13 Bite-Sized Games for Travel, Ranked From Shortest to Longest
Amber Stefanson | July 5, 2023
Over the weekend, I flew out to California to see my family for the holiday. It’s a super short, 1 ½ hour flight… not quite enough time for me to get invested into any activity and see it through before touchdown. However, it was the perfect opportunity to pick up another game short enough to be finished in one sitting.
I love short indie games. They’re typically more impactful and artistic than longer independently-made games, since developers spend more of their limited resources on artistic direction than on creating filler content to make the game take longer. In this list are some of my favorite bite-sized games — the perfect length for a flight or road trip.
So, pull out your Nintendo Switch, laptop, or fancy handheld gaming computer and try out some of these stellar one-sitting games. They’re ordered from shortest to longest to help you find the perfect game to fill the amount of time that you’ll be traveling.
Side Note for all the Switch Players out there: before setting out on your adventure, I recommend picking up an ergonomic controller designed for playing long hours without cramping up your hands.
1. Old Man’s Journey (2017)
Image Credit: Broken Rules
What it's about
This meditative puzzle game follows an old man on a long hike through the scenic countryside. Gameplay consists of altering the landscape in order to help him through obstacles. You click and drag each of the rolling hills and pastures to reshape them. This alters the man’s path and makes it more traversable.
After each level, the old man rests and has a short flashback related in some way to the scenery around him. Each of these flashbacks is a clue as to where the man is going and why. It’s a beautiful, painterly game — and the perfect length for short trips like mine.
Time it takes to complete
- Median Play Time: 1 hours, 39 minutes
- Standard Playstyle: Around 1.5 hours
- Completionist Playstyle: Around 1.5 ~ 2 hours
Where to get it
2. Donut County (2018)
Image Credit: Annapurna Interactive
What it's about
A Hole opens up under Donut County and devours everything in sight. As it cromches down on everything from tennis balls to skyscrapers, those responsible for summoning the Hole must put a stop to it before it consumes the whole town.
You play as the Hole, which gets a little bigger with each thing it swallows. To complete each level, you must strategically devour things in the right order — from smallest to largest — until you grow big enough to consume every last thing. I love Donut County for shorter trips; it’s so chaotic and delightful that you won’t even notice the time has passed.
Time it takes to complete
- Median Play Time: 2 hours
- Standard Playstyle: Around 2 hours
- Completionist Playstyle: Around 2.5 hours
Where to get it
3. What Remains of Edith Finch (2017)
Image Credit: Annapurna Interactive
What it's about
The Finch family is cursed; each of Edith Finch’s family members have died under sudden or mysterious circumstances, going back as far as anyone can remember. At age 11, Edith Finch fled her ancestral home following one of these tragic deaths. You play as Edith 6 years later, when she returns searching for answers about the fates that befell the family she lost.
What Remains of Edith Finch is a first-person exploration game. Most doors in the house have been sealed off, so you have to find open windows and hidden passageways in order to move from one room to the next. To make things worse, power has been shut off for years, so your only source of light is the sunlight drifting in through dirty windows. You’ll be swept away by the tender eeriness of What Remains of Edith Finch, and once you start it, you won’t be able to put it down.
Time it takes to complete
- Median Play Time: 2 hours, 20 minutes
- Standard Playstyle: Around 2 ~ 2.5 hours
- Completionist Playstyle: Around 2.5 ~ 3 hours
Where to get it
4. Superliminial (2019)
Image Credit: Pillow Castle Games
What it's about
The plot of Superliminal is similar to Portal — you wake up in a strange facility that turns out to be something other than what you’re initially led to believe. In Superliminal, the scientific facility is conducting a study on lucid dreaming. While going through a routine dream cycle, you get stuck within your dream and have to solve increasingly surreal puzzles to force yourself awake.
Gameplay features puzzles based on optical illusions and forced perspective. Notice how in the gif above the toy house becomes lifesize when you place it at a further distance. This is because in Superliminal, objects remain the same size optically as you move them, but when you set them down the size of the objects becomes relative to your distance from them.
After navigating through each of the puzzles, you’ll come out feeling like a genius — but your own depth perception may be distorted for several hours after you finish playing.
