The year’s best games are under 10 hours | Polygon's 2018 Games of the Year
The year’s best games are under 10 hours | Polygon's 2018 Games of the Year
Game of the Year lists tend to be dominated by big AAA titles, but 2018 has seen a number of stand-out indie games. So how do you compare two vastly different experiences?
Games shown (in order of appearance):
Return of the Obra Dinn
Celeste
Donut County
Gris
Minit
Into the Breach
Florence
A Way Out
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I agree very much with the sentiment of appreciating good, short indie games; mainly because I don’t like the opinion that games should be judged/based/priced on long hours/playtime, which is what I feel the AAA industry is pushing for these days. But open world games have their place too; what else would tide us over until the next indie hit comes out?
Also, Solo represent, for real good insight into oneself (and puzzles).
Celeste has become one of my favorite games of all time. I always put it in my top 5 after playing it. Its like she said, its super hard because it’s supposed to be. You get to feel the anxiety your character is going through
8 hours is short?
I love shorter games. I want to be satisfied, I want to enjoy the art. That’s why Donut County was my jam to play, but I watched Cuphead let’s plays.
I think the bigger games are more popular because more often than not, you choose how you want to play. You choose your character and their story and their path, and that takes a lot longer. However, I can play Skyrim for hours, but aen’t interested in any of the current AAA games except Spiderman. Of those indie games, I’d only play the phone one, and once I’d completed the story, I wouldn’t play it again. I like games that you can play over and over and get a different complete story. If that means playing a bigger game like Skyrim to avoid more strategy, multiplayer, or war-like, endless grinding games, so be it.
Of course Fortnite is released…
All games are under 10 hours for a speedrunner.
i prefer a short good game over a long boring one.
my top 3 favorite ‘small’ games:
1: UNDERTALE (and Deltarune)
2: Celeste
3: What Remains of Edith Finch (Cry)
“Is shorter better?”
Not if you ask a girl, I believe.
what is the jazzy song used during the video? it’s the slap!
also, great video jenna!
That depends on the indie game… if you’re a perfectionist, Into the Breach can probably take over 100 hours, as it was for me.
YES! Florence was so good!
I have to be honest, I’m getting tired of open world video games. I love Horizon Zero Dawn, but I get tired of it so quickly because I feel I need to do all the side stuff to level up for story content and for the extra story that side content offers.
Great Video, will have to check them all out and stream them!
Red Dead should have been way shorter in just killing Dutch and Mica earlier and explore more intersting stories of Redemption
more brian
bravo
There is another issue here I don’t see many people address. How well does the game work as an open world compared to its theme. Hear me out.
There are a lot of open world games. A lot. And you see a lot of series that didn’t use to be open world. This sometimes creates a dissonance. You play the game and can’t help but feel like this game would be better off not being open world. For example, farcry works because the sidequests fit into the story of being a fish out of water exploring the jungle. Or in Witcher, the side quests and hunts fit because you are exactly that, a Witcher, and a lot of the sidequests fit right in the themes of the short stories.
But take a game like assassin creed odyssey. The you look at the game and the sidequests don’t fit. They don’t fit the theme. I’m not saying they aren’t well done they are and I love em. But they kinda don’t work thematically, especially with the relative immediacy of the main quest. Same for god of war. It doesn’t fit.
This year we had none of the open world games where the open world fit the theme.
One of the games I found too short was Inside. It was an extremely well-polished game. But it took like 2 hours. It felt like more could be delivered from the game’s world.
This is all very interesting, Jenna..but I still consider 2018 as the *Year of the Single Player AAA* Video games (Dad of War, Spider-Man, Red Dead 2, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey).
This year, Sony & Rockstar proved to the game industry that there is _still_ demand for good Single Player games, dammit *>:(*
One of the best released this year goes by the name Bomb Chicken. A blast to play, what a treat so short and sweet. Nitrome rocks!
Girl, you need to do water fasting. Your skin’s dying out.
I always have bloated playtimes because I like going very slow, so short games are appreciated.
finishing the C sides sure took me longer than 8 hours, let me tell ya.
Both styles of game are very good and now I want to play donut county
oh no. jenna has made it onto the list of polygon employees I would die for with this well thought out take on time
They’re not better simply for the fact they’re shorter. But, what in my opinion it was instead of making a 60 hour game that’s grindy and has padding, they decided to condense all the fun into a 10 hour game which makes it consistently fun. Games can be fun that are this long, breath of the wild, GTA 5, persona 5 and a bunch more. It’s just these developers decided to condense the fun.
Three Words: LA-MULANA 2. Bigger game that kicks butt and has great moment to moment gameplay~
Wandersong took me ten hours and was both beautiful and fun. A game just needs to be well put together, not long
You need to play them a lot….
Dude….do you even game bro?
0:54 no u
This is true, but the lack of shockingly beautiful game The Missing is a crime. Then again it’s a lot so understood.
Celeste took me almost 48 hours to complete lol.
I played moss on PSVR. That shit was more than twenty dollars, made in unreal, and took less than 5 hours. I enjoyed it and I don’t regret purchasing it. Which is weird because I felt like so much was missing but I still feel satisfied.
Short games are ok but honestly I don’t see the meaning in playing a game with no real depth of gameplay. I feel like most indie games focus on story and gameplay and that’s a fun experience…until they end like thirty minutes in. Most of the time I want to play a game over and over again and have some new content to discover but you can’t really manage that with small indie games.
Gris was so beautiful
But
What about all the other small indie-games released in 2018 that were great?
What about all the other great ones?
Seriously I only enjoyed enter the breach on that list and I HATE SHORT TITELS!
Jenna’s fashion sense = [chef’s kiss]
I’d definitely say that The Red Strings Club is one of the best short games of the year. It takes only about 3 or 4 hours to complete on the first try, though it has some replay values out of different ways of information gathering and dialogue.
I just can’t devote 40-60 hours for games anymore. I love shorter more narrative games. Games up to 30 hours are what I like now.
I like rpgs…
I think celeste took me 75 hours. But good vid.
stardew valley and slime rancher are the best of both worlds you cant change my mind
I remember my closest friend downloaded Florence and played it in the bathrooms at lunch and one day she just told me how fast it went and how surprised she was. With the length, she said nothing about the story or gameplay. She was going on about how surprised she was that this short game costed her the amount it would be for a typical downloadable game on the phone, and at the time, I was surprised too. But sure time might seem to factor into how much a game is worth monetarily, it is what you get out of it and the experience that you judge it by.
Clearly, my friend must have not gotten much out of it because despite playing it, she still only focussed on the time and money spent whilst people with satisfying experiences would have come back with a story of how personal it is to them, meaning that the stories will be literally what they made of the game.
So having that said, how do I feel about this topic? Well…
Just play your damn game, if you’re not enjoying it, there may be either a learning curve in gameplay or mindset (like if you’re looking at the game from the right angle) or it’s just not your cup of tea.
Into the breach isn’t under 10 hours, if you play it right😏
A Jenna video!! yes!!!
I’ve been becoming more fond of short games. 8 hours is a good average.
I am torn. Some of my fav games are on the shorter side. 15 hours or less. But I also respect any developer who can make an 80 hour game amazing all throughout
Assassins Creed Odyssey was the best game this year