10 Games That Make Exploration Feel Lonely in the Most Beautiful Way Possible

Gaming, in its current iteration, has become a largely social activity, whether you’re actively playing games with other people or just talking about them online or in-person. However, not all games are meant to be experienced with online multiplayer or in the company of others. Some games are best suited to solitary experiences, something to really put you in tune with your inner world and the ambience of your surroundings.

These games make exploring their respective worlds very lonely experiences, but not necessarily in a bad way. When you don’t have friends screaming in your headset, you’re able to better appreciate the quiet beauty of the settings you find yourself in, ponder the significance of your place in them, or just simply bask in the distinctive feeling of complete and utter silence and isolation. I think we could all use some alone time every now and then, and if you’re going to be alone, you might as well get to see the world from interesting new angles.

10 The Witness

Stranded, but Not Endangered

If you suddenly found yourself in the middle of a deserted island with nothing on your person but the clothes on your back, you would almost certainly be in danger. However, what if you were in that particular situation, but somehow not in danger? Well, as in The Witness, you’d have all the time in the world to appreciate scenery and solve puzzles.

There are no enemies or death traps or anything of the like, nor do you get hungry or tired or have your safety overtly threatened in any way. It’s just you, the island, and a boat-load of puzzles to solve, which you can do entirely at your own pace and on your own time. That means, if you need a break, you can step away from whatever you’re working on and just take in the admittedly very lush, colorful scenery for a few minutes.

Nobody is there to mumble instructions or quips in your ear, and there are no wild animals seeking to take a bite out of you. You can just stand there and stare off into space for as long as you darn well please.

9 Firewatch

Life in the Wilderness

Preserving the natural world isn’t just about recycling your bottles, it’s also about maintaining vigilance for potential natural disasters. This is why large forests and nature reserves have fire lookouts like the one in Firewatch to notify authorities of sudden wildfires. Of course, fires don’t happen that often, which leaves plenty of time for appreciating nature.

Firewatch is a walking sim set in a large stretch of Wyoming wilderness, with our protagonist Henry working as a fire lookout. He usually just stays in his tower, but when he starts seeing unusual movement, he has to start exploring the surrounding forest. Now, Henry’s a strong survivalist and isn’t in any imminent danger, but he also only has one person who knows he’s out there: his supervisor Delilah, available over two-way radio.

You can call in to Delilah whenever you want if you need to hear a friendly voice, but a voice is literally the only thing she can offer you. You’re largely on your own for navigating the wilderness, really experiencing what it means to be disconnected from the world of humanity and be at one with nature.

8 The Long Dark

Nothing Lonelier than a Bad Winter

I generally like winter, since it’s a great excuse to stay inside and play games. Of course, that appreciation is predicated on things like power, heat, and internet to make things comfortable and keep me connected. In a winter like The Long Dark’s, which is distinctly bereft of all three, you suddenly become acutely aware of just how alone you truly are.

The entire point of The Long Dark is that, beyond whatever’s keeping the storm going perpetually, there is nothing overtly supernatural at play. It’s just you, by yourself, in the midst of a terrible snowstorm in the middle of the northern Canadian wilderness. If you had a nice, warm coat and a mug of cocoa to enjoy, it would probably be very pretty, but you don’t have either of those things. Just whatever you can carry on your back and the looming threat of equally freezing and hungry wildlife lurking in the woods.

Survival games like The Long Dark force you to become intimately familiar with your surroundings in a hurry, recognizing every distinct hill and bent branch. Nobody else will do it for you, so start making maps and building reliable shelters wherever you can.

7 Hollow Knight

You Aren’t Like Them

You may think that any game with a more-or-less consistent presence of NPCs wouldn’t be a game you could get truly lonely in. However, no matter how many other bugs he encounters on his journeys through Hallownest, our little unnamed hero of Hollow Knight will always remain alone, and in more ways than one.

For one thing, the Knight can’t talk. When you interact with NPCs, that’s just them talking at you, not to you. He’s self-aware (I think), but he can’t interact with any of these other bugs in any meaningful capacity. This goes double for all the Blight-infested bugs down in Hallownest proper, who are barely even capable of thinking, let alone speaking. The Knight may as well be navigating caverns full of wooden signs and wild animals.

Without anyone to really relate to, all you can do is explore the ruined kingdom on your own, gradually piecing together everything it went through from incidental dialogue and environmental context clues. It does help to put you more in tune with Hallownest’s overall ruined vibe, but that’s something you have to figure out and manage on your own time, through your own effort.

6 Subnautica

It’s an Underwater World, and You Ain’t Welcome

Here’s a fun science fact: despite the fact that Earth is 70% ocean, we’ve only mapped about 29% of the seafloor, with less than 0.001% of that seafloor having been witnessed by human eyes. The point is that the ocean is definitively not our territory, and that goes double for the distinctly alien ocean of Subnautica.

While the ocean of this foreign world functions similarly enough to our own, that doesn’t mean crashing and surviving on it is easy. You still need to build a safe haven for yourself, as well as source edible food and potable water. That would be hard enough on land, but in the ocean especially, you’re even more alone than usual.