Time it takes to complete
- Median Play Time: 2 hours, 48 minutes
- Standard Playstyle: Around 2 ~ 4 hours
- Completionist Playstyle: 6+ hours
Where to get it
5. Death and Taxes (2020)
Image Credit: Placeholder Gameworks
What it's about
Death and Taxes reimagines the role of Grim Reaper as an office job. As one of the grim reapers, you must go through a stack of biodatas everyday and decide who should live and who should die. To make the decision even more difficult, you receive a memo with the daily quota of deaths. You can choose to follow the rules for the day, or you can choose for yourself how many people to reap or spare.
Macabre and philosophical, Death and Taxes forces you to consider death as a force that is both morally neutral and necessary. The world will face dire consequences if you try to spare everyone or make your decisions with morality alone as your guiding tenet. Death and Taxes branches into many endings depending on who you choose to reap, so the game has a lot of replayability.
Time it takes to complete
- Median Play Time: 3 hours, 17 minutes
- Standard Playstyle: Around 2 ~ 3 hours
- Completionist Playstyle: 6+ hours
Where to get it
6. Untitled Goose Game (2019)
Image Credit: Panic Inc.
What it's about
In this impish puzzle RPG, you play as a goose who wreaks havoc on a quiet English village. Your only goal is to ruin everyone’s day. You steal their tools right out from under them as they’re working, trick them into destroying their most prized possessions, and cause other general mayhem.
The first few levels are just good fun — if you can think like a bully goose, you’ll naturally gravitate towards the right tasks you need to complete to move on to terrorizing the next neighbor. However, each level gets progressively more difficult until you find yourself strategizing over hijinks that would have been impossible for the standard avian.
I love this game for longer local flights. If you breeze through the standard tasks too quickly, you can spend several extra hours on the new challenges that unlock at the end of the game.
Time it takes to complete
- Median Play Time: 3h 20m
- Standard Playstyle: Around 3 ~ 4 hours
- Completionist Playstyle: Around 5 ~ 6 hours
Where to get it
7. Dordogne (2023)
Image Credit: Focus Entertainment
What it's about
Dordogne follows Mimi, a woman trying to process the recent death of her grandmother. Mimi returns to her grandmother’s home in Dordogne, France and tries to reclaim memories of her that have been lost to time. Mimi investigates different objects and locations, then relives the memories that they evoke.
The cool thing about Dordogne is that everything is hand-painted in watercolors. In fact, most visuals you see were first drafts and barely anything was repainted. This lends itself to the organic feel of the game. Meanwhile, all the thin, tapered washes of color evoke the haze of an old, distant memory. As you follow Mimi on her nostalgic journey through her grandmother’s home town, you’ll lose yourself in the stunning art style and interwoven storylines.
Time it takes to complete
- Median Play Time: 3 hours, 30 minutes
- Standard Playstyle: Around 3.5 hours
- Completionist Playstyle: Around 3.5 hours
Where to get it
8. Unpacking (2021)
Image Credit: Humble Bundle
What it's about
Meditative and sentimental, Unpacking is a great game to help you calm down if you have travel anxiety. Gameplay is simple: you unpack boxes and organize a new living space after each move in a young woman’s life. Though Unpacking is pretty casual for a puzzle game, it can be a bit of a challenge trying to determine where each thing should go. There’s never quite enough storage space, so you need to be creative.
You start with the main character’s first move as a child and continue with her through college, until she becomes a homeowner with a child of her own. The story of her life is implied by the things you unpack in each new space. It’s the perfect game for those who like reading between the lines.
Time it takes to complete
- Median Play Time: 4 hours
- Standard Playstyle: Around 3.5 ~ 4 hours
- Completionist Playstyle: Around 4 hours
Where to get it
9. The Artful Escape (2021)
Image Credit: Annapurna Interactive
What it's about
Tired of living in the shadow of his famous uncle, Frances Vendetti runs away the night before he’s expected to play a set of his uncle’s folk hits for a memorial concert. Although Frances takes after his uncle in musical ability, he’s more interested in hard rock than the softer folk that everyone expects him to play. So, when aliens appear to him and request his help opening at an intergalactic concert, he happily flees his obligations in order to help them.
