8 Video Games That Did More With Less
These bite-sized games won't ever be forgotten.
In the modern gaming era, it sure feels like most video games are all about more, more, more - developers are forever chasing more mind-bogglingly photorealistic graphics and players want more and more content to justify their spend, resulting in dev times that are often totally nonviable from a commercial perspective.
And so, there's something to be said for the merits of games which make an impact while remaining stridently minimalist, with their short length, simple gameplay, clean art style, and so on.
While it's incredibly hard for even good games to stand out in the sea of quality indies releasing every month, these games absolutely did by virtue of offering so, so much in such a small package.
These games didn't need hundreds of team members nor a decade to cook in the kitchen - they thrived off their simplicity, by finding a compellingly straight-forward gameplay loop or impactful emotional beat and basically hanging the entire experience off it.
It's extremely tricky to pull off, but when it works it really works, and typically proves far more gratifying than yet another also-ran AAA open world behemoth...
8. Thomas Was Alone
Thomas Was Alone is one of the most strikingly memorable puzzle-platformers of the last 15 years, no matter that all the central "characters" are nothing more than coloured rectangles of various sizes.
Despite the deceptively simple gameplay consisting of little more than transporting the various shapes to their respective end-points on each level, the masterful narration from Danny Wallace imbues the journey with an unexpected amount of feeling.
Wallace's words alone will make you feel a whole hell of a lot for these otherwise unremarkable entities, which have no expressive hallmarks whatsoever like faces or even eyes.
But players are encouraged to fill the empty spaces with their own imagination, which in conjunction with the deeply charming narration, make this a game which is boiled down to just the few "basic" elements it needs to make an impact with players.
Though Thomas Was Alone remains fondly regarded today, if you haven't played it you owe it to yourself to change that, like, right now.