Do you have any reccomendations for PC video games that are easy to play for short periods of time?
I’ve got a few, yeah. The most straightforward approach is to go with abstract puzzle games, the sort that can easily be picked up, played for one puzzle, and set down again; they all have the same basic gameplay flow, so I’m not going to trouble you with detailed descriptions here – I’ll just list a few whose puzzle design I’ve found quite engaging:
Disoriented (warning: not for those prone to vertigo)
The trick is not to let your self get caught up bashing your head against any one puzzle; if you’re stuck for more than five minutes at a stretch, put the game down and go do something else. They naturally lend themselves to very sporadic gameplay when approached that way.
Outside the abstract puzzle realm, there are a number ways you can go for very short play sessions – some puzzle-oriented, some less so. Here are some personal favourites:
Assault Android Cactus - You’ll want to bring a controller for this one – it’s a top-down twin-stick shooter with strong bullet-hell elements. It’s broken up into bite-size levels that demand total focus for a couple of minutes at a stretch. Atypically for the genre, it isn’t actually possible to die from getting damaged – you just eat a time penalty if you get knocked down; actually failing a level is time-based, so quick, aggressive play is practically a requirement.
Celeste - A precision puzzle-platformer might seem like an odd fit for short-duration play, but this one’s framework particularly lends itself to it. Each screen is a self-contained puzzle, ubiquitous checkpoints largely eliminate lost progress, and even the longest screens take scarcely thirty seconds to complete; of course, multiply that by the number of times you die trying, which is likely to be a large figure. As above, it plays better if you frequently set it aside – gotta give that muscle memory time to set.
Dead Horizon - I’m just throwing this one in for fun; it’s good for short-duration play because the whole game is only about five minutes long! It’s a bite-size (and free-to-play) visual novel about a gunslinger’s final duel with a demonic opponent who may be Death Himself. The story is related in a series of brief flashbacks during the fatal confrontation. Some twitch gameplay.
Endhall - A turn-based micro-roguelike. You play as a goofy little robot using a variety of chess-move-like weapons and tactics to to fight other goofy little robots; each run is divided up into ten small, randomly generated “boards”, and takes about as many minutes to complete once you get the hang of it.
Fist’s Elimination Tower - This one’s another precision puzzle-platformer, though with a much stronger emphasis on speed of execution. You have twenty-five lives to climb a tower 150 floors high, with one puzzle per floor. The catch? You only get five seconds to complete each puzzle. Better think fast!
Melody’s Escape - Pretty much any bring-your-own-MP3s rhythm game is good for short-duration play, as a session is by definition as long as a song. This one happens to be a personal fave, mostly for aesthetics. Its beat recognition algorithm is definitely biased toward dance electronica, so maybe not the best choice if that’s not your genre; on the other hand, if it is your genre, the included soundtrack is fantastic, albeit brief.
Metrico+ - A puzzle-platformer with an emphasis on the “puzzle”. I almost included it under abstract puzzlers, above, but it’s got just enough narrative to set it apart. It’s about exploring a living spreadsheet. No, really – that’s the actual premise!
NO THING - I’ll level with you: this game is basically the poster child for the “setting tedious minimalist gameplay to vaporwave and calling it Art™” school of game design. I’m including it solely because I find it weirdly easy to just space out to it for about ten minutes at a stretch. Whatever you see in the demo video, that’s literally what you get.
Princess Remedy in a World of Hurt - A free-to-play retro RPG – and by “retro” I mean ZX Spectrum, not Super Nintendo – that casts you as a medical-student-slash-princess healing people’s problems by going into their bodies and fighting their ailments bullet-hell style. Save and quit anywhere, and there’s no complicated story to forget if you end up going a while between sessions. The sequel’s even better, though it’s not free; definitely check it out if you like what you see from this one.
Run or Die - This one combines short, hand-crafted levels with the mechanics of an endless runner – i.e., you move from left to right at steadily increasing velocity, and if you stop, you die. There is an endless mode with randomly generated levels if you’d prefer, but the mission mode – which is excellent – is better for short play sessions.
TIMEframe - This one’s duration of play is limited by its premise: you’ve arrived on an alien world ten seconds before the Apocalypse, and have that long to explore and figure out what happened. Time is slowed by a ratio of 60:1, so every session ends after exactly ten minutes, regardless of where you are at the time. Puzzling out all the lore will take multiple loops, so you’ll need to be good at setting short-term goals!
Velocity 2X - An odd little genre hybrid, this one has you swapping back and forth between top down twin-stick shooter mode and side-scrolling runner mode. Some of the very late levels can drag on a bit, but you can shoot through most of the rest in under five minutes a pop. Includes multiple ranking systems for each level (time, completion percentage, high score), so you have a lot of freedom in how to approach things.
If anything on this list particularly grabs you, let me know – I may be able to suggest other titles along similar lines.
