When I was kid, I could sit in front of TV for hours and sink a day or two away into a game and have no problem having to start the game over from the beginning. Time meant nothing to me and I wasted it like it was a near infinite resource.
Now I am a parent and ain’t got time for some of the nonsense that’s in games nowadays. I’m lucky if I have even an hour to play each night.
A good example: Forza Horizon 5 allows you to switch cars mid game without traveling back to a house. That to me is a huge time saver compared to the recent NFS games.
Contrarily, Forza Motorsport (2023) makes you do qualifications every round. While realistic, a big time sink.
That said, what are some of your favorite games that have respect for your limited time?
Roguelike games are generally pretty good for this as they will have shorter run durations with some kind of metaprogression. Slay The Spire is the first one that came to my mind.
Also games that have some smaller unit of progression which can be measured independently of the larger game, like Darkest Dungeon, which takes ages to finish, but each individual delve into the dungeon is relatively short and straightforward.
Hijacking this comment for recommending my two favorite rouge lites Noita and Balatro. Both have the possibility to save and quit at any time.
I’ve found a lot of Roguelikes that I’ve played force you to rebuild your arsenal every game and repeatedly progress through to the same boss that can annihilate you if you didn’t get lucky on your finds or get your timing off.
One of my favorite Rogue-lites is Rogue Legacy since it doesn’t do that. People complain that it’s brutal. But I find it so much more frustrating to mop up hordes for an hour and get wrecked by one tough opponent to restart from square one.
Thats my favorite thing about roguelites and why Rogue Legacy is literally my least favorite one.
In roguelites with stat progression, there’s often little need to actually improve at the game. It’s just mindless grinding until your stats are high enough.
Enter the Gungeon does it best IMO. New weapons and items get added to the loot table, but you never unlock anything that just straight up makes you stronger.
One complaint I’ve heard about Rogue Legacy is how the cost of stat progression increases. To the point that, for some, they find it difficult to make enough during a run to get upgrades.
The problem is that they tried to rely on increasing their stats to get better. Instead they should have tried the more difficult challenges and just gotten better.
I realized after starting a new game just how much better I was than the first time I played.
Completely different answer to what you’re asking, but I’ve found that the Steam Deck helps a lot with this because you can pause the game at any time, sleep the device, and then come back and be back in the game on that screen in 3 seconds. That helped me clear a lot of games because I could squeeze a game session in any 10/15min window of time I had.
Yup, can confirm. I’ll often start out assuming I’ll have 1-2 hours, but about 10-15 min in, I need to handle stuff (kid is sick, wife needs IT help, etc). It’s fantastic. :)
I would say Outer Wilds is very good. You have the ability to beat the game as soon as you start, but you don’t have the knowledge to beat it.
Without spoiling it as it’s a very spoiler sensitive game, you can spend as long as you want gathering all of the knowledge to beat the game, you aren’t punished for taking your time. And all the knowledge you collect is stored in the games computer as long as you save so you can play for 22 minutes if you want, or multiple hours.
I beat the game over the course of a few weeks playing for various amounts of time. Recently played the DLC too and that went the same.
I really need to get over the early learning curve and get into this game.
I’ve tried a few times and don’t know why it doesn’t engage me.
Give it another try tonight.
You have to want to explore and you have to pay attention. The gameplay is casual but the progression is not
I loved Outer Wilds but I’m surprised to see it get called out in this thread. I still recommend it but once you get like halfway through it’s very easy to spend an entire session making 0 progress and feeling like you “wasted” your night.
There is NO handholding which I personally like in games but I wouldn’t say it respects your time…though I definitely wouldn’t say it doesn’t respect your time either
If you think you’re getting lost or don’t know what to do, it’s okay to follow another lead. Sometimes the solution will come back to you. The signal scope is your friend when finding a new lead, and the ship log is your best friend for tracking it and figuring out what to do next.
I hope you enjoy it, it’s a game you can only experience once.
Roguelikes, such as Hades. A single run won’t take you longer than 30mins (and often far, far less than that – you’ll die, a lot).
Every run is progress. And if you feel like you’re not progressing fast enough, you can turn on “God Mode” (the protagonist is a god) and gain 2% damage reduction after each death, to make subsequent runs a little easier (no penalty in doing so, either).
Totally different genre, but I liked how Celeste approached this.
If you struggle to complete it there are tons of accessibility options to make the game more approachable.
And the content necessary to finish the games story is not too much, while giving challenging -well- challenges to anyone who wants to spend more time with the game.
And you clear the game screen by screen making it possible to only play it a short bit at a time.
It’s almost a bonus that the story and soundtrack are fucking beautiful.
