I found so many adorable little short games that are nonetheless amazing fun. Tinykin, cat quest, troll hunters, stray… none of those are over 10 hours, even if you achievement hunt. Maybe stray, since you have to beat it more than once.

Like they don’t have to be super long to be super good. And sometimes you only have the energy to play my little pony (actually fun and super quick because it’s made for small kids, and sometimes you just want something that takes 2 hours to get 100% on because that’s the mood..)

I normally prefer super long exploration games, but those get old. Especially when they are all filler content like run here run there kill 5 things then go back to the same place 6 more times for dumb little quests you could have done all at once if they just gave them to you… I like 100%, but man they often make that so very tedious.

That's one of the reasons I lost almost all interest in games.

It already costs an arm and a leg to stay somewhat on top of the hardware requirements, I can't justify to myself also investing hundreds of hours into essentially busy work.

I don't enjoy fetching Fred's uncle's magic shovel of doom from a stupid generic dungeon 4h away.

Maybe I'm weird, but I use games more like interactive movies. I want a story, not some artificial and ultimately pointless "challenge".

There's a little, top-down hack-and-slash, strategy/tower defense game built on this premise of "dad-mode" called Thronefall. I've found it fun and sufficiently challenging.

It's pretty easy to get through almost all of the content and leveling progression, but the developer puts out content regularly, so there is almost always something new to do every time I go to pick it back up.

It might be something you find entertaining.

Definitely. I go back to older games all the time for similar reasons. I also enjoy a linear story that just has a focus and ends eventually.