Lead review
A run lasts fourteen minutes. The game saves between rooms, tells you how long the next room will take, and never once suggests you continue. It is the only game in this file we have never regretted starting at midnight.
Every game here is measured for the hour when you should already be asleep. The first figure is how long a real session actually lasts. The second is how hard the game makes it to stop.
Ordered by honest session length — the interval a session actually takes rather than the one the game implies, measured across at least twenty real evenings.
Fourteen-minute runs, a save between every room, and a duration estimate before each one. The design assumes you have somewhere else to be, which is an assumption almost no other game in this file makes.
Discrete puzzles, instant saves, and no chained rewards. We stopped mid-collection twice and lost nothing either time, which sounds trivial and is the entire reason this scores where it does.
Slow, quiet and deliberately unexciting, with an audio mix that works at very low volume and no music sting anywhere. The closest thing in this file to a game designed as a wind-down.
A fine deduction card game with one hostile detail: the run ends only at the case, and a case is between thirty and ninety minutes. Quitting mid-case loses the whole board.
Nothing chases you, nothing scores you, and the route can be abandoned at any lay-by with your progress intact. A driving game that understood exactly what a tired person wants.
Forty-wave maps with no mid-map save, an escalating streak bonus and a between-wave timer that does not pause. A good game that treats leaving as a mistake, and the worst offender in the file.
Three running investigations across the whole file, updated when a new measurement changes the picture rather than on any schedule.
Log
Frequent saving does not produce a clean stop on its own. What matters is whether the game ends a unit of progress at a place a person would naturally leave.
Log
Across twelve games we recorded intended session length against actual. The overrun correlates almost perfectly with one thing: whether a reward is visible before the current unit ends.
Note
Brightness sliders calibrated for daylight, no low-light preset, and interface text below thirteen pixels. A short note on what makes a game legible at two in the morning.
