Many games boast “hundreds of hours of content” as a selling point. People want to feel like they get bang for their buck, which isn’t unreasonable. It may be a unique video game phenomenon because you’ll pay upwards of 15 dollars for a two-hour film, but 15 bucks for a four-hour game is clearly unreasonable.

If Paul Blart Mall Cop 2 is worth 15 dollars, any other goddamn thing is. — If *Paul Blart Mall Cop 2* is worth 15 dollars, **any other goddamn thing is.**

Short form gaming has a lot of positives that go largely ignored; short-form games are cheaper to make (meaning that indie developers face less overhead); they can be more experimental (because they don’t have triple A budgets behind them and stockholders); and they can be exactly as long as they need to be (as opposed to a 200-hour long game with a 10-hour main story).

Devil Daggers is the 1st person arena shooter equivalent of climbing Mt. Everest. You work hard for every 30 seconds of progress you make. There is no story to speak of; you run around on a brick platform in almost total darkness and have to survive for as long as possible. The screen only shows your flame-tinged hand that points forward. By holding down left mouse button, you rapidly shoot red, glowering daggers. Click the left mouse button twice, and you fire out a cone of daggers, much like a shotgun. You can use some common arena shooter mechanics like bunny-hopping or rocketjumping (shotgunjumping in this case) to move around a little quicker or dodge enemies.

Prepare to be spooked. Often. By skeletal hellbeasts. Lots of them.

A few seconds after you spawn a giant and gently spinning tower comes floating out of the darkness towards you, followed by a wave of grinning skulls explodes out of the top of the tower. They loom rapidly towards you, and before you know it, another tower has appeared, and another, and another. The longer you survive, the more enemies (and enemy varieties) come at you. Certain enemies will drop red crystals that power up your daggers. You’re constantly on the move, whirling around to fling crimson blades into the horned skull chasing behind you, or the giant floating arachnid skull that steals your crystals.

Welcome to this, but forever. Also with more skulls.

By constantly pressing you with enemies, Devil Daggers forces you to react on instinct without a precise strategy. Every extra second you can stay alive feels more monumental than any main quest. At the time of writing, the best run out of almost 50,000 players is something around 680 seconds, just over 11 minutes. On average, a player lasts around 50 seconds. Survival is by definition stressful, but Devil Daggers makes it fun.

**SLEEPTIGHTSLEEPTIGHTSLEEPTIGHTSLEEPTIGHTSLEEPTIGHTSLEEPTIGHT**

Half-Minute Hero is what you get when you boil down an JRPG to its molecules, then made it self-aware. A king asks you to destroy monsters around his kingdom but in your absence, an evil wizard casts a spell that will destroy the earth in 30 seconds. You fail to stop him, and after he destroys the world, the Goddess of Time revives you. She resets the clock for you, provided you give her all the rewards from your quests. You have 30 seconds to fight enemies to level up (literally bashing yourselves into each other until one of you dies) and fight the boss. But once you defeat that boss, you meet another boss who can also destroy the world in 30 seconds.

Lots of anime fluff for a game that's entirely pixelized.

Whenever you die, the Goddess of Time restarts the clock and pauses the timer when you head to towns to eat/buy food, buy new gear, and find allies. Since combat requires no input on your part, strategy relies on the gear you have equipped and the item you carry. Short term planning and decision making is a valuable skill after all. Just like in Devil Daggers, death is a quick pause and then you’re right back to the action. Each time you die, you learn a little something more about how the game works and what kind of gear you might need to defeat this particular boss. Instead of focusing on instinct, like Devil Daggers, Half-Minute Hero respects the time you put in; you don’t have to invest 500 hours to be a world saving hero, just 30 seconds.

Here's what it actually looks like. Hurry up, Hero!

Sometimes you don’t have 200 hours to dedicate to one game. Maybe you’ve got a family, a job, or just don’t feel like wading through` oceans of filler. Not a huge genre, short-form gaming has relied on the expansion of the independent development scene. Triple A games are no longer the only show in town. Keep an eye on those short-form games; they’re more than just a flash in the pan.

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