Longvideo gamesare great, but not every game needs to be an epic, 100+ hour journey filled with intense lore and side quests.
Sometimes, the most impactful narratives are the ones that hit you hard and fast, leaving a long-lasting impression in just a matter of hours.
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Forget blockbuster AAA games! We want some plucky little indies!
If you want to experience every single human emotion at once but only have a single afternoon to spare, then these games are for you.
These narrative-driven experiences will have you bawling your eyes out on your bedroom floor at 3:00 a.m. and won’t even offer you a tissue afterward.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
A Story of Family, Sacrifices, and Cooking
Venbais one of the few games out there that can make you hungry and want to call your mom at the same time.
This narrative cooking game follows the life of an Indian immigrant family in Canada, told through the lens of food, tradition, and the challenges of preserving one’s culture in a new world.
As Venba, a mother trying desperately to stay in touch with her roots while raising her son, players get to experience cooking traditional Tamil dishes, with each meal acting as a poignant thread in the overall story.
As you pick through the recipes from her late mother’s threadbare cookbook, Venba weaves a tale of generational sacrifice and the thankless job of motherhood.
While struggling with heavy obstacles like systematic racism, familial deaths, and the anticipatory grief of failure, you’ll also have to learn to accept the steadily growing rift between you and your son.
The game explores the unique grief of watching your children learn and grow in a culture vastly different from your own, while no longer being able to relate to them because of it.
Trying to bridge the gap while sacrificing everything you have left of yourself is a big ask, and a largely unrecognized one at that.
When I tell you that this game will make you cry like you have never cried before, Imeanit;this game will be squatting on your tear ductslongafter you’ve finished it.
9Purrgatory
A Cozy Journey Through the Afterlife
Though it might just seem like a silly point-and-click adventure,Purrgatoryis one of those rare gems that somehow manages to be both deeply comforting and quietly devastating all at once.
This slice-of-death adventure takes place in a limbo-like afterlife, full of hopeless lost souls who linger infinitely to an unknown end.
You play as a newly arrived spirit, wandering through this surreal yet weirdly cozy realm, striking up conversations with its inhabitants and slowly uncovering the stories of how they died and ended up there.
Many of the characters have already been there for decades, already resigned to their fates without end.
This game does tackle some pretty heavy topics, but it also throws you into absurd situations that make you laugh ‘til you cry, making the dark topic of death feel just a little lighter.
For every introspective deep dive into themes of regret, loneliness, and longing for closure, there’s a cat pun and a dad joke waiting right around the corner.
As you help your fellow spirits come to terms with their pasts, presents, and unknown futures, you’re kind of forced to look inside yourself and start questioning your own.
This game doesn’t offer any easy answers about what happens when we die, but it does remind us that even in limbo, the connections that we make matter.
And when the time finally comes to move on to what lies ahead, whatever that may be,Purrgatoryleaves you with a bittersweet ache of having laughed, loved, cried, and lived a little in a place where no one was ever really supposed to stay.
(Also, it’s100% free-to-play, so don’t sleep on this one!)
8Landlord of the Woods
Cute, Creepy, and Surprisingly Emotional
No matter how old you are,Landlord of the Woodsmanages to strike somewhere dark and deeply personal in all of us, reminding us of a time when all that mattered was living up to everyone else’s expectations.
As its title might suggest,Landlord of the Woodsis a game about knocking on doors and collecting rent, but also realizing—slowly, unsettlingly—that you might never be able to catch up to everyone else.
You play as a 25-year-old, lonely protagonist in charge of a cute but slightly creepy forest, tasked with visiting five woodland tenants and keeping things in order.
But beneath its cozy exterior lies a deeply personal story about feelings of isolation, inadequacy, and the quiet fear of being left behind by your peers.
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All the difficulty, less of the time commitment
This game explores the strange sense of detachment that young adults often feel while watching their peers succeed, as though you’re playing a part in a script that was never actually meant for you.
Even though the world may seem heavy and the weight of your responsibilities suffocating, all of that fog begins to lift the longer you spend out in nature, helping woodland critters and tenants of all kinds.
In the grand scheme of things, helping stitch a bird back up (he’s alive, I swear) may not seem all that monumental, but at the end of the day, it meant the entire world to that little bird.
Landlord of the Woodsshows us that by comparing our own choices to the successes of others, we’re robbing ourselves of the joy in everyday life and accomplishments.
7Gone Home
Coming Home to An Empty House
Gone Homeis like the confirmation of every paranoid fear you’ve ever had regarding the ones you love.
This game opens with you coming home to an empty house that should’ve been full, which, although already an anxiety-inducing prospect by itself, is made worse by all the cryptic notes and disarray left around the house.
