No multiple endings, but you might enjoy The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog. It's an official Sega product and free on Steam. Pretty entertaining, good art and can be finished in a couple hours. It's a simplified Ace Attorney style game, using inventory items and clues to interrogate the characters and solve the mystery.
Sounds cool; I did play the Ace Attorney series a while back, that's totally in the genre I'm thinking about!
Would you count disco elysium as a visual novel?
I just got Citizen Sleeper, and I'm really enjoying it. It's a little more interaction than you're describing, life-sim stuff, but it never feels like it's getting in the way. The art is top notch and the writing is enthralling. It's one you want to keep playing just to get to know the characters.
Citizen Sleeper is a fantastic game. I was surprised they announced a sequel so soon. Looking forward to trying out the tabletop rpg too since the video game was so strongly inspired by indie tabletop rpgs like Blades in the Dark
Visual novels definitely qualify. They are at the very least adventure-adjacent.
I have to recommend Doki Doki Literature Club, although I'm sure most of you have already have the game spoiled for you (it was a pretty big thing a while ago). If you've somehow managed to avoid hearing about it, my advice is to go play it (it's free) and not look up anything about it! This is one that definitely needs a blind playthrough.
Those are my favorite ones.
Raging Loop
Yu-No
AI: The Somnium Files
Zero Escape trilogy
Danganronpa trilogy
Most don't really have multiple endings, but some of those titles have a story branching mechanic that might be of you interest.
Edit: Here's a visual novel database if you are interested. This is the same site with the multiple endings tag applied.
Sounds like a great resource! I'll see how good Lemmy is about saving posts (-:
I'm totally blanking on if they have multiple endings but I love Digital: A Love Story and If Found. I also liked We Know The Devil and A Summer's End - Hong Kong 1986, which do have multiple endings, but are a little more adult. All are fairly short. Ladykiller in a Bind is more comedic since you're looking for something along those lines and each playthrough is fairly short although that has more player input than the other games I mentioned.
The Coles are experimenting with making visual novels-- see Summer Daze: Tilly's Tale. Mostly because it's well suited to their artist's art style and (in theory) quicker and simpler to produce. Long Live The Queen, Dream Daddy, and Loren Amazon Princess were inspirations.
Not sure how much crossover the VN community has with adventure games in general.
A community for fans, devs, and general aficionados of the adventure game genre. This includes IF/parser games, point-and-click games, puzzle games, walking simulators, and whatever else you want to call these. To us, they're simply adventure games.