Short, Wonderful Games Like Astro Bot Are The Antidote To The Industry’s Scope Problem
I’ve been on a tear the last few weeks. I often fall into long stretches where I pick up and play a lot of games for varying periods of time, but never finish them. Thanks to the job, I just rarely have the time to linger on a thing for too long outside of a professional obligation. Fortunately, the last few games I’ve picked up have been just the right size, allowing me to see them through to the end and marvel at their construction and ingenuity. I’m now more convinced than ever that we need shorter games.
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Suggested ReadingOn the most basic level, shorter games just feel better. Or rather, I feel better at their conclusion. Games aren’t just experiences to be had, but also things to be beaten. Finishing a game is supposed to be a triumph, and it can often be that victorious feeling that carries me from one to the next. Even if a title lacks any real story, we have our own narrative arcs with them, complete with rising and falling actions, climaxes, and a conclusion, and that’s a satisfying rhythm to have with a game. Your impression of a movie, book, show, or album is colored by the time you spend with it and how thorough an experience it is. Therefore, it’s kind of incomplete if you never listen to that last song, or see the final shot of a film. Similarly, games that I don’t finish remain this kind of half-formed image in my head. Since most notable releases have ballooned in size and now require dozens of hours to complete—time which, in my life, is increasingly hard to come by—I’m finishing less and less of them, but there are now more barely formed impressions of them in my head than ever. You know what that all means? It means I’m playing less than ever before, and experiencing fewer fresh titles as a consequence, and it’s as frustrating as it sounds.
The run I’ve been on the last few weeks flies in the face of the industry’s poorly conceived notion that bigger is unilaterally better. It started when I was reviewing Astro Bot, a 3D platformer that thankfully takes all of about a dozen or so hours to beat and see through to 100 percent completion. Soon after that, The Plucky Squire was released, and I managed to beat that roughly 10-hour game across two back-to-back evenings. When I couldn’t sleep the other night, I booted up Thank Goodness You’re Here and wrapped it within about three hours.
Even looking ahead at some of the games I’m excited to get to, Arranger sounds like a fantastic game that I can wrap up in a weekend and Castaway explicitly communicates how much of a bite-sized adventure it is. I Am Your Beast is a speedrunning first-person shooter styled like a comic book that is a few hours long, and Arco seems about as lengthy as most of the aforementioned titles. Look at what a wealth of different experiences I could potentially get around to without having to exhaustively give up whole days of my time.
I’m not just propping these games up due to their lengths, either. Each of the games that I’ve beaten over the last few weeks stands apart from the others, and they all feel like breaths of fresh air. Astro Bot is the feel-good, polished AAA 3D platformer that people have begged for, the kind that it seemed like only Nintendo and Sega were in the business of making anymore. The Plucky Squire is a loving homage to gaming’s past that’s perhaps a little too hands-on with its guidance but frequently hops between genres and dimensions and sets you loose in its best moments. Thank Goodness You’re Here sometimes feels more like a series of interactive comedy sketches stitched together than it does a fully-featured game, but it is also one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever played, and unlike anything I’ve picked up before it.
All three games feel like things that could only be made by smaller teams with clear visions that were unburdened by the industry’s tendency to fruitlessly chase trends. They eschew the previously outlined parameters of success, and yet I’d consider each one of them a resounding win. Crucially, none of them ever get stale or stagnant due to the premium bloat that is so commonly found in the lengthy blockbuster games often touted as the culture’s best work.
By comparison, many criticisms of a tentpole game like God of War Ragnarök found the game to be remarkably, even distractingly, stuffed. Persona 5 felt like such a slog by the end that I had to shelf it for a month mere hours before its ending. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed both The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, but eventually found myself dashing to the credits and forgoing the near-endless side content that either aimed to distract me with. This year’s Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is bigger than it realistically should’ve been, and its best moments are undermined by the inconsistent quality of its filler content, which is so frequently pushed to the forefront. There is such a thing as bang for your buck, but a lengthier experience with a game is not always a richer one. These games exhausted me, and their increasingly standardized framework feels like a prison for games and their developers. Only so many things can get made with such a specific and narrow vision before we start reproducing the same shit ad nauseam and it all risks becoming nothing more than slop.
The previously mentioned blockbusters are each great in their own right, but they are also all victims of the AAA inflation that leads to problems like scope creep, blown up timelines, rising budgets, and increased pressure from publishers and business partners to meet increasingly unrealistic expectations that promise returns from their huge investments. The idea that games need to be this big is a scam sold by marketers and executives who want to upsell you the same kinds of games over and over. These are the same people who birthed games-as-a-service to turn one-time purchases or installs into “forever” games squeezing you for your money for months, if not years, at a time. The same people who tried to trick you all into thinking they believed in Concord and then pulled it from physical and digital shelves within weeks. These titles are victims of a failing system and vision for games.
Astro Bot, The Plucky Squire, and Thank Goodness You’re Here, as well as other shorter games, aren’t the catch-all antidote to the industry’s ailments, but they sure do read like a damn fine blueprint for a possible future. There’s no good reason why these sensibly budgeted, mid-range, and creative titles should feel like outliers in this field. Even the safest of them, Astro Bot, feels like this bold experiment when it really shouldn’t. A family-centric platformer and adorable brand icon is a no-brainer on so many levels, but after a decade of pursuing prestige and mature audiences with increasingly bloated games and overly similar franchises, Sony breaking from its own tired formula reads as revolutionary when it’s just common sense.
I don’t want massive games to disappear. Sometimes, you need a three-hour epic of a film to rock your world and sensibilities, or a hefty tome of a novel to challenge you. I don’t know of a good double-album, but I’m sure there’s one out there that provides a sonic journey like no other, and similarly, there are worlds and stories in games that demand a certain size and investment to pay off. I just wrapped up Yakuza 0 after more than 80 hours, and I’ve been championing it as one of the best things I’ve ever played. I just want us to break free of the trap that the homogenized vision of the big game has become.
That’s why we need shorter games. Yeah, I selfishly feel better being able to complete these diverse, brilliant, and bite-sized experiences, but it also feels like a healthier move for everyone involved. It frees developers to make a different mold of game than what the industry has deemed acceptable for the last decade. Hell, it could begin to save the industry from the ballooning costs and increasingly common failures of the service games bubble that has clearly burst. It’s something else, and more than ever, that’s what video games need.
