Are you strapped for free time to enjoy your favorite hobby? Worry not! I’ve found a bunch of games, split into eight genres, that are perfect for quick gaming sessions. All of these games are, first and foremost, single-player experiences, with some also offering multiplayer modes.
1 Racing Games
Most racing games, aside from hardcore racing simulators, are inherently designed to be enjoyed in bite-sized sessions. You can do a couple of races, perhaps upgrade your car, check out what you’ve unlocked, and get out in less than an hour or so. And while some racers have expansive career modes, even those games allow you to enjoy that sweet feeling of progress by chipping at a few races per session.
As someone who has less and less free time to enjoy my favorite hobby, I’ve started playing more racing games in the last year precisely because I can finish a race or two, unlock a couple of new events, buy a few cars, and then call it a day while being able to experience that sweet feeling of making some progress and unlocking new in-game content.
Wreckfest is a great example of a racing game suited for short playing sessions. While it’s got a massive career mode, you aren’t forced to finish every championship to unlock the next tier of career events. Championships themselves are made of relatively short events, each event taking only about 10 minutes to complete.
Despite its massive open-world map, Forza Horizon 5 is another racing game where you can do a lot in an hour or less. You can knock a couple of icons off your career checklist just by cruising through the map and playing open-world activities such as speed zones. Better yet, the game features short races, with an average race taking about 10–15 minutes to complete. The game’s live service aspect also respects your time; you can finish all weekly events in around three hours.
If you’ve got them in your library, the first three Dirt games from Codemasters are perfect for time-strapped gamers. I have just finished the first Colin MacRae: Dirt game, and I loved just how short each championship was and how compact yet enjoyable the rally stages felt. Dirt 5 is decent, but not as good as the original trilogy.
While we’re talking about rally games, do check Art of Rally. This bite-sized rally racer is yet another game that’s brief gaming session-friendly. And before I move on, I’d also like to recommend Descenders, a mountain bike game based on roguelite-like runs, where each run takes less than half an hour to complete. Perfection.
2 Roguelites and Roguelikes
Most well-designed roguelites and roguelikes respect your time and allow you to complete a run in less than an hour, which is perfect for a daily gaming session when you don’t have much time for gaming. After all, if the game’s good, you’ll crave more, and one run a day will turn into a bunch of runs over time.
Personally, I love Slay the Spire and cannot recommend it enough. Each run takes about an hour, but the great thing about Slay the Spire is that you can play only a few floors at a time because the game saves your progress after each encounter, which makes it a perfect game for playing during breaks. Then you’ve got Balatro, a super addictive deck-building roguelike that is optimized for short, itty-bitty gaming sessions.
Nuclear Throne is another brilliant roguelite with very short runs, which sometimes take 15 minutes or less to complete. Hades is, unsurprisingly, another great choice with the longest runs taking about an hour to complete. If you end up liking those, you shouldn’t sleep on arguably the king of the genre, The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth.
If you’re okay with very challenging difficulty, check out Spelunky 2. I’ve played the game for almost 30 hours in total, but I don’t remember having a run that lasted longer than half an hour. If you’d like to shoot your way through a roguelite, Roboquest is a fast-paced FPS roguelite with Borderlands-like visuals that offers runs that take between 15 minutes and half an hour.
3 Boomer Shooters
I love boomer shooters not only for their retro visuals but also for their old-school, compact level design. This allows you to finish most levels in 15 minutes and have a blast doing it. The average boomer shooter takes less than 10 hours to complete, which is so much better than more bloated open-world, live-service shooters that try to take up all of your free time.
My favorite is Dusk, which has all the hallmarks of a quality boomer shooter: brief levels filled with adrenaline-pumping set pieces, brilliant retro visuals, an arsenal of weapons that are a joy to use, and a story that’s so out there. Hrot is another good boomer shooter set in Czechoslovakia that oozes a dark and gritty Soviet atmosphere.
If you like Warhammer 40K, you’ve got to try Warhammer 40000: Boltgun; just increase the difficulty from normal because I found the game too easy on the default difficulty setting (on the PC, at least). Sci-fi fans will enjoy Prodeus, and if you’d like to experience an H.P. Lovecraft boomer shooter, try Forgive Me Father.
4 Short Cozy Games
Cozy, or chill games are becoming increasingly popular, and my favorite cozy games are the ones that play like A Short Hike: chill adventures without combat that are perfect for unwinding after a long day.
