Summary
Lonelinessis a powerful feeling.It can make people emotional,angry, and desperate, and it can push them to follow rash, and sometimes ill-advised impulses that make their situation worse. Many people are familiar with this feeling in their personal lives, but it’s a feeling that can also be evoked byopen-world games.
Some games cast players as a lone survivor in a dangerous environment, while others place them with several other characters while giving them a unique featurethat causes severe alienation.Then there are the games that give their players a choice: engage with the other characters in the setting, or deliberately isolate themselves and tackle their adventure solo. Whatever the case,these open-world games excel at making their players feel totally isolated, completely cut off, and utterly alone.
A seasoned investigator gifted with paranormal abilities,Paul Prospero travels to the town of Red Creek Valley, Wisconsin, after receiving a letter from a local boy named Ethan. However, upon his arrival, Paul discovers that the town is abandoned, and Ethan is missing. Through the use of detective abilities both supernatural and mundane, players travel through Red Creek Valley at their own pace, investigating the various deaths and disappearances that have occurred in the town in whatever order they see fit.
The Vanishing of Ethan Carteris effective in how it evokes intense feelings of both loneliness and isolation. At its core, this is a horror game, although many of the “scares” are centered on events that have already occurred by the time players arrive. Those feelings are amplified as it is gradually revealed that Paul may not be the only supernatural entity to have ventured into Red Creek Valley.
A desolate island, a lone hunter, and a powerful curse. This is the setup forThe Pathless,a game from developer Giant Squid, who also made a similarly desolate exploration game withAbzu.The Pathlessis a different beast, though. For one, it’s open world, granting players access to the entire cursed island from the outset. Secondly,unlikeAbzu’steeming underwater biome,the only other creature the player interacts with is a lone eagle.
Granted, the eagle is an embodiment of the Eagle Mother, a god native to the island setting, but that does little to stem the feeling of solitude brought about by the gameplay. The Hunter is, for better or worse, on this quest by herself, cleansing the island’s cursed spirits and staving off the Godslayer at every turn. It’s lonely work, mitigated occasionally by the presence of the Eagle Mother, which only makes the game’s ending that much more heartbreaking.
This game is one that can go either way. The procedurally generated “open universe” ofNo Man’s Skyis quite literally impossible to fully explore. That said, there is plenty to do, and if players go looking for them, there are plenty of NPCs to encounter, massive space battles to engage in, and space stations loaded with merchants and aliens to chat with. That’s saying nothing of the game’s multiplayer component, which can do away with any sense of loneliness players might experience while playing it.
However, there is another option as well. Players can sequester themselves on a single planet, or in a single solar system, build their base, and content themselves with exploring each planet solo. Nothing is stopping this approach beyond a slightly more complex progression pathway. If players avoid multiplayer, ignore NPCs, and neglect the game’s main quests, they will come across few lonelier feelings in gaming than the knowledge that they are the sole living person on an entire planet.
There is an inherent loneliness that permeates nearly every game inThe Legend of Zeldafranchise—barring perhaps theHyrule Warriorsseries—but it has rarely been as prominent as it is inBreath of the Wild.Right from the outset, when Link emerges from his hibernation cave, it’s clear that he’s going to be doing most of his adventuring on his own.
Granted, there are small towns scattered throughout the Hylian open world that have a few residents,and the Zora,Gorons, Gerudo townsfolk, and the smattering of hidden Korok seeds found throughout Hyrule can occasionally make Link seem slightly less alone. However, none of these characters leave the places where Link finds them. It almost makes the loneliness more pronounced, as no matter how many friends players might encounter along the way, once their quest picks back up, they’re once again on their own.
For many gamers,Subnauticaneeds very little introduction. It’s a sci-fi open-world survival game where players are cast as the lone survivor of a shipwreck that crash-lands on an alien ocean world. They have access to an onboard computer, but that’s about the only “human” interaction they can expect. The rest is up to them as they scour the waters for supplies in an effort to find a way off the planet.
Loneliness inSubnauticahits like a freight train from moment one. Simply standing atop the tiny escape pod, which will mark the player’s home base in the early game, and gazing out at the endless expanse of blue is a daunting feeling. Then, inevitably, they will have to dive beneath the waves, leaving behind their small vestige of safety and braving the alien unknown by themselves. The deeper underwater they go, the darker the world gets, and the bigger the planet’s native inhabitants grow. Players with thalassophobia beware.