This point-and-click RPG has been described as an extended character creator, since the entire journey centers around Frances reinventing his stage persona, starting with creating a new stage name and peaking with a makeover scene. It’s a great game to binge for the visuals alone — but make sure you bring your headphones so that you can enjoy the killer soundtrack and musical puzzles.
Time it takes to complete
- Median Play Time: 4 hours, 20 minutes
- Standard Playstyle: Around 4 hours
- Completionist Playstyle: Around 4.5 hours
Where to get it
10. Roundguard (2020)
Image Credit: The Quantum Astrophysicists Guild
What it's about
Peggle, but make it a dungeon crawler RPG. Roundguard features gameplay similar to the classic arcade pachinko game, but instead of launching a ball, you launch a bouncy little character. You can choose from several characters, each of whom has their own RPG class and special abilities.
In between levels, there’s a cast of zany characters you’ll meet as you defend Castle Springbottom. However, the arcade-y feel of Roundguard makes it generally low stakes and easy to play with intermissions if you need to take a break.
Time it takes to complete
- Median Play Time: 4 hours, 21 minutes
- Standard Playstyle: Around 4 ~ 5 hours
- Completionist Playstyle: 12+ hours
Where to get it
11. Genesis Noir (2021)
Image Credit: Fellow Traveller
What it's about
Genesis Noir reimagines the Big Bang as a noir film. Detective “No Man” reflects on the murder of his lover, the jazz singer “Miss Mass”. He recalls dashing into the room just as antagonist “Golden Boy” shoots her. He replays the moment over and over in his head, trying to find a way to save her.
In Genesis Noir, each of the characters represents a force from the birth of the universe. Miss Mass represents the mass of the universe, No Man represents time, and Golden Boy represents energy. No Man plays with time, attempting to turn back the clock and prevent the Big Bang (the gunshot that kills Miss Mass) and the inevitable expansion of the universe (her death). Gameplay consists of musical puzzles — so you’ll want to make sure you bring headphones!
Time it takes to complete
- Median Play Time: 4 hours, 58 minutes
- Standard Playstyle: Around 4.5 ~ 5 hours
- Completionist Playstyle: Around 5 hours
Where to get it
12. The Spectrum Retreat (2018)
Image Credit: Ripstone Games
What it's about
Alex wakes up at a resort hotel run by AI robots, with no recollection of how he got there. The resort is completely empty, and the idle robots stand around, observing him. You play as Alex as he investigates the hotel. You discover that many details are just a little bit off, suggesting that the hotel is not quite what meets the eye.
By investigating what’s missing and what’s askew, you try to determine how you got there and how you can escape. Your only lifeline is Cooper, an ally on the other end of the rotary phones peppered around the hotel. Your id doesn't have the authorization to use the elevator or leave the hotel, so you have to find alternate ways of getting around. To gain access to each subsequent floor on your way to the rooftop, you have to complete a round of logical puzzles. It’s a great game to keep your mind sharp during long hours spent traveling.
Time it takes to complete
- Median Play Time: 5 hours
- Standard Playstyle: Around 5 hours
- Completionist Playstyle: Around 5 ~ 6 hours
Where to get it
13. Afterparty (2022)
Image Credit: Night School Studio
What it's about
If you have a bit of a longer flight, Afterparty is a great way to pass the time. You play as Milo and Lola, two college friends who wake up in Hell, with no recollection of how they died. They learn that Satan is willing to release anyone from Hell who can drink him under the table. He’s a big party guy. Bent on getting a second chance at life, Milo and Lola try to get an audience with Satan.
The studio that created Afterparty is big on leaving out cutscenes so as not to break the immersion of the game. As a result the game flows beautifully, with compelling dialogue options and mini games throughout the story. And since there are different endings depending on the choices you make, you might feel incentivized to pick it up a second time.
Time it takes to complete
- Median Play Time: 6 hours
- Standard Playstyle: Around 5.5 hours
- Completionist Playstyle: 10+ hours
Where to get it
Have a great trip
I hope this list helped you find the right game for your flight. If you’re traveling really far, consider some of the longer titles from the recommended articles below. Safe travels!
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