The fastest PS4 Trophies: Earn 14 Platinums in 12 hours

We all like to have a virtual award cabinet full of shiny things, and knowing about the fastest PS4 Trophies can help you to stock yours up in no time. Easy Platinum Trophies are great, but many of those awards actually take a serious amount of work to collect, and I should know as my Plat count has now reached triple figures. There were the endless weeks of increasing my online rank using Red Dead Redemption's quadruple XP events, so many matches in Rocket League that I lost count along the way, and let's not even dwell on the eight individual times I had to grind through Metal Gear Solid 4's epic storyline.

However, you don't pass a century of Platinums without cutting a few corners along the way, and some of the games I've completed are exceptionally short and far from challenging. No, they aren't the best PS4 games, but if you want to boost your own stats with some of the fastest PS4 Trophies, here are 14 Platinum awards you can unlock in just 12 hours.

36 Fragments of Midnight

Trophies: 12, Time to Platinum: 30 minutes, Price: $2.99/£2.49, Walkthrough

There are many questions you'll ask yourself while playing 36 Fragments of Midnight – who are those hairy creatures you're helping? Why is there a timed challenge when each level is randomly generated? Is that really the entire game? Mercifully you don't have long to ponder these thoughts, as you can blitz through this basic platformer in around half an hour. You play as Midnight, a small white square who must collect, you guessed it, 36 fragments at the behest of some slightly sinister looking furballs. Most of the Trophies involve dying, so you'll need to meet your demise at least once on each of the spikes, saws, and laser traps punctuating the levels. You'll also need to expire while carrying 1, 35, and 36 fragments in your possession, which is a somewhat frustrating requirement. The only Trophy that offers much of a challenge is for collecting all 36 fragments and returning to the start in under six minutes, though once you've got the hang of the double jumps it shouldn't be too problematic. If you're having difficulty, the levels are randomly generated so keep trying until a simpler layout is produced.

Active Neurons

Trophies: 19, Time to Platinum: 30 minutes, Price: $4.99/£3.99, Walkthrough

This is a simple-looking puzzle game, in which you have to guide your square of white light to the exit of various mazes. However, your movement is that of a sliding puzzle, meaning when you press a direction you keep moving that way until you hit something, and each set of levels introduces new mechanics and obstacles to gradually ramp up the complexity. There are eight sets of 10 levels you need to complete in total, and at any point you can hit Triangle to see the solution to your current problem, so between that and a walkthrough you can easily blitz through this in half an hour.

Burly Men At Sea

Trophies: 25, Time to Platinum: 2 hours, Price: $9.99/£7.99, Walkthrough

With its striking visual style, beautiful a cappella soundtrack, and cheeky sense of humour, there's much to love about Burly Men At Sea. Acting as the storyteller, you need to guide your three bearded, husky fisherman through a series of encounters spanning Scandinavian folklore, in what is essentially a Choose Your Own Adventure-esque branching narrative which ends where it begins to run on a constant looping journey. After exploring your home village and setting sail, you'll soon find your ship being swallowed by a whale in classic folklore style. Here you have three choices – strap on some barrels and jump in the sea, don't strap on some barrels and jump in the sea, or just hang out in the whale's belly with the ghostly girls you meet there. Each decision leads to two more binary choices, resulting in a total of 12 different outcomes, and if you're economical then you can collect them all in a couple of hours.

Don't Knock Twice

Trophies: 29, Time to Platinum: 1 hour, Price: $19.99/£15.99, Walkthrough

Loosely based on the film of the same name, Don't Knock Twice is a first-person horror adventure in which you try to protect your daughter from a demonic witch who has taken over your house and is trying to steal her away. Although the game is compatible with PlayStation VR, you can just play it 'normally' which I'd recommend if you're following a walkthrough and don't want an old crone occasionally screaming in your face. There are a number of collectibles to look out for including diary pages, family photos, plus various other bits and bobs, and you'll need to find all of them on a single playthrough for one of the Trophies. There's also a set of Russian dolls to destroy, as well as a couple of items that must be set on fire. Finally, you need to complete both endings to the game – with some save manipulation you can do one after the other, but even if you do two complete playthroughs it should only take around an hour.