Shadow of the Colossusis well-known for being one of the emptiest and most desolate open-world games ever made. Players are exploring a world with almost nothing in it. There’s Wander, the voice of Dormin, the unconscious (or dead) woman Wander brought along with him, Wander’s horse, Agro, and sixteen ancient colossi. Out of all of these, Dormin is the only character who speaks, and only in cryptic riddles. It’s a recipe for loneliness before players take one step into the world.
When they do, that feeling is amplified tenfold. There is no one to help them find their way to the next colossus, so they must travel guided by the sunlight reflected off of Wander’s sword. Agro, their lone companion, only speaks in grunts and whinnies. Plus, with every “successful” excursion, one less colossus remains to populate the land.By the game’s conclusion, Wander is completely alone,and it’s the player’s own actions that have driven him to that point.
Few triple-A games are as experimental asDeath Stranding,but leave it to Hideo Kojima to make it work. The game follows Sam Porter Bridges, a courier for the Bridges company tasked with expanding the Chiral Network, a web of interconnected hubs—known as “Knots”—where civilization persists following an apocalyptic event known as the Death Stranding.
Sam rarely encounters other people; at least, not in the flesh. He’ll chat with holographic transmissions who provide him with cargo and a destination, and then he sets out—often on foot—with that cargo in tow. Joining him is a Bridge baby, initially known as “BB” and affectionately named “Lou” by Sam. However, Lou doesn’t talk much; she’s a baby, after all. That leaves Sam having a lot of one-sided conversations during his long excursions. He’ll occasionally encounter people who chat with him face-to-face, but they never join him on his treks, making for nothing more than short reprieves from the loneliness that Sam has chosen for himself.
Existentialism is an incredibly lonely feeling, and few games capture it better thanOuter Wilds.Players are a fledgling explorer, granted their first ship and their first spacesuit and sent off to explore the Hearthian solar system. They’ll be seeking answers to a number of mysteries, from what that explosion was near Giant’s Deep to the questions surrounding the extinction of the ancient Nomai civilization. However, all that is put on hold when the sun explodes.
Thankfully, it turns out that players aretrapped in a 22-minute time loop.This allows them to reset their day each time the sun goes supernova so that the end of their solar system isn’t really the end at all. There is a gratifying feeling of power granted by this time loop, but also an intense loneliness. Players aren’t the only explorer out in the solar system; there’s one on most of the system’s other planets. However, these other explorers are (mostly) not sharing in the time loop experience, and therefore have no clue about their impending doom. It actually makes the experience more lonely, because while there are NPCs that players can chat with, it’s hard not to think of them as dead aliens walking, especially when none of them even notice the sun is expanding until it’s too late. Thanks to the time loop, players are given the gift of knowledge, and it’s both a blessing and a curse.
Puzzle games are rarely focused on providing deep NPC characters for players to interact with over and over again. That’s not to say they’re non-existent, but the focus is usually on the puzzles, with everything else taking a backseat.The Witnesstakes this concept to its extreme.
Players find themselves on an open-world, uninhabited island (or at least, a no-longer inhabited island) brimming with obtuse puzzles. There are no guides to help them solve these puzzles, no NPCs to point them in the right direction. They need to decipher the rules of these puzzles by themselves to progress, only to come up against the next set of rules to parse through, and occasionally, the petrified remains of what one assumes are the island’s former citizens. Eventually, they’ll realize that the island itself is one big, interconnected puzzle, but it’s a realization they’ll have to come to on their own. No matter how many puzzles they solve, players will never encounter another soul.
Survival games are typically lonely experiences, butfew are as brutal and unforgiving asThe Long Dark.The game is open world by design, but the nature of its intense survival mechanics means that players will be hard-pressed to freely wander the world when everything from the local fauna to the weather will kill them mercilessly. Players take on the role of a plane crash survivor lost in the Canadian wilderness following a geomagnetic storm.
To be completely fair toThe Long Dark, its story mode—titled Wintermute—features tons of NPCs, including a companion physician character who is a constant presence for most of the campaign. However, in survival mode, all of these NPCs are either dead or missing, leaving the player completely on their own. This comes with the need to manage their hunger, thirst, and body temperature, as well as braving the frozen wilderness and risking serious injury in the process. There are no open-world settings that will make players feel more alone and helpless than the desolate and dangerous wasteland ofThe Long Dark.
