The best short games for busy people

Time-poor adults, try these games

When you’re a child, you have what feels like endless free time to finish all the games you want. However, as you get older, you have the money to buy all these games, but you usually don’t have the time to play them. If this resonates with you, we’ve rounded up ten amazing games that will take you less than five hours to finish. From amazing stories, to fun gameplay, there is something for everyone on the list.

Sayonara Wild Hearts

Sayonara Wild Hearts is a hard game to describe. It’s an autorunner, a fighter, a shooter and a rhythm game rolled into one. The music is the star of the show here, but the way the animations and gameplay tie it together is what makes it magical. This is one that needs to be tried to discover how engrossing it really is.

A Short Hike

A simple game where you play as a bird taking a hike across a mountainous island. The island is your oyster, as you decide what you want to do next. You can help fellow hikers, go fishing, or try to scale the island’s biggest heights. The beauty of this game is in not being given a direction to go in. It’s a story you tell yourself.

Unpacking

The ultimate ‘show don’t tell’ game, Unpacking has neither dialogue nor a narrator. You discover more of the protagonist as you play through the story, unpacking boxes in the different places they live throughout their life. You see what’s important to them through the things they keep with them through to adulthood. A message that’s so much better told by not saying anything at all.

The Gardens Between

The Gardens Between is an interesting puzzle game with a twist. Each level is a garden island, where you manipulate time and space to find out its secret. Like Ico, despite having two main characters, this is a single-player experience where you need both characters to get to the end. Under the puzzle design, there’s a touching story that’s waiting to be discovered.

What Remains of Edith Finch

Edith Finch is a short game, broken up into a set of even shorter tales. Edith is the last of the Finch family and must explore the family home to figure out what happened to the others. You will embark on a number of supernatural adventures that stitch the history of the family together. This one has been highly acclaimed for years and has a passionate fan base to this day.

Papers, Please

Lucas Pope

Despite how short this game is, the multiple endings will have you playing over again to see how the story could play out. It takes place entirely in an immigration booth where you have to check paperwork to see who can legally enter the country. You are faced with moral decisions along the way, like whether you should take a fine to help an illegal immigrant find asylum. All the while you have to decide whether to stay a part of the system or take it down. 

Inside

You play as a young boy who is seemingly the last person with unique thoughts and feelings in a world full of mindless drones. You have to find your way out of various industrialized landscapes by figuring out the puzzle in each area. The second half takes a completely unpredictable twist leading to its bizarre conclusion.

Donut County

Like a backward form of Katamari, you control a hole that gets bigger the more things it sucks into it. Played in flashbacks, you see the downfall of Donut County, as you suck in each of the town’s residents. A quirky, fun story, with a large dollop of dark humor, this is a short game that will give you plenty of laughs. 

Stray

One of the standout releases of last year, Stray lets you play as a cat lost in a cyberpunk world. Playing a platformer as a cat gives you an interesting range of movement options that aren’t available in traditional games. Stray worked its way into the hearts of gamers and cat lovers alike. 

Undertale

While Undertale is a few years old, it remains a favorite as a game that broke the mold. Undertale is an RPG where you can choose between fighting foes and getting stronger, or the harder route of becoming their friends. It plays so unlike a traditional game that it immediately grabbed attention, and the bombastic boss battles only cemented its popularity.