Football Game

Trophies: 16, Time to Platinum: 30 minutes, Price: $4.99/£3.99, Walkthrough

This dark and moody point-and-click adventure follows Tommy, the hero of the high school football team, as he tries to find his sweetheart on the night of the big game. However, it soon becomes clear that something isn't quite right, and everything you think you know starts to unravel as you explore your home and the football ground to try and piece together what's actually going on. The story itself isn't particularly long, and with the aid of a walkthrough you can reach the finale with minimal backtracking. If you're in Europe you get the additional bonus of the PS Vita version bundled with it, for an extra Platinum if you have the handheld, though the two versions are sold separately in the US.

Her Majesty's SPIFFING: The Empire Staggers Back

Trophies: 26, Time to Platinum: 1 hour, Price: $18.49/£14.99, Walkthrough

If you like British stereotypes and lots of jokes about Brexit, then this is the point-and-click adventure for you. After withdrawing from the European Union, the Queen takes over the country and establishes SPIFFING (Special Planetary Investigative Force For Inhabiting New Galaxies), launching the quintessentially middle class Captain Frank Lee English and Welsh Sub-lieutenant Aled Jones into space onboard a refitted Big Ben to establish a galactic British Empire. Yes, really. To grab all the Trophies in one playthrough you'll need some manual saving, to complete certain challenges in more than one way – for example, there's a hatch that Captain English is too portly to fit through, and you need to alternately lubricate it with washing up liquid to squeeze through, and hop on the treadmill to shed a few pounds. Once you've landed on a planet and defeated the French colonists already there by throwing a frog and cheese at them (again, really), you can raise the Union Jack and celebrate a fast Plat.

JigSaw Abundance

Trophies: 21, Time to Platinum: 30 minutes, Price: $4.99/£3.99, Walkthrough

Look, we all know how jigsaws work, right? Move the pieces around until they fit into place and complete the final image, it's simple. Admittedly the presentation in JigSaw Abundance makes this slightly fiddly, as the overlapping pieces can be hard to differentiate and identify corners/edges, but it really doesn't take much swapping around to identify the parts you're looking for. There are ten different themes to choose from including CyberPunk, Food, and Travel, and you need to complete 20 unique puzzles from them in total – stick to the smallest 4x4 size and you'll rack them up in no time. If this sort of puzzle is your thing, then also check out Jigsaw Zen and Puzzle Showdown 4K for more of the same.

The Little Acre

Trophies: 28, Time to Platinum: 1 hour, Price: $12.99/£9.99, Walkthrough

The Little Acre is well crafted point-and-click adventure, presented with fully hand-drawn animation and a beautiful soundtrack, and produced by Charles Cecil of Broken Sword fame. Set in Ireland in the '50s, the story revolves around Aiden, who must look after his daughter Lily while investigating the vanishing of his inventor father. This leads to them being teleported to a strange world, where they have to solve the mystery disappearance and find their way back home. Unlike most of the other games on this list, this one actively encourages you to speedrun as there's a Trophy for finishing it in under an hour. Pausing the game stops the clock, making it easy to follow a walkthrough, and you'll need one as there are a number of obscure actions to complete along the way. There are also some challenges you need to get right first time, so be ready to use manual saves so you can have another go if you mess them up. Beat the story without using any hints, then ask for a solution on a new playthrough and you'll be wrapped up in an hour.

