Why the smallest indie games keep winning me over

I set myself a stupid task last month: download every new indie game that crossed my feed and give each one twenty minutes. I got through about forty. Most I deleted before the timer ran out.

The pattern was obvious by the end. The games I kept were tiny. Tidefold Lanterns, Static Orchard, a couple of others that knew exactly what they were and didn't pad it out. The bloated ones, even pretty ones, wore me down.

There's a fear in mobile design that a short game is a bad deal, so everything gets stretched with grind and timers. But I'd rather pay for four hours I loved than crawl through forty I tolerated.

My advice if you're drowning in choices: pick the one with the honest description. The developer who says 'a short quiet puzzle' usually made a short quiet puzzle worth your time. The one promising everything rarely delivers any of it.

Small isn't a compromise. Half the time it's the whole reason the thing works.