Mothergunship
- Estimated Time To Beat: 3.5~ Hours
- Available To Purchase On: Steam
Enough with the puzzle games! Let’s get back into the action. Mothergunship is a randomly-generated FPS, where you’ll enter ships full of robotic bad guys and blast them with increasingly elaborate guns you construct yourself. The premise is all about unlocking more and more gun parts, until you’re an absurd machine of absolute destruction. Great little game if you’re feeling bloodthirsty.
Gunpoint
- Estimated Time To Beat: 1.5~ Hours
- Available To Purchase On: Steam
An extremely clever action-puzzle game where you can instantly hack structures to weave through, defeating bad guys and unraveling a conspiracy that doesn’t really seem to matter. It’s all about the puzzling action gameplay, where you infiltrate buildings and (sometimes) beat up bad guys by connecting different functions together in a building — it’s hard to explain, so just watch the trailer for an idea.
The Swapper
- Estimated Time To Beat: 5~ Hours
- Available To Purchase On: Steam
Indie puzzlers tend to be short and sweet, and The Swapper is one of the sweetest. With your special Swapper Gun, you can make clones of yourself to solve puzzles — all while wantonly killing off your copies. The graphics of the game are unlike anything else on Steam, completely built by hand and digitized. It gives the game a claymation quality that’s both eerie and affectingly DIY.
Thunder Wolves
- Estimated Time To Beat: 3.5~ Hours
- Available To Purchase On: Steam
Sick of puzzles? Here’s the opposite of all that. As an elite member of the Thunder Wolves team, you’ll pilot an arsenal of unlockable helicopters and blast everything in sight. This game is all about blisteringly fast action and complete chaos — if you’re a fan of arcade helicopter action games, Thunder Wolves is the best modern spin on that short-lived retro PC formula.
And those are 20 of my favorite short games from the last 20 years. There are countless games we couldn’t list here, but I tried my best to share a bunch of different types of games. Let us know what we’re missing!
