Venba has me rediscovering an old love: very short video games.
When I was a freelance writer, I played short games because I played everything. From 2018 to 2022, I was a full-time freelancer, mostly focusing on reviews. To make ends meet, I played as widely as possible, because when you’re a freelancer, you probably aren’t going to get to review the biggest triple-A games most of the time because a staffer will already be covering them. Plus, for the sake of your pay per hour, the shorter a game is, the better. If you get the same rate for a two hour visual novel and a sixty hourRPG, your time is much better spent on the former.
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But when I went full-time, the calculus shifted and I started spending time with bigger games instead. As much as I love little games like Before Your Eyes, The Big Con, and Museum of Mechanics: Lockpicking — some of theindiesI reviewed in the last year before I got this job at TheGamer — they don’t get clicks on the same level thatThe Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom,Elden Ring, orBaldur’s Gate 3do. So, over time I’ve focused more on triple-A games which also tends to mean playing games that are, at minimum, 15 hours long.
But, I made a step toward reversing that trend a few weeks ago when I picked up Venba throughXbox Game Pass. The indie from Visai Games, which combines cooking sim gameplay with visual novel storytelling, took less than two hours to complete, and reminded me of how great it is to play games that don’t need to take over your life for weeks at a time. I watch a lot of movies and Venba was able to provide a similarly rewarding, concise experience. To take a page out of Venba’s cookbook, it felt like a full meal, and one I was able to consume in a single evening.
This has reignited my desire to play short games and since completing Venba, I’ve been trying to play one game that HowLongToBeat.com clocks at four hours or less each week. So far, I’ve crossed two short 2023 games off my list. And, at only 45 minutes each, it barely felt like a commitment.
The first,He ****** The Girl Out Of Mefrom developer Taylor McCue, is a bleak but rewarding 45 minutes. The story of a young, newly out trans woman experimenting with sex work and having a traumatic experience with a client, is rendered with minimal graphical flair — it looks like it was made in the easy-to-use engine Bitsy Game Maker — but uses its pixelated art style to tell an emotionally raw and absorbing story. I loved it, in part because its depiction of a pivotal moment in a young person’s life reminded me of reading The Catcher in the Rye in high school and feeling like I was seeing my depression rendered accurately for the first time. I imagine anyone who has gone through something similar to what the game’s protagonist goes through will feel similarly seen. You can play it at a pay-what-you-want price scale onitch.io.
After that, I started playing Babbdi from developers Sirius and Léonard Lemaitre, a short, indie exploration game about trying to find a ticket out of the title city, a gray block of brutalist high rises populated by a small collection of grim-faced people. I love exploration in games, and a small dense environment beats a sprawling but sparse landmass any day. I finished it in under an hour, but there are collectibles and achievements you can nab if you want to linger a little longer. This game,available on Steam, is also free.
I have a few more short games ready to go on my PC. Dordogne andThe Murder of Sonic the Hedgehogare next up, but I’ll keep dipping into itch.io and Xbox Game Pass going forward, too. The games that impact you the most aren’t always the ones you most anticipate and it can be rewarding to venture off the well-worn triple-A path. And, when the games are this short, you can be back on the trail before you know it.
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