There are many beautiful sights to see down there, but much like a tiny prey fish, you only do so by the grace of larger predators. You are not a sea creature, and you do not know these waters like they do. In order to survive, you have to use your wits to outmaneuver their raw evolutionary advantages to properly establish your own habitat.

5 Minecraft

Lonely in 3x3

Minecraft may be a primarily social game these days, but this was a little harder to facilitate in the game’s earlier days. Server support was added fairly early on, but you still had to manage the server all on your own, as opposed to being able to just make one easily and invite your friends. I played Minecraft during those early days, and the way I played still largely informs my current solo playstyle of it.

When you’re playing Minecraft solo, both offline and without any friends present, you are wholly responsible for your own survival and enrichment. No one will share resources or equipment with you; you have to chop the trees, dig the holes, and mine the ore. You have to venture as far from whatever safe hole in the ground you’ve made for yourself as you’re comfortable in order to find more materials and broaden your crafting abilities.

Exploring in this manner can be scary, especially at night when the hostile mobs come out, but also kind of exhilarating. You never know when you’ll stumble across some interesting new material or item, and whatever you find, you get to keep all of it for yourself. You know, assuming you don’t get killed and drop it in magma on your way home.

4 Shadow of the Colossus

You Aren’t Supposed to be Here

The large stretch of land Wander visits in Shadow of the Colossus to revive Mono is known as the Forbidden Land. Wanna know why? Because nobody is supposed to be there, least of all Wander. If you want to talk about lonely exploration, galloping around a place you aren’t supposed to be is a good example. It’s like taking a hike through the ruins of Chernobyl.

As you traverse the Forbidden Land, whose only point of entry is the narrow stone bridge Wander came in on, you’re struck by the distinct lack of human presence of infrastructure. This is not a place for people to live or travel. The only thing you’ll find besides a lot of cliffs, rocks, and sand are the Colossi, and they seem to be content just doing their own things in the middle of nowhere.

At the same time, Wander’s dogged persistence through the Forbidden Land does help to drive home how determined he is to revive Mono. If you had to ride through an enormous stretch of absolutely nothing to bring someone back to life, to say nothing of battling all of the giant monsters hiding within, well, let’s just say your relationship with that person would be very much put to the test.

3 No Man’s Sky

It’s a Big Ol’ Cosmos Out There

Wanna know how big the universe is? Well, so would I, but the universe is theoretically infinite in size, which means it could never be completely mapped out. If you’re an adventurous sort, though, and particularly one who lives in No Man’s Sky’s setting of ample, accessible space travel, that’s less of a challenge and more of an invitation to adventure.

Every planet you could possibly visit in No Man’s Sky is randomly generated; there are commonalities between them, of course, but you still need to get an idea of how each one functions before you can really get to exploring. This includes finding materials for surviving and sourcing valuable resources, as well as cataloging local flora and fauna to determine if anything is an overt threat to your safety.

More to the point, while No Man’s Sky does have a multiplayer aspect, unless you’re deliberately playing with other people, the odds that you’ll ever encounter another human explorer are infantesimal. We’re exploring the entire universe here; expecting to find another person by chance is like expecting two oxygen molecules on opposite sides of the planet to meet.

2 Death Stranding

Building Bridges

It’s a pretty wild coincidence that Death Stranding came out just a few months before the entire world closed down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The entire premise of the game, after all, was that most of humanity had isolated itself for safety, leaving brave couriers like Sam Porter Bridges to deliver vital supplies and resources between the few remaining secure cities. Now that’s what I call an essential worker.

As Sam, at least at the start of the game, you don’t have much in the way of helpful equipment to make your deliveries fast or easy. Heck, you don’t even have roads. All you have is a strong back and your own two feet, forcing you to march through unpaved hills and cliffs and occasionally watching out for marauding BTs or raiders.

While Sam is utterly alone for the vast majority of the game, there is also an uplifting cooperative effort. Other couriers (i.e. other players) leave bridges, ladders, ropes, and other assistive mechanisms during their travels, which you can use to aid yourself. You will never meet any of these people in person or get to talk to them, but just getting to experience that little act of kindness in the midst of a hostile world really touches your heart.

1 Outer Wilds

It’s Always Further than You Think

In 2021, beloved actor William Shatner took a brief trip into low orbit to see the majesty of space. Rather than an infinite realm of possibility, he was struck by how terrifying it was to realize that Earth is our only true safe haven in an infinite void of death. I think that should be indicative of how brave astronauts are, and especially how brave the protagonist of Outer Wilds is. At least Shatner had some other passengers on his trip, after all.

The courageous, time-looping pilot of Outer Wilds’ titular space program doesn’t get any kind of co-pilot or mission control when they take off from the lush world of Timber Hearth into the solar system. No other planet in the system is truly habitable, whether due to a simple lack of oxygen or bizarre, terrifying weather phenomena. It’s all fascinating to behold up close, of course, whether in your spacesuit or your ship, but it’s also lonely in one of the most terrifying ways possible.

Impending supernova notwithstanding, in the event our pilot dies in space, and they almost definitely will, there’s a good chance nobody will ever find them. It’s a dark reminder that, for as much as there potentially is to see in the stars, you will never be completely safe as long as you’re out among them.