^^ You're confusing the classics from modern-day adventure games.
Jungle Hunt & Donkey Kong only had so-many stages... but you didn't "win" the game, you made it onto the next round of stages, of which then got progressively harder & faster... harder & faster. Eventually near-impossible!
Well, the OP didn't specify whether the games could be from any era or just modern games only. However, you are right about the levels getting harder...at least I know they do with Donkey Kong and many other classic games. Jungle Hunt, on the other hand, didn't seem to get any harder when the levels reset...at least not on the Atari 2600 version.
But anyway...I'll list off a more recent game that's really short. Contra III on the SNES. Excellent game...but it only had 6 levels, and 2 of them were overhead view levels that were really short.