Gone Homeis framed as a horror game, but once you start playing, you quickly realize that the only scary thing in this game is the realization that you didn’t know your own family as well as you thought.
Set in 1995, you play Katie Greenbriar, finally returning home after a year abroad, only to find your family home eerily silent.
Your family is missing, and your younger sister, Sam, has left behind only cryptic clues in her wake. What follows isn’t exactly a horror game, but instead an exploration of missed memories, family secrets, and the quiet ache of growing up without emotional support.
Though the missing parents are definitely a problem, much of the priority falls on figuring outwhere your younger sisteris, and whether she’s okay (fair).
As you wander the dimly lit halls, rifling through old letters, cassette tapes, and journal entries,Gone Homegently peels back the layers of Sam’s life, her struggles with her identity, and her blossoming first love with another girl.
It’s a short game, but the emotional weight it carries lingers long after the credits roll.Gone Homeisn’t just about uncovering a mystery; it’s about the things we leave behind, the love we fight for, and the unspoken words that shape our relationships.
6Before Your Eyes
Blinking Through a Lifetime of Memories
Before Your Eyes
This game only takes around 3 hours to beat, but you’ll need to tack on a few more to account for all the crying that you’re going to be doing.
Before Your Eyesis a game that forces you to face the fleeting nature of life, as uncomfortable as that may be.
Interestingly, this interactive experience is played using your real-life blinks, measured using your webcam, with each one advancing the story whether you’re ready for it or not.
InBefore Your Eyes, you play the part of a soul adrift in the afterlife, reliving the most defining moments of your life as they flash before your eyes. At first, you’ll go through all of your most precious memories, like falling in love for the first time or the best defining moments in your career.
Soon, however, the ferryman in charge of assessing your soul will begin to suspect that you’re purposefully leaving some things out, causing him to dredge upthe deepest, darkest, and most painful memoriesthat you’ve tried so hard to bury.
This game chucks you headfirst into a cocktail of guilt, regret, and the quiet devastation of knowing you can never go back, all while making you painfully aware of how fleeting life truly is.
It’s an experience that ultimately only lasts a couple of hours, but the emotional gut punch it deals you will leave a scar that lasts a lifetime.
Unlike other narrative games,Before Your Eyesdoesn’t just tell you a story—it makes you live through it, feel it, and, ultimately, devastatingly, say goodbye to it. And when the credits finally roll, you’ll wish you had just one more moment before it all slipped away.
5The Red Strings Club
What is Fate, Really?
The Red Strings Club
The Red Strings Clubis a unique narrative experience about finding happiness, fighting fate, and taking down a corrupt, corporate power structure dead set on brainwashing the masses. It’s surprisingly relatable for a cyberpunk dystopia about bartending and pottery.
This is the kind of game that’ll have you side-eyeing your smart devices and questioning what it means to be human long after you’re finished with it.
Set in a cyberpunk dystopia where technology reigns supreme, you are a bartender atThe Red Strings Club, mixing drinks that unlock people’s deepest secrets and influence their decisions.
Whether it’s a corrupt member of government or an average Joe looking to get a buzz, your cocktails have the power to strangle deeply buried truths out of anyone, depending on what you serve them.
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These games are for those who love JRPGs but don’t want to spend months on the same playthrough.
For example, while one cocktail may make them confess to an affair, another one may make them confess to a conspiratorial government plot about controlling humanity through technology. Simple bartending stuff, really.
Despite looking relatively innocent on the surface,The Red Strings Clubis a deeply philosophical exploration of identity, choice, and the ethics of technological control.
If you don’t feel like leaving your comfort zone today, then you might not want to pick this one up (but you still should because it’s amazing anyway).
4Impostor Factory
“Impostor Syndrome” On a Whole New Level
As a self-proclaimed “bonkers time-loop tragicomedy”,Impostor Factoryis one of those experiences that’ll leave you staring at your black computer screen for hours after you’ve finished it.
While technically a part of Freebird Games’ “To the Moon” series,Impostor Factoryis its own game and can be played independently.
Like no game that has ever come before it,Impostor Factorystarts off with a suspiciously secluded mansion, a time machine in the bathroom, and an invitation to a fancy, yet deadly, party; it might sound like a wild ride on the surface, but trust me, it only gets wilder the deeper in you go.
We take part as a Joe named Quincy, who, for reasons unknown, gets a mysterious invitation to a party in a remote, secluded mansion.
No one in their right mind would follow through with that, but evidently, Quincy isnotin his right mind, so he decides to go, to hell with the consequences.
