnant due to the premium bloat so commonly found in the long-running blockbuster games that are often touted as the culture’s best work.
In comparison, many criticisms of a tentpole game may be disliked God of war Ragnarök found the game that way remarkable, even distracting, crammed. Persona 5 It ended up feeling so crappy that I had to put it on hold for a month just a few hours before the end. I really enjoyed both The Witcher 3 And Cyberpunk 2077But I finally threw myself at the end credits and forgot about the seemingly endless side content that tried to distract me. This year Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth Is larger than it realistically should have beenand its best moments are undermined by the inconsistent quality of its filler material, which is so often pushed to the foreground. There Is While it’s great value for money, a longer experience with a game isn’t always a richer experience. These games have exhausted me, and their increasingly standardized framework feels like a prison for games and their developers. With such a specific and narrow vision, only so many things can be done before we start reproducing the same crap ad nauseum and everything risks becoming nothing more than sloppy work.
The aforementioned blockbusters are all great in their own right, but they’re also all victims of AAA inflation, which leads to problems like scope expansion, stretched schedules, rising budgets, and increased pressure from publishers and business partners to set increasingly unrealistic expectations that promise a return on their huge investments. The idea that games have to be so big is a scam spread by marketers and executives who want to sell you the same types of games over and over again. These are the same people who created Games-as-a-Service to turn one-time purchases or installs into “forever” games that will keep you drained of your money for months, if not years. The same people who tried to fool you all into thinking they believed Concord and then pulled it from physical and digital shelves within weeks. These titles are victims of a failing system and vision for games.
Astro Bot, the brave squireAnd Thank God you’re hereand other shorter games aren’t a panacea to the industry’s woes, but they certainly read like a damn good blueprint for a possible future. There’s no good reason why these creative midrange titles with reasonable budgets should be considered outliers in this space. Even the safest of them, AstroBotfeels like this bold experiment even though it shouldn’t be. A family-centered platformer and adorable brand icon is in many ways a given, but after a decade of chasing prestige and a mature audience with increasingly bloated games and all-too-similar franchises, Sony’s break from its own outdated formula reads as revolutionary, if only common sense.
I don’t want huge games to disappear. Sometimes you need a three-hour epic film that will shake your world and your emotions, or a sprawling novel that will challenge you. I don’t know of a good double album, but I’m sure there’s one out there that offers a sonic journey like no other, and similarly, there are worlds and stories in games that require a certain size and investment to pay off. I just broke up Yakuza 0 after more than 80 hours, and I have called it one of the best things I have ever played. I Only want us to free ourselves from the trap that the homogenized view of the big game has become.
That’s why we are need shorter games. Yes, I selfishly feel better about completing these varied, brilliant, small experiences, but it also feels like a healthier move for everyone involved. It gives developers the freedom to create a different form of gaming than what the industry has found acceptable over the last decade. Damn, it could start save the industry from the exploding costs and the increasingly frequent failures of the service games bubble that has obviously burst. It’s something different, and video games need that more than ever.
