8 Single-Player Games Every Gamer Should Experience, Ranked

Single-player games are a different kind of experience from anything you’ll play online. Nobody is yelling in your headset, or waiting on you to queue up, and the game gets to tell its story at exactly the pace it wants. That’s a big reason some of the best games ever made are the ones you play alone, late at night, with the lights low and the controller in your hands. These eight are the ones I think every gamer should try at least once, whether you’ve been playing for decades or only pick up a controller now and then. A couple are huge open worlds you can lose a month inside, while others are tighter, story-driven trips you can finish in a week. Here they are, ranked from great to the one that changed how open-world games get made. 8 'A Plague Tale: Innocence' (2019) Image via Asobo Studio Amicia and her younger brother Hugo flee across 14th century France, dodging Inquisition soldiers on one side and massive swarms of plague rats on the other, rats that scatter the second you point a torch at them. Hugo carries some kind of mysterious illness tied directly to why the rats are swarming in the first place, and the game slowly peels back what that actually means as the story goes. Developer Asobo Studio built a rendering system that could throw thousands of rats on screen at once, and the swarms genuinely look like a force of nature. There's barely any combat here, most of the game is sneaking, luring guards into torchlight, using the rats against your enemies. Amicia and Hugo's relationship carries the whole thing, she starts out just trying to keep him alive and ends up watching him become something neither of them expected. 7 'Marvel's Spider-Man' (2018) Image via Insomniac Games This isn't tied to any movie or comic storyline, it's its own version of Peter Parker, already eight years into being Spider-Man by the time the game starts, so you skip the usual origin retread entirely. The swinging is the real star here, Insomniac Games spent a huge amount of effort here, and it's still one of the best traversal systems in any game. Combat borrows from the Batman Arkham games' rhythm-heavy style, but the web-slinging keeps it from ever feeling like a copy. Miles Morales shows up as a side character here, before he got his own game, and Mr. Negative runs as the main villain for most of the story. There's a genuine twist involving Otto Octavius, a scientist Peter actually trusts, turning into Doctor Octopus, and it lands harder than you'd expect from a game that focuses on being fun. The game also recreates New York with precise details that make just swinging around genuinely enjoyable on its own. 6 'Tomb Raider' (2013) Image via Crystal Dynamics, Square Enix This reboot strips Lara Croft (voiced and mo-capped by Camilla Luddington) down to someone young, scared, and completely out of her depth, shipwrecked on a mysterious island with no idea how to survive any of it yet. The whole game is basically an origin story, she starts off barely able to kill an animal for food and ends up hardened by an island run by a violent cult called the Solarii Brotherhood. It's brutal in a way earlier Tomb Raider games never were, every early encounter feels genuinely dangerous instead of routine. There's a mystical thread running through the island too, tied to an ancient queen named Himiko, and it gives the survival story an eerie supernatural backdrop without taking over the whole plot. The tagline was "a survivor is born," and the game actually earns that line instead of just slapping it on a poster. It swapped out the campy, confident adventurer version of Lara for something a lot more grounded, and the tone shift stuck for the whole rebooted series after it. 5 'Uncharted 4: A Thief's End' (2016) Image via Sony Computer Entertainment Nathan Drake (voiced by Nolan North) is retired and settled down until his brother Sam, who everyone thought was dead, shows back up needing help finding pirate Henry Avery's lost treasure. Sam's whole storyline was actually a late addition, Naughty Dog scrapped an earlier version of this game with a different director and plot before landing on the one that shipped. The facial animation and motion capture were considered industry-leading at the time, and it still holds up remarkably well years later. This was meant to close out Drake's story for good, and it treats that depth seriously, which lets him actually reckon with what this lifestyle cost him instead of just sending him off on one more heist. The epilogue jumps forward and shows Drake's own daughter picking up a game