Great Games You Can Finish in Under 10 Hours

Valve shipped it on 18 April 2011, and the single-player campaign runs about eight hours if you stop and listen to the Aperture recordings. Down in the old Aperture shafts the propulsion and repulsion gels turn portals into a plumbing problem, and I spent far too long painting a wall orange so I could run faster. Co-op is a separate campaign and does not count toward that eight.

Giant Sparrow made it, Annapurna Interactive published it on 25 April 2017, and my first run took a bit over two hours in one sitting. The cannery sequence splits the screen between a girl beheading fish on a line and the daydream she escapes into, and both halves need your hands at once. Two hours, and I still think about Lewis.

Playdead followed LIMBO with this, debuting on Xbox One on 29 June 2016 and reaching Windows on 7 July, self-published both times. It took me about three and a half hours, with no dialogue and no interface slowing anything down. Shockwave rooms make you time a sprint against a pulse that turns you to paste, and then the last twenty minutes throw out the grammar of the whole game.

Eight chapters in the base game, roughly eight hours, and somewhere near nine hundred deaths in my case — the summit run is where it stops being about jumping. Maddy Makes Games released it on 25 January 2018 and shipped Assist Mode so nobody has to bounce off it. Dream blocks in Old Site turn Madeline's own doubt into level geometry. B-sides, C-sides and the free Farewell chapter are extra, and not part of that eight.

Respawn Entertainment built a six-hour campaign inside a game most people bought for the multiplayer. It launched on 28 October 2016 for PlayStation, Windows and Xbox One, though the Steam listing only dates from 2020. It qualifies here because that campaign is a finished, self-contained story rather than a quick path through a big game. Effect and Cause hands you a wrist device that flips between two eras mid-jump.

Valve's first go at the idea arrived inside The Orange Box on 10 October 2007, for Windows and Xbox 360, and takes roughly three hours. One chamber hands you the Weighted Companion Cube, lets you get attached, then asks you to incinerate it — and people remember that better than most sixty-hour plots. Momentum carries through the portals; that is the whole physics lesson.

Thatgamecompany's PlayStation 3 original arrived on 13 March 2012 and did not reach Steam until 11 June 2020, published there by Annapurna Interactive. Two hours, one sitting, and the most affecting thing in it is a chirp — the only sound you can make at the stranger walking beside you, whose name you learn in the credits. Sand-surfing down a dune still gets me.

Lucas Pope self-published this through his company 3909 on 8 August 2013, and one run to an ending takes around six hours of squinting at passports. The rulebook cross-check is the whole job: name against permit, weight against photo, city of issue against a list that changed overnight, while the queue builds and your son gets cold. I denied a man his wife.

Askiisoft's one-hit-kill action game came out through Devolver Digital on 18 April 2019 and took me five hours, most of them spent in the same three rooms. Every death rewinds with a tape hiss, because the assassin is narrating a plan he has not carried out yet, so failure is part of the fiction. Dialogue lets you interrupt people mid-sentence, which I did constantly.

Xbox 360 owners got it first, on 21 July 2010 through Microsoft Game Studios, and the Windows release followed on 2 August 2011 from Playdead. Three or four hours in monochrome, and the spider in the forest is why a generation flinches at silhouettes. Dying is the teaching method, and being killed by a trap you could not have seen never once felt cheap.

Dennaton Games and Devolver Digital put this out on 23 October 2012, and I cleared it in roughly four hours across several hundred restarts, which is rather the point. Animal masks picked before each floor change what you start holding and how the building hears you, and the instant respawn means a botched room costs one second. Then the second half asks what you thought you were doing.

Starbreeze Studios built the control scheme first: left stick moves the older boy, right stick the younger, both at once on one pad. Published by 505 Games, it reached Xbox 360 on 7 August 2013, and Steam dates the PC version 3 September 2013. Three hours later that scheme does something in the closing minutes no cutscene could manage. Skip the remake SKU — the remakes list can have that one.

Blade Mode slows everything so you can draw the cut yourself, at any angle, then tear the spine out of whatever you sliced to refill your health. PlatinumGames developed it and Konami published it on 19 February 2013 in North America for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, with the PC version arriving 9 January 2014. Six or seven hours, and the Senator Armstrong fight justifies all of them.

Time moves only when you move, so a room full of bullets becomes a chess problem you solve while standing perfectly still. SUPERHOT Team both developed and published it, releasing on 25 February 2016. Two hours to finish, and what stuck was throwing a pistol at a man's face to stagger him, then catching the gun he dropped. The framing story is obnoxious and I enjoyed it.

Fullbright's first game, released on 15 August 2013 and now co-published on Steam with Serenity Forge, is a two-hour walk around an empty Oregon house during a thunderstorm. Sam's journal entries unlock off objects you happen to pick up, so the order you find the story in is yours. Plenty of people decided nothing happens in it. Plenty happens; you have to open drawers.

Dialogue never stops for you here — characters keep walking and talking while your three options float overhead, and saying nothing is a choice the game records. Night School Studio self-published it on 15 January 2016. Tuning the handheld radio to the right frequency in the right spot opens things that should have stayed shut. Five hours, one island, and a second run that remembers.

Golden feathers are the whole progression: each one you find buys another flap of climbing stamina, and Hawk Peak stops being a wall once you have a handful. Adam Robinson-Yu, working as adamgryu, released it on 30 July 2019. Ninety minutes if you head straight up, three hours if you keep getting distracted by fishing and a beach volleyball game. I got distracted.