Tiny adventures worth an evening

Not everything has to be a hundred-hour epic. Some of my favorite mobile experiences this year were games I finished in a single evening and thought about for a week.

Lantern Hollow is the one I keep pressing on friends. It's a few hours of hand-drawn exploration, gentle light puzzles, and a story told almost entirely through the world around you. Nothing overstays its welcome.

The beauty of a short adventure is that it can be perfectly paced. There's no need to pad out the runtime with busywork, so every scene can carry weight. When a game knows exactly how long it wants to be, you feel it.

If you've got one quiet evening and want something that ends cleanly, these are the games I reach for. Sometimes the best thing a game can do is respect that you have a life to get back to.