Outerwilds is a beautiful game and quite short, try to go in as blind as possible. It’s space archaeology.
Gris is an art game that’s about 3hrs long. Very pretty, very zen.
Into the breach, is a puzzle game (chess vibes) where you are time travellers saving the world from insect aliens. has a long time to beat, but play sessions are fairly short. I think it’s a great game for when you are taking short breaks between something else. it might be a tad too on the roguelike side for you, but it’s primarily about solving puzzles.
Carrion is a puzzle-horror game that took me about 5hrs to beat, it’s extremely satisfying
Nauticrawl is a very esoteric game, you pilot a sub at the bottom of the ocean and have to learn from scratch how to pilot it. If you like doing stuff with no instructions you’ll enjoy it.
Not for broadcast is a shortish (~20hrs) game where you control a live action broadcast and get points for how well you do cuts… or censor people
Superliminal is a 3hr puzzle game that plays with size and perspective.
I just finished the game (40hrs) I would greatly recommend it.
It has some rough edges, it could benefit from a few QOL changes, and there’s also some weirdly useless mechanics (it rained almost every single day after unlocking the farm, making the watering can a bit of a joke, the sea people currency is far too easy to get) and the sleep gun is far too powerful compared to anything else.
That said it was a very enjoyable romp, I really liked all the pretty animations for upgrading stuff and the game had a lot of delightful one off mechanics which were fun.
Pay 10bucks every 4ish months to get the hero immediately
grind 45 levels of the free battlepass (note that the hero is locked in competitive for the first 3 weeks). Personally this takes me about 10hrs.
wait until the season ends and do some rather trivial challenges (essentially play a tutorial for the character and play like 20 games)
Personally I see it as a subscription based game, and 3bucks/mo is pretty fair imo. like all competitive MP games, it doesn’t really make much sense to play it unless you can play a fair amount of it.