That's my pick. It's worth a couple of bucks for the nostalgia trip, but there isn't much meat on it.

Dear Esther was a disappointing 75 minutes or so, but also disappointing that it wasn't actually a game but rather a linear walking art and poetry exhibition. Boring.

Shortest games I've played recently are To the Moon and Tale of two Brohters. Both took me about 5 hours or so to complete. Although I almost did not finish a Tale of two brothers as I did not like the direction they went with it, but I'm in the minority on that one :)

Kane and Lynch 2: 3 hours

Star Fox 3DS was short (the story mode) if I remember correctly. 2-3 hours I think.

I find it interesting that some of the games in this thread are some of my favorite games from last few years (Dear Esther, Gone Home, Brothers: A Tale of Two Brothers).

I'd add to the list of very short, but very good games Limbo and Journey.

A sequel is in the making which will be a lot bigger.

Apart from the games already mentioned here, I can recommend Thirty Flights of Loving. It's a story about a heist and can be finished in under 30 minutes. The art style and the fact that the story isn't told chronologically were especially interesting, I thought. You can get it for 5$ either DRM-free from the dev's website or on Steam.

http://blendogames.com/thirtyflightsofloving/

That April 1 Starcraft parody from Blizzard. I especially liked credits, people like "pencil holder assistant" and stuff.

Not sure if You Have To Burn The Rope counts. :-) But Real Horror Stories was also very short (thank goodness, it was horrible).

Would have made an inappropriate joke about a certain type of 'pool', but that would neither be true nor would it necessarily meet the OP's requirements.

As far as the OP's requirements I'd have to say Hydrophobia: Prophecy. Clocked in at somewhere just over an hour (once configuration issues were accounted for). It was more like the intro of a game than an actual game. Enjoyed it though and the fluid mechanics were neat.

Uhm, the first time that i felt that way was with Red Faction 2, i can't really remember how long it took to finish the game but i passed it in one afternoon (2~3 hours). This week i have been playing FarSky and i finished the story mode in 3 hours (and i could have finish it earlier), so there's that... Uhm... I think that DLC Quest also takes like 30 minutes to finish it...

Just getting to an ending? Any ending (not necessarily good bad, whatever)?

IIRC, Metal Saga has an alternate ending with credits if you say "no" when you're asked if you want to go on an adventure in the middle of the opening cutscenes

This was the first game that came to mind for me too. I think it took me 25 minutes to get through the story on first runthrough.

I'm also an advocate for shorter games that raise the bar of quality at the expense of quantity. Especially in this day and age of cheap prices and 1000's of titles in people's game catalogs, I'd much rather spend 30-60 minutes playing something amazing and exquisitely crafted with perfect pacing than have it dragged out over 10 hours and diluted and strung out just because people will complain that it is "too short" otherwise.

I liked the overall time and experience of 4PM, but it definitely shows that it is a student experiment and not fully fleshed out. However, I think that many narrative-based games these days could do with a lot more tightening up of the pacing of their exposition and gameplay. I don't think every game needs to be short, and many genres do well to be in the 100+ hour territory. I just get tired of seeing reviewers docking points for a game being a great experience but "too short" because of some arbitrary amount of time they think they are owed -- games should last as long as they need to make the right experience.

There's also the issue of people equivocating length of game / addictiveness with content. Some games are short, and lack content. Some games are long, and lack content. Some games are long, and packed full of content. Some games are short, yet still packed full of content. These are the kinds of games I want to see more of.

Depression Quest was 5 minutes. Gone Home about 2 hours being very complete, listening to all the music and developer's commentary. Not recalling off the top of my head any games too much shorter than that besides the arcade-ish game Super Hexagon where lasting 20 seconds seems good.