After arriving at the mansion surprisingly unharmed, you eventually come across a time machine (yes, a literal time machine) in the bathroom. After that, everything is pretty much downhill from there: everyone starts dying,Lovecraftian horrorsare let loose, and the world starts getting doomed along the way.
Despite its batshit insane premise, at its core,Impostor Factoryis a philosophical exploration of human guilt, remorse, and the choices we all wish we could unmake.
What starts as a quirky, murder-mystery adventure turns into a gut-wrenching look at the cost of our actions and the haunting regrets that we all carry with us.
By the time you reach the end, you’ll be left with a single, devastating question: how far would you go to undo your biggest mistake, even if the price is everything you’ve ever known?
3To The Moon
The Cost of Dying in Reverse
To the Moon
From the creators ofImpostor Factory,To the Moonoffers a mind-boggling narrative experience that will wrinkle your brain exponentially. This game willwreckyou, and you will bethankfulfor it.
What starts off as a sci-fi adventure about two doctors entering a dying man’s mind to fulfill his last wish quickly becomes an unforgettable observation of love, loss, and the apologetic beauty of life’s most fleeting moments.
LikeImpostor Factory, Freebird Games did not pull any punches when it came toTo the Moon’s wild premises.
You assume the role of Dr. Eva Rosalene and Dr. Neil Watts, tasked with helping Johnny, a man on his deathbed, experience his lifelong dream of going to the moon.
To do this, you must enter his mind, dive deep into his memories, and piece them together (with a few tweaks here and there) to artificially rebuild his life as an astronaut.
As you dive deeper into Johnny’s memories, however, you begin to uncover the real reasoning behind his wish, and it’s far more agonizing than you could ever imagine. Every moment caught in his psyche exposes a lifetime of missed opportunities and unspoken desires, life-altering moments that never came to fruition.
If you don’t come out of this game rethinking your entire life and every choice you’ve ever made, then you’re lying to yourself, and you need to play it again. May your tear ducts never know peace.
2Eternal Threads
The Butterfly Effect in Motion
Eternal Threads
While there are many games out there thatinvite you to step through moments in time, not many do so directly before a horrific fire that tears through a family of six.
InEternal Threads, you’re a sci-fi operative from a distant future who’s been tasked with traveling back in time to fix an anomaly in the time stream.
The anomaly in question refers to a massive fire in May 2015, a devastating event that took the lives of six innocent people. Your job is to analyze each of the individual’s habits and relationships with each other and manipulate the events leading up to that fateful night.
As powerful as the butterfly effect is made out to be, it’s surprisingly hard to keep everyone’s lives intact without interfering too much.
Prohibited from actually stopping the fire itself, you’ll have to rely on your own methods of manipulation to control the housemates' decisions.
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The game’s unique time manipulation mechanic lets you rewind and fast-forward through the week that led up to the fire, allowing you to make choices that reveal different outcomes and change the fates of specific characters.
As you uncover the threads of each character’s life, you’re given a glimpse into their hidden struggles and unspoken desires, all while piecing together the real tragedy itself that led to the fire.
At its core,Eternal Threadsis a game about the power of even the smallest of decisions, the consequences of your actions, and how everything can go up in smoke in an instant.
1SEASON: A Letter to the Future
When Nothing Matters, Everything Does
Season: A Letter to the Future
Just like the very first entry of this list,Season: A Letter to the Futurewill make you want to call your mom and cry your eyes out.
Season: A Letter to the Futureis an open-world RPG set in a world right on the edge of a catastrophic apocalypse, where players take on the role of a young woman who embarks on a journey to document the world before it all crumbles away.
As you leave home for the first time to explore the doomed world around you, you’ll capture photographs, record bird songs, and document people and their stories, all while reflecting on the fleeting beauty of life and the passing of time.
I don’t know what drugs she’s on to make her not freak out about the world ending all around her, but I think I’d like some (just kidding, she’s not doing any drugsthat we know of).
I think what makes this game hit so close to home is just how much it resonates with people, especially young adults, in today’s world.
As a young adult navigating a world increasingly marked by uncertainty and rapid change, this game hits right where it hurts the most, in a place not many are eager to dwell on.
From a young adult’s point of view, especially in an era where everything feels transient and disposable, this game asks the difficult questions: “How do we deal with loss before it even happens”, “How do we find meaning in a world where permanence is increasingly uncertain?”
For a generation that has been bombarded with existential dread since day one—whether through climate change, political instability, or the pressure to make something of themselves in a hyper-competitive world—Season: A Letter to the Futureexposes the fragility of life as we know it, and the importance of holding everything we love just a little bit tighter.
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If you don’t have a lot of time to play a game, just boot up something quick like Balatro or Pizza Tower.
