Let’s face it: video games are time-consuming and putting all that time into it is stressful, especially if you’re an adult with a full-time job, kids, school – whatever it may be. Sometimes we want to enjoy a game that doesn’t take up our entire lives because it can be annoying or you lose focus and we get it: life happens and we can’t always control what comes in it.
As an avid video game player myself, it’s hard to play when something frequently comes up when I least expect it or I can never find the motivation to play games that require hours of gameplay when I just don’t have the patience for it.
We’ve all been there and it sucks. But, the games I present here are absolutely worth your time and on the plus side: it’s all under ten hours so you can enjoy the other things in life.
Tangle Tower – 5 to 6 hours
A murder mystery adventure puzzle game, Tangle Tower is set in a mysterious mansion on an unknown island. You play two private detectives, Grimoire and Sally, as you both get called on to examine the murder of Freya Fellows, an inhabitant of the mansion. The game shifts from both points of view of the private detectives as you uncover the details of Freya’s death from her family, the Fellows, and another family, the Pointers who both cohabitate the mansion. You’ll be conducting interviews, exploring the mansion’s rooms and find clues –some harder to find than others– leading up to Freya’s death and who was involved.
Journey – 2 to 5.5 hours
A tranquil adventure game that brings its focus on life and death, the main objective you have to complete in Journey is to reach the mountain you see from afar. As you travel towards it, you’ll not only enjoy the breathtaking views, but you’ll meet with companions whose names you won’t know nor will you be able to communicate with them until the end of the game. It may take you more than six hours as you’ll find yourself enveloped with intricately beautiful artwork and daunting, but calm music – an experience you’ve never had before.
Oxenfree – 4.5 to 10 hours
As stated on Night School Studio’s official game website, Oxenfree is a supernatural teen thriller where you play as Alex, a bright and rebellious teenager who brings her stepbrother Jonas to a night party on Edwards Island, an old, vacated military island. As the rebel you are, you open a ghostly gate from the island’s odd past and things go south from there. You are in charge of the decisions you make for Alex and her friends as you explore the island of its dark secrets and change the course of your and your friends’ lives.
The Swapper – 3 to 6 hours
An atmospheric sci-fi puzzle mystery game, The Swapper follows the story of a person, whose name you don’t know or background whose in an abandoned space station, and you just want to escape this place. How you escape is the interesting part: you are handed some sort of ray gun that allows you to clone yourself and send these clones (and your consciousness) on explorations of this space station on means of escaping and perhaps dying in the process (something you can avoid, but for how long?). Like Oxenfree, this is another game where your decisions make due to the outcome as you work your way towards escaping with only just this peculiar ray gun.
Valerie is a senior studying Digital and Print Journalism and minoring in French at the University of North Texas. After her cousin introduced her to video games at nine years old, it was love at first sight and plans to experience the world of gaming journalism in the future. Though her favorite game varies, Kingdom Hearts will always forever be her number one game series. Outside of her studies and gaming, she drowns herself in coffee and tries new food places with her friends and family.
