You know me by now; I enjoy a good 100+ hour RPG that I can sink my teeth into over a long period of time, but I’m often reminded quite how much a short, simple, straightforward game can hit the spot on occasion.

There’s a lot of different places you can get this sort of experience, but I’ve been finding it particularly pleasant on the PlayStation 4 recently — thanks in part to freebies delivered through PlayStation Plus, and partly simply due to the selection of excellent, low-cost indie titles available on the platform.

Triple-A junkies are quick to whinge about the number of indie titles on PS4, particularly when they show up as PlayStation Plus freebies — they’re seen as “less valuable” somehow — but, in actual fact, the PS4 is a good home to them. Not only is the Dual Shock 4 eminently suitable for fast-paced arcade games — which a lot of these titles, which tend to channel retro sensibilities somewhat, err on the side of — but social features like the screenshot sharing, online leaderboards and live video broadcasting make otherwise solo experiences into much more compelling prospects that can be shared with others.

Most recently, I’ve been particularly enjoying a couple of games, and in many ways they are polar opposites of one another.

The first is a title called Woah Dave, an Atari 2600-style platformer from the people who created the Bit Trip series a while back. Woah Dave is a deceptively simple but enormously addictive take on the Mario Bros/Bubble Bobble formula in that all you have to do is survive for as long as possible while fending off never-ending waves of enemies. You can jump, you can pick up things, you can throw them. That’s it. It gets more frantic as you progress, and the only reason to play is to try and get a high score. And that is reason enough.

Woah Dave is testament to the fact that strong gameplay will always be compelling and enjoyable, regardless of technical proficiency. That said, while the game looks like a mess of gigantic pixels in about 8 colours, it runs at a silky smooth framerate, with extremely responsive controls and a very enjoyable overall “feel” to the whole experience. It’s dumb and it’s silly and it’s shallow, but it’s a lot of fun.

The other game I’ve been playing a bit recently is a shoot ’em up called Astebreed. I was a big fan of this when it originally released on PC, so I decided to “double dip” on the PlayStation 4 version, and haven’t been disappointed.

Astebreed is a beautiful-looking, 1080p, 60 frames per second cinematic shoot ’em up in which you pilot a giant mecha with some unconventional weapons systems as you attempt to fend off the unwanted advances of alien race the Filune. Along the way you learn more about their human experimentation and the true fate of your adoptive father and his two daughters, who have been made into living parts of a Filune reality alteration system that has the potential to be used as a deadly weapon.

The plot is pure anime — and, frankly, a little difficult to follow, given that a lot of it unfolds while the action is coming thick and fast on screen, leaving little time to read subtitles — but it’s snappy, pacy, dramatic and even a little emotional. Unlockable documents that you can read after clearing the game once show that the game world, setting and backstory have been very comprehensively fleshed out, too, and the whole experience is wonderfully polished until it shines.

I’m still rubbish at it, though.