Video games have gotten big. Really big. As budgets have ballooned, so has the scale of a full-priced game. It’s very rare these days to play a big-budget game that you can finish in under 10 hours. If you wanted to play a story-driven game in 2024, that likely meant setting aside up to 80 hours for something like Metaphor: ReFantazio or Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. That’s great for those who want the most bang from their buck, but it makes gaming even more difficult in terms of the time commitment.
Not all developers follow that trend, though. The independent scene has long been rich with more concise experiences that don’t waste a second of their precious runtime, and 2024 showed how that mentality can pay off. Some of the year’s best — or at least most interesting — games were no longer than a feature-length film. Thank Goodness You’re Here packed an uproariously funny slapstick comedy into under three hours. Clickolding only keeps players captive for an unforgettable (and uncomfortable) 45 minutes. Mouthwashing does what many horror games could only dream of pulling off in just a few short hours.
These games, and more, helped dispel the myth that a game’s quality is tied to how much content is packed into it. Sometimes a more compact experience can stick with players long after the credits roll, much like an impactful movie. For the developers behind 2024’s best hidden gems, determining the perfect video game runtime isn’t about creating arbitrary value; it’s about trimming the fat to more effectively tell a great story.
Cutting content
Trying to figure out the perfect length of a video game is no easy task. Whereas most movies tend to land in the 90 to 180 minute range, there’s no unified idea of how long a game is. Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth takes around 60 hours to beat even if you’re skipping extra content, whereas you can beat Astro Bot at 100% completion within 15 hopurs. The rise of enormous open-world games has conditioned players to believe that there’s a price-to-content calculation that needs to weigh into any purchase. But for some creators, like Arctic Eggs lead developer Kevin Brown, sometimes a game needs less content, not more.
“Ultimately, I think the length of a game should be determined by how you want it to end and how many players you want to see it through to the finish,” Brown tells Digital Trends. “I think this might sound strange because I think we as developers all want players to finish our games, but I feel some are unwilling to cut or simplify aspects of the game or story based on the belief that every moment/element is essential for the ending to have impact. The whole time while making a game, I feel like you need to be asking yourself what you are willing to cut in order to get players to the finish line.”
Arctic Eggs is one of several bite-sized games released by publisher Critical Reflex this year. The label found a niche for itself in 2024 with a slate of creative indies that can be beaten in one session. A few of them have already achieved cult status with fans, and Arctic Eggs is at the top of that list.
Developed by The Water Museum, Arctic Eggs is a strange game about a fry cook trying to escape a dystopian colony on Mount Everest. To do that, he needs to cook meals for enough people to please some sort of mysterious entity ruling over the community. At roughly two hours in length, the oddball project has players struggling to master physics-based frying challenges while listening to surreal monologues from hungry residents. It’s as if they adapted Waiting for Godot into a Nintendo Wii game. “Can you fry a game atop Mount Everest?” it asks, channeling the kind of impossible question that absurd theater is obsessed with.
There’s a reason that Arctic Eggs is as concise as it is. The project was originally conceived during a two-week-long game jam. After a positive reception, The Water Museum decided to expand the one-off project into a more complete game. That came with some indecision, as the team was skeptical about adding extra fluff onto something that was already telling its story efficiently without it. New content was inevitably added, but the extra bits earned their spot in the final release.
“I planned a more impactful ending that would still work if I simply tacked it onto the preexisting jam version,” Brown says. “This made it easier to cut anything that didn’t fit or risked muddying the streamlined focus of the game. Every addition had to earn its place by building on the core mechanics or narrative in an incredibly meaningful way, without adding unnecessary complexity or diluting what made the original experience so engaging. The goal was to expand thoughtfully, keeping the experience tight and cohesive while still offering something fresh for players to discover.”
That same philosophy fueled Buckshot Roulette, another one of 2024’s most surprising success stories. In the viral microgame, an unnamed character is locked in a game of Russian roulette with a creepy dealer. It isn’t played with a revolver, but a shotgun filled with both blank and live rounds. Players can either choose to pull the trigger on themselves or the dealer on each turn, making for the ultimate statement on risk versus reward — both in life and game design. It’s a simple concept and one that developer Mike Klubnika didn’t want to stretch too thin.
“There are, of course, many ways to take existing mechanics and put a spin on them, and to get more out of the loop, but I generally don’t find that interesting because the last thing I want to do is to make a game that outstays its welcome,” Klubnika tells Digital Trends. “I’ve never thought to myself, ‘Man, this game is only 10 minutes long. I should put some more stuff in this game so that it’s longer.’ Because if the original vision and concept of the game are these specific mechanics in these specific moments, then everything else feels like clutter to me.”
Game length wasn’t top of mind for Klubnika heading into the project. The development timeline for it was only two months, and that would dictate the final runtime more than anything else. The final game can be completed in 20 minutes — if you’re lucky. And if that sounds short, you might be surprised to hear it was almost even shorter. Klubnika would ultimately add a bit more to the game, but like Arctic Eggs, it was strictly to strengthen the idea.
“In one case, I did increase the length of a game [The Other Side] twofold based on tester feedback, but instead of making that decision for the sake of making the game longer, it was to fix a major flaw in how mechanics were introduced to the player,” Klubnika says. “Originally in that game, the ‘tutorial’ part of the game was basically the end of the game, and there was no moment throughout the game where the player could use the mechanics on their own. Which was not fun, and the testers made that clear. So in this case, adding an additional gameplay segment with the existing mechanics, and a bit of a spin on them, was a good choice.”
Players didn’t seem to take issue with the short runtime. Buckshot Roulette has an “Overwhelmingly Positive” user score on Steam with over 68,000 reviews. That’s a mind-boggling feat, but one that reinforces audiences’ desire for compact games. For Klubnika, one thing matters above all else: keeping the player engaged. Whether it’s 20 minutes or 20 hours doesn’t matter if the game simply doesn’t have a hook.
Short stories
The topic of length is especially crucial to narrative games with a tight focus. Buckshot Roulette’s more gameplay-driven hook made it flexible enough to support a multiplayer mode, but a story-focused project has to be very intentional in all its choices. Every superfluous system could risk compromising a theme or idea. Just look at this year’s The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered, which clouds its nuanced takeaways on cyclical violence with a head-scratching roguelike add-on that only exists to add replay value. For some of this year’s most intriguing games, protecting the heart of the project was a top priority.
You can feel that in Threshold, one of the stranger releases from Critical Reflex’s 2024 catalog. The unnerving game follows a worker who is given a mysterious job high atop a mountain: They need to regulate a passing cargo train’s speed … or else. That job is made harder by the high altitude of the surroundings, as speeding the train up requires blowing a whistle into a loudspeaker, draining my precious oxygen. I can only refill it by biting into glass air vials, which have to be earned through menial maintenance. It all takes place in one small location and it’s over in an hour.
It’s an unsettling game about enduring horrible working conditions for a job that somehow feels both meaningless and highly important in the same breath. It’s stressful, eerie, and filled with a few secrets that build out its world just enough. Like Busckshot Roulette, all of this could have been communicated in an even shorter runtime, but creator Julien Eveillé notes that simply telling the story wouldn’t entirely get the point of the project across.
“Five minutes would actually be enough to make a point for Threshold (and the first prototype was exactly that), but at some point, you also want to put your player in a certain mood in order to maximize the payoff and make it stand out,” Eveillé tells Digital Trends. “For Threshold, it meant putting a lot of effort in pressuring the player in a game loop that puts them in danger if they do more than what they are told to while teasing them with a lot of things to be curious about.”
Creating a concise game is a delicate balancing act where mechanics, tone, and story all need enough room to fully develop without overdoing any of them. But when it all comes together, developers can create the kind of focused artistic visions that are hard to come by in sprawling games peppered with extra content. Of any game released this year, Mouthwashing makes the best argument for why we need more games with that design philosophy.
Developed by Wrong Organ, Mouthwashing is a two- to three-hour horror game with more staying power than big-budget titles five times its size. Set aboard a stranded spaceship, it follows a crew slowly succumbing to cabin fever over the course of its nonlinear narrative. It’s a harrowing story that captures humanity at its worst. There are monsters aboard the ship, but they’re not aliens; they’re poisonous humans whose violence and toxicity erodes everything around them. They’re dirtbags who yearn to be both punished and absolved of their sins. Is there enough mouthwash in the world that can sanitize them?
Not a second goes to waste. Mouthwashing uses claustrophobia to its advantage, both making players feel caged in a tight space with an untrustworthy crew and occasionally lost in its surreal corridors. What we don’t actually see happen on board is just as important as what we do; the key to its horror hinges around an unspeakable act of violence that’s implied in horrifically subtle ways throughout the story. It’s an unflinching vision made more powerful by its limitations.
“With Mouthwashing ,the overall playtime was dictated by the story,” narrative designer and art lead Johanna Kasurinen tells Digital Trends. “We wanted to stick to whatever runtime served to best highlight the experience and keep it tight. As much as we all love to get hours and hours of fun out of our games, when it comes to something as indie and outside the norm as Mouthwashing, bloating it at all would do the experience a major disservice.”
“Indie” is the key word there. These aren’t the kinds of games you’ll likely ever see from a profit-driven mega corporation; they’re lo-fi creative swings that wear their niche status like a badge of honor. They don’t need to sell millions of units, which means that they can take more risks that serve their vision first. While a short runtime is a risk in an industry defined by content bloat, Kasurinen believes that gaming needs bold projects like this to counterbalance it.
“Bittersweet, swallowable yet uncomfortably memorable,” Kasurinen says. “In this corner of the industry, we’re trying to serve pills instead of full-course meals. And there should be room for that.”
