One Sitting Games

deepspacefine

I finished Untitled Goose Game in one sitting the night it came out. Beat the main story and went back and completed many of the challenge objectives. Mostly haven’t played it since, still love that game and think about it often!

TheFragranceOfDarkCoffee

I played through Adios in one sitting before work one day and I have never truly stopped thinking about it. It’s maybe three hours long if you’re really pushing it and I think it’s got some great storytelling in it, both in dialogue and environment. It’s pretty cheap, give it a go sometime.

edward

Really enjoyed Gris, Journey, and Gorogoa. All take 2-4 hours, I think, depending on how long it takes you to figure things out.

Reverse Kaiser

Mnemogenic Undertale. It might take like 10 hours but it’s the best way to kill a lazy sunday that I can think of.

I guess I’m allowing bathroom and snack breaks.

I’ll also say that when I got Vanguard Bandits I played it for over 50 hours without sleep and beat it twice, and man, I was having a good time.

tokucowboy

I really adore a one-sitting game. It’s been said on the show, but A Short Hike is a perfect little thing. I second @edward on Gorogoa, too (I did that in one sitting on a Christmas Eve, what a singular work of art and illusion). Sayonara Wild Hearts is essentially a pop album in video game form, so it’s roughly album length. Donut County and Pikuniku are breezy little anti-capitalist guys. Wide Ocean, Big Jacket is a game that I just remembered I should’ve posted in our “actual good relationships in games” type thread. Speed Dating for Ghosts is a good Halloween date.

On the less (tonally) breezy side, Iron Lung and Paratopic are big dreadtime recs.

And I hope people will keep coming with more specific shouts on this front, but playing through NES/Fami-era platform and action games with rewind enabled or, even better, arcade games that allow uninterrupted continues with unlimited (digital) quarters is one of my absolute favorite things to do in video games. So many arcade games become half hour, stress-free bits of digital tourism. I love nothing better than to credit feed through an STG for the first time. On the console front, there’s a bit more pushback but it still makes games that previously felt insurmountable into a one-sitting experience – just last night, I rewound my way through Sunsoft’s Journey to Silius. That clocked me 1 hour and 15 minutes well spent.

Reverse Kaiser

What about when you play through a shooter or a fighter enough times that it becomes a one sitting game?

edward

Reverse Kaiser
This reminds me of when I was at the hospital with my son for a long time so we watched a playthrough of Donkey Kong Country and it took less than two hours.
The person playing never even lost a life!

KennyL

Fitz Packerton

The Portopia Serial Murder Case

Karasu

I was recently thinking about Fairune, originally on the 3DS but also now on Switch! It’s a very concise but well thought out game that looks like Zelda-ish games but actually plays more like Ys. It’s probably close to a one-sitting game, I guess depending on how much is a sitting for you!

Kez

I do like a one-sitting game! One that pops into my head straight away is Rain on the PS3, I played through that on a rainy weekend morning a couple years back and had a nice time.

treefroggy

have to really wrack my brain to think of some…
back in the days when it was new, I finished Tower of Heaven in one go. nowadays it’s nothing special/dime a dozen, but back then, I was a teen, and it was a spiritual experience lol

Meta Knight Mode in Kirby’s Nightmare in Dreamland has no save option, requiring you to beat it in one sitting.

I definitely played A Short Hike in multiple sittings.
Parappa, Rez, Lammy are all good

Practically all arcade games… Most recently I had fun playing through House of the Dead for the first time with a buddy on an original restored CRT cabinet.

ttzop

treefroggy back in the days when it was new, I finished Tower of Heaven in one go. nowadays it’s nothing special/dime a dozen, but back then, I was a teen, and it was a spiritual experience lol

i’m older but same, blew my mind that something so sublime could be a flash game. still an absolutely killer all-time soundtrack too

Tradegood

A Little to the Left was one of my favorite games of last year. It’s about 3-4 hours full of super aesthetically satifying puzzles. The point of the game is to put things in the right place, and I can’t recommend it enough.

Also that GBA Warioware game that just dropped on the Nintendo Switch is a great game you can blast through in one sitting.

onefiftythree

Dog Days, preferably with a bud

pasquinelli

onefiftythree Dog Days, preferably with a bud

another good bud 1 sitting game (b1sg) is bubble bobble.

there’s a class of game that are by nature complete in a sitting. a good one is pacman ce.

a fighting game single player mode can usually be finished in a sitting if the difficulty can go low enough.

actually, most arcade games can be cleared in a sitting if the machine is in freeplay, and can be great dumb fun if the game is right, for instance the metal slugs.

recently i recommended both inside and superliminal precisely because they’re one-sittingable.

here’s a silly story: the summer before the dreamcast came out, hollywood video offered dreamcasts to rent, with sonic adventure. i think you might’ve had a choice of game, but in any event i chose sonic adventure to play over a weekend. but since the rental didn’t include a vmu, and since the dreamcast didn’t have built in storage (which surprised me), i couldn’t save. so i just beat it in one sitting. i’m not sure if i 100%ed it, but i got enough sonic adventure that weekend to never play it again.

you know what game should be completable in a sitting? pathologic 2. with all its interesting choices and their interesting consequences, it would be nice if you could finish a playthrough in 2 or 3 hours. but then they might’ve had to cut out some of the walking…

treefroggy

ttzop late teen, like 16-19, I don’t remember. It felt like the first good indie thing since Cave Story & La Mulana to me at the time. Now there’s thousands lol
One cool thing is I think Project M, Project Plus or whatever it’s called, comprehensive SSB Brawl hack, added a Tower of Heaven stage!

fivedollardare

This topic got me to update my list on Backloggd: single sitting games that rocked me. They all tend to be short games with strong stories, like Firewatch and Adios. Sometimes they have a strong visual tone that stuck with me, like The Music Machine or Paratopic.

Metal Gear Solid 3’s also on the list. I finished that in a single sitting on the weekend it released. I was completely fried by the end of it but I was so strongly hooked into the story that I couldn’t put it down. I also very much remember thinking “oh, this has got to be the end” and finishing the game hours later at dawn.

Sredna14

I cannot recommend FRANKEN enough if you have a love for short and comedic RPGs. Took me around three hours to complete and is an easy ride from start to finish. A lot of laughs were had.