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I enjoy single-player video games, but I have limited time for them. I tend to get absorbed by games with a long completion time, bingeing them and neglecting my responsibilities. At the same time, I find roguelikes and roguelites addictive. When I get upgrades after a run, I am very tempted to start a new run and do better. Even if there are no upgrades, if the game uses procedural generation, the novelty of a new run is often too good to resist.

I am looking for a genre of games with permadeath (so a run would last for a couple of hours max), no persistent upgrades, and no procedural generation. What is this genre called?

My Research

A candidate I found is “arcade” games. Many old-school arcade games like Contra and Castlevania had a short, repetitive game loop. However, I haven’t had much success browsing through Steam’s “arcade” category. The selection of games is filled with fighting games, multiplayer games, and roguelikes.

I also looked at the “retro” tag. But it seems to encompass a variety of games with a particular aesthetic (pixel or low-poly art).

Finally, through a YouTube video, I discovered a category of games that people refer to as “session games” or “weekday games”. While the name sounds promising, it is not the genre I’m looking for since the games include bulky AAA games with lots of content. While some people do consume these games in short sessions, completing a small part of the story each time, I manage my gaming time most successfully when the next run would involve starting from the beginning and repeating all the levels I just played.

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    @Grammer, The question is on-topic. It falls under the "terminology" umbrella and none of the bullet points for "prohibited" questions in the help center apply here. Also, if you search for "genre", you will find many highly upvoted questions asking for the names of video game genres. Commented Aug 28, 2025 at 21:27
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    So something between roguelike and metroidvania, I don't know if there's a name for that Commented Aug 28, 2025 at 22:46
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    @Malady Pinball is suitable lol. But OP is looking for a genre, not a list of games Commented Aug 29, 2025 at 0:29
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    @Joachim Not necessarily. These games offer quick play sessions, so they usually do not have a save/load feature. However, the feature might still exist, especially in the form of quick-saving. Commented Aug 29, 2025 at 11:31
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    Kinda different, but rhythm games might also hit some of the notes you're looking for. In that case, you get the option of playing the same levels (songs) over again, or doing something different, and the time you spend is pretty modular, since most songs in most games are 2-5 minutes. Commented Sep 2, 2025 at 14:51

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"Arcade" is probably as good as it's going to get. Original arcade cabinets couldn't do persistent saves or upgrades by design (passwords being an exception, but even then, there's only so much data that can be saved in a user-entered text string). This doesn't exclude procedural generation though.

If that term isn't giving useful results, it's likely just due to the limits of user-defined tagging. Additionally, there's nothing stopping someone from taking an arcade-like game and adding persistent upgrades and calling it "arcade".

I would consider "Arcade" to be a sub-genre or "feature" rather than a full genre. Some genres will lend themselves better to an arcade. I wouldn't expect to see a story-driven arcade RPG, for example. Offhand the best genres would likely be platformers and Shmups/STG.

You could also try scoring focused games or score attack games. This doesn't automatically meet any of your criteria, but typically score attack focuses on repeating a stage over and over to obtain a better score without the stage itself differing, so this should at least help filter out procedural generation. Again, Shmups would be a good candidate for this.

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After researching further, I am posting an answer to my question. This is a partial answer, as I couldn’t find a definitive name for this genre.

I had the most success finding games of this type by searching for “short games”. For example, the “short” tag on Steam returns various contemporary games that can be completed quickly, usually within a few hours. Many of those satisfy my criteria.

While this is not a video game genre, the “Gamers with only little time” Steam curator proved useful for discovering games of this type. The collection includes more than 400 titles and an estimate of the completion time for each.

The Epic Games Store has special tags for games called “users say”. One of the possible values is “Great for Quick Sessions”. Games with this tag often satisfy what I’m looking for. While the store does not currently allow searching based on this tag, this feature exists on the community-driven database “egdata.app”. I had lots of success with this, especially when also filtering by the “platformer”, “action”, and “indie” genres.

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