A Short Hike is an obvious recommendation, with Lil Gator Game being another. I just finished it, and while it starts kind of slowly, you get super invested once you move to the big island and start meeting new friends every five minutes. If you end up liking these two, do check out Haven Park as well.
Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip is great if you’d like to explore an urban environment instead of wilderness, and Thank Goodness You’re Here! is a definite recommendation for gamers who resonate with the quirky British humor. There’s also Alba: A Wildlife Adventure if you’d like to explore a cozy island in the middle of the Mediterranean and photograph its cute fauna.
5 Level-Based 2D Platformers
While 2D platformers are all the rage, lots of modern 2D platformers follow the metroidvania formula or are 2D action games with huge maps or massive levels. These aren’t well-suited to bite-sized playing sessions.
If you’d like to play 2D platformers that respect your time, your best bet is to either emulate classic Nintendo platformers or get a Nintendo Switch and a Nintendo Switch Online subscription that includes a bunch of classic 2D platformers from the 80s and 90s. These games are stage-based, with each level only taking a few minutes to complete.
My personal favorites include Super Mario All-Stars, Super Mario World and its sequel, Yoshi’s Island, as well as the SNESDonkey Kong trilogy. On the Switch, you can rewind time so that when you screw up you can have another go without having to start the level over (talk about respecting your time).
If you’d like to play something newer, Kaze and the Wild Masks is an incredible throwback to Nintendo’s classic 2D platformers. Rayman Origins and Rayman Legends are my favorite modern 2D platformers of all time. There’s also Pizza Tower for Wario fans and Celeste and Bzzzt for those who like both short and sweet games and punishing difficulty.
6 Walking Simulators
We cannot talk about games for gamers with limited free time without mentioning walking simulators. These games are almost always super short, respecting your time and offering the best ratio of fun-to-time-investment, as long as you like this game genre, of course.
Gone Home is one of the genre’s pioneers, and I love it. It only takes a few hours to complete and features a ton of 90s nostalgia. Firewatch is a bit longer, but it’s crowned as one of the best walking simulators ever for good reason; do check it out.
What Remains of Edith Finch is an emotionally charged, somber journey that takes only three or four hours to complete. It’s my favorite walking simulator.
POOLS is a perfect walking simulator for horror fans who don’t want monsters chasing them but still want an eerie, slightly unnerving experience that never turns into flat-out fear. There’s also The Stanley Parable, a poster child of the genre, and yet another must-play walking simulator you can finish in just a few hours.
7 Retro-Style Horror Games
The rise of retro-style horror games is great news for gamers with limited free time because you can finish most of them in a matter of hours. They usually sport retro visuals and simplistic gameplay, and many are dirt cheap or free to play.
David Szymanski’s Iron Lung is one of the genre’s best games; short, bizarre, eerie, and with one of the weirdest settings ever in a video game. If you like this one, be sure to check The Pony Factory made by the same developer.
Descending is another genre gem in which you’re drilling a deep hole in a USSR experimental facility and have to survive ten shifts while all kinds of weird stuff is happening around you. Bloodwash is ugly and funny, and you can finish it in just a couple of hours.
If you’re looking for a classic survival horror that looks and plays like it was released in 1994, Signalis is one of the best retro horror games on the market. I played it a couple of years ago, and it ended up being one of the best survival horror games I’ve ever played.
If you end up liking these retro horror game recommendations, check out Game Rant’s list of the best modern horror games with PS1 visuals.
8 Puzzle Games
I’m not talking about hardcore puzzle games that will turn your brain into a mush; nope, the puzzle games found below are lightweight, brief adventures made to be fun, not super challenging.
Superliminal is a perfect example of what I’m talking about; a brief, colorful puzzle quest that’s fun and in which you won’t get stuck for days trying to solve knotty conundrums. Viewfinder is a game in a similar vein that’s gorgeous-looking and brain-teasing-lite, which you can finish in a couple of hours.
The legendary Portal with its compact levels, is a perfect puzzler for gamers who can only reserve an hour or two each day for gaming. Portal 2 is also a masterpiece, but the sequel is way longer than the first game, so try it only if you’re okay with a game that takes more than 10 hours to finish.
Manifold Garden is a sort of mix between a puzzler and a walking simulator that impresses with its fractal-like environments. If you’re a fan of environmental storytelling, love to sort things out, and would like to play a pixel art puzzler that you can beat in a couple of hours, Unpacking is just what you’re looking for.
Want more bite-sized games? Check our list of the best Android games for killing time. If you’re a Linux gamer, you’ll appreciate my list of 10 awesome games that run natively on Linux.
