Best Short Games 2025

Any gamer with a challenging full-time job, family, or even pets will know just how difficult it can be to set aside time for their favorite hobby.

The concept of choosing a game you can complete in one to two sessions has become more appealing to people who no longer have the available time for lengthy RPGs or other genres with a lot of grinding.

In this list, we’ll highlight the greatest short games you can breeze through in an afternoon (or two) in 2025, including the best short games on PC, PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.

We’ll be updating this list in the future with new titles, so make sure to check back and let us know if we missed any games!

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Our first short game recommendation is Refunct, a soothing first-person platformer that can easily be beaten in under an hour.

It tasks you with restoring a dreary world back to vibrancy by traversing platforming challenges that incorporate wall-jumps, slides, pipes, lifts, and springboards.

The game encourages you to take things at your own tempo and features no combat, making it appropriate for all ages and skill levels.

Sayonara Wild Hearts is both a visual and auditory pleasure that chronicles the life of a young woman with a broken heart who gets transported to a fantastical world filled with divine heroes and villains.

The rhythm game consists of 23 levels in which you must guide the woman through surreal landscapes as she collects hearts, avoids obstacles, and battles adversaries.

Each level introduces new mechanics ranging from quick-time events to shooting adversaries with a bow and arrow, and a complete playthrough will take just over an hour for most players.

A Short Hike invites you on a poignant adventure spent hiking, climbing, and soaring across the scenic landscapes of Hawk Peak Provincial Park as you make your way to its summit.

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Along the way, you’ll discover concealed treasures, meet other hikers with thrilling stories to share, and collect golden feathers that can be used to extend your flight time.

As its name suggests, A Short Hike can be completed in a single sitting but rewards you for taking your time and exploring every small nook Hawk Peak has to offer.

The Stanley Parable got its start as a mod for Half-Life 2 in 2011 before spinning off into its own thing and is best known for its engaging narrator and very “meta” story.

In it, you play as Stanley, an ordinary office worker who suddenly decides to break his routine and investigate his coworkers’ disappearances.

Since there is no genuine ending but rather multiple outcomes depending on your choices throughout the game, Stanley Parable can take anywhere from a single minute to several hours to beat.

What Remains of Edith Finch is a game where you control the sole surviving member of the Finch family as she explores their ancestral home.

You spend most of your time exploring relatives’ old bedrooms and reliving their memories in sequences told from their perspectives.

Despite having plenty of unexpected twists and turns throughout its story, you can see pretty much everything in about 2-3 hours max.

Despite following the structure of a traditional FPS game, Superhot sets itself apart through one ingenious gameplay mechanic: time only moves forward when you do.

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This provides the player with sufficient time to assess threats and determine the best course of action before setting it in motion with stylish shootouts and fierce melee showdowns.

Even after factoring in Superhot’s time-slowdown effects, getting through the main story takes less than 3 hours, though you can easily prolong that by tracking down extras and achievements.

Gorogoa was initially envisioned as an interactive graphic novel, but its scope was eventually broadened to allow for a complete puzzle game.  

Gameplay revolves around organizing up to four images on a 2×2 grid, with the objective being to place them in a specific order by zooming in or out to trigger a sequence of events.

Whereas most puzzle games throw challenge after challenge at you, Gorogoa never overstays its welcome, clocking in around 2 hours to complete.

Superliminal is a first-person puzzle game that sees you manipulating objects in your environment to access new areas.

Most of its challenges are physics-based and use a mixture of compelled perspective and optical illusions that will have you thinking outside of the box, occasionally quite literally.

It also has a rather interesting and, at times, confusing plot that revolves around the player character participating in some strange therapy program, though there’s definitely more beneath the surface.

Little Nightmares is an eerie puzzle platformer about a young girl who finds herself trapped at the bottom of a peculiar vessel traveling by sea.

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In order to escape, you’re tasked with navigating gloomy and sinister passageways occupied by freakishly large giants that can kill you with a single hit.

The game features some stealth sequences and the occasional jumpscare as well; the main story can be completed in roughly 3-5 hours.

Pikuniku is a peculiar and delightful puzzle-platformer about a red creature that sets out to help eccentric characters overcome obstacles and unearth a deep state conspiracy.

Characters will often assign you entirely arbitrary tasks that introduce new gameplay mechanics you wouldn’t expect to encounter, many of which are quite challenging.

Aside from coming to grips with Pikuniku’s distinctive controls and platforming, the primary story can be beaten in about 3-3.5 hours.

FAR: Lone Sails is a vastly underrated indie puzzle platformer that has you traversing the parched seabed of a once-glorious civilization. 

In it, you play as the diminutive unnamed captain of a massive steam-powered ship capable of traveling on both land and sea.

Your job is to keep the ship advancing by managing each station inside while also stopping to collect fuel and solve puzzles throughout the game’s 2.5D world.

If you’re an admirer of the Katamari Damacy games, then there’s a good chance you’ve heard of Wattam, Keita Takahashi’s most recent project that was released in 2019.

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While it introduces a bunch of random, unorthodox gameplay mechanics, if we had to sum the game up, it’s essentially an action game centered on befriending a peculiar cast of characters.

This is done by holding hands with various trees, rocks, toilets, poop, etc., you encounter throughout the world; it also features minigames, puzzle-solving, and mysteries that will run you about 3-4 hours.

Inside is another exceptional short and eerie puzzle platformer from developer Playdead, the same studio behind the hit Xbox Live Arcade title Limbo.

In it, you play as a cryptic unnamed boy tasked with exploring a peculiar facility with multiple floors and areas that can only be reached by solving a series of platforming puzzles.

Each obstacle introduces a fresh mechanic that will force you to reevaluate your strategy, sometimes on the fly, as there are a handful of pursuit sequences.

First-person adventure games, especially those labeled as walking sims, are typically one-and-done affairs with comparatively brief campaigns.

One such game worth exploring is Firewatch, which follows a fire lookout named Henry working in the Shoshone National Forest for less than a month before peculiar things start to happen.

Aside from some puzzles and narrative threads you’ll need to unravel, the game is relatively straightforward, clocking in at around 4-5 hours for most playthroughs.

Hotline Miami presents itself as a top-down stealth game where you’re both outgunned and outnumbered by enemies, though you can overcome this by memorizing guard patterns.

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The game does an outstanding job of helping you adjust to its brutal combat difficulty by presenting dozens of scenarios designed for you to repeat over and over again until you find the optimal route.

Eventually, you find yourself dashing through rooms, killing enemies solely off instincts as you get closer to your goal: wiping out the entire Russian mafia.

The Last Campfire is a puzzle game from Hello Games, the identical developer behind No Man’s Sky, though it’s considerably smaller in scale and scope.

In it, you play as the embodiment of a soul named Ember as they solve intricate puzzles in order to help guide lost souls to discover their genuine purpose.

The game has a remarkable Pixar quality to its animations and can be completed in a single day, assuming you have 5 hours to spare.

Going Under is a satirical take on tech startup culture that casts you as a tired and underpaid intern tasked with dungeon crawling through the company’s basement.

Here, you’ll encounter a host of foes and peculiar weapons to wield, ranging from everyday office supplies like staplers to enchanted swords and even fully operational vehicles.

While the game’s procedurally-generated dungeons can make each playthrough feel somewhat unique and enhances replayability, you can get through the main story in less than 10 hours.