Short, Wonderful Games Like Astro Bot Are The Antidote To The Industry's Scope Problem
I’ve been on a tear the last few weeks. I often fall into long stretches where I pick up and play a lot of games for varying periods of time, but never finish them. Thanks to the job, I just rarely have the time to linger on a thing for too long outside of a professional obligation. Fortunately, the last few games I’ve picked up have been just the right size, allowing me to see them through to the end and marvel at their construction and ingenuity. I’m now more convinced than ever that we need shorter games.
On the most basic level, shorter games just feel better. Or rather, I feel better at their conclusion. Games aren’t just experiences to be had, but also things to be beaten. Finishing a game is supposed to be a triumph, and it can often be that victorious feeling that carries me from one to the next. Even if a title lacks any real story, we have our own narrative arcs with them, complete with rising and falling actions, climaxes, and a conclusion, and that’s a satisfying rhythm to have with a game. Your impression of a movie, book, show, or album is colored by the time you spend with it and how thorough an experience it is. Therefore, it’s kind of incomplete if you never listen to that last song, or see the final shot of a film. Similarly, games that I don’t finish remain this kind of half-formed image in my head. Since most notable releases have ballooned in size and now require dozens of hours to complete—time which, in my life, is increasingly hard to come by—I’m finishing less and less of them, but there are now more barely formed impressions of them in my head than ever. You know what that all means? It means I’m playing less than ever before, and experiencing fewer fresh titles as a consequence, and it’s as frustrating as it sounds.
The run I’ve been on the last few weeks flies in the face of the industry’s poorly conceived notion that bigger is unilaterally better. It started when I was reviewing Astro Bot , a 3D platformer that thankfully takes all of about a dozen or so hours to beat and see through to 100 percent completion. Soon after that, The Plucky Squire was released, and I managed to beat that roughly 10-hour game across two back-to-back evenings. When I couldn’t sleep the other night, I booted up Thank Goodness You’re Here and wrapped it within about three hours.