Mr. Massagy

Trophies: 34, Time to Platinum: 30 minutes, Price: $3.99/£3.99, Walkthrough

Have you ever wanted to go on a date with a werewolf? How about a cow? A jar of mayo? Well now you can, as you guide the Johnny (the titular Mr. Massagy) through a dating app to encounter a whole host of quirky characters. Pick the right conversation options to suitably impress your paramore, and your pad will vibrate rhythmically so you can reward yourself with a 'massagy' from them. I am assured that this game is a parody. Although the main priority is getting a three-star rating and a massagy from each date, you also need to rack up five two-star dates and fail 20 of them. In addition, there are a couple of date-specific challenges, such as being eaten by the werewolf and tapping the jar of mayo 10 times – more on that coming up next. You could spend the time on trial-and-error to find the best responses for your prospective partners, but with a walkthrough you can breeze through the whole thing in a mere 30 minutes.

My Name is Mayo

Trophies: 51, Time to Platinum: 1 hour, Price: $0.99/£0.99, Walkthrough

To play My Name is Mayo, the previous game from the studio who made Mr. Massagy, you use a disembodied finger to tap a jar of mayo. That's it. Well, sort of – as you rack up the taps you unlock various costumes to dress your jar of mayo in, which is definitely not unusual behaviour. Pop on an outfit and continue tapping to receive more of them, which gradually tell one of four stories as you keep poking away. As well as revealing these tales, you are also presented with various facts when you hit certain tapping milestones, though these get spaced further and further apart as your count builds up. You can speed up your progress by tapping both the DualShock 4 touchpad and the X button simultaneously, and by doing this it should take an hour or less to reach the RSI-inducing 10,000 total taps required for the final reward.

Nubla / The World of Nubla

Trophies: 20 x2, Time to Platinum: 1 hour x2, Price: $26.48/£19.98, Walkthrough

Created in conjunction with the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, Nubla is an educational project that turns works of art into puzzles as part of a 2D platform adventure. Planned as the first in a series, Nubla was originally released in 2015, then re-released as The World of Nubla in 2016, which is essentially the same game with a demo of the next chapter bolted on - which still hasn't been released as of 2018. This means you can follow the same route for both games, and pick up two Platinum Trophies in the process. To get started, make sure you select the green-haired character, as their teleporting ability is needed to grab all of the collectibles. The artwork puzzles are all pretty basic so shouldn't cause any problems, and although there are only ten collectible items in total to find they're invisible until you walk over them, so unless you want to search everywhere it's best to follow a walkthrough. Armed with that information, you should be able to whizz through both games in a couple of hours.

Suicide Guy

Trophies: 13, Time to Platinum: 1 hour, Price: $7.99/£6.49, Walkthrough

Video games have conditioned us to prioritise keeping playable characters alive, but Suicide Guy flips this core concept on its head. The opening sees our chubby hero falling asleep while drinking in front of the television, at which point his bottle of beer starts falling from his hand. Trapped in his dreams, he needs to wake up and rescue his plummeting alcohol, but can only escape his slumber by killing himself, over and over again. For some reason. There are 24 levels in which you need to solve puzzles to meet your demise, many of which are humorous pastiches of other games and movies – including Indiana Jones, Super Mario Bros, Jurassic Park, and Portal. The less than perfect controls make some of the platforming and action puzzles tricker than they should be, but with a guide to get through them and find the collectible statues along the way, it won't take more than an hour to wake up and save your beverage.

Tic-Tac-Letters by POWGI

Trophies: 31, Time to Platinum: 30 minutes, Price: $7.99/£6.49, Walkthrough

Lightwood Games have published a huge number of puzzle offerings ranging from Picross to word games, but Tic-Tac-Letters by POWGI is probably the one that you can complete the fastest. This logic puzzle follows the standard rules of Tic-Tac-Toe, or noughts and crosses if you prefer, where you have to completely fill in each grid without placing more than two of the same letter consecutively in a row or column. Although there are 120 different puzzles in total, you only have to clear 22 specific levels for the required Trophies – which will take a couple of hours if you identify them with the walkthrough and solve independently, or 30 minutes if you rattle through them with the solutions.

So there you have it, 14 Platinums in 12  hours! Looking for more PlayStation silverware? Then check out the funniest Trophies on PS4. And if you need more storage for your games, here are the best PS4 external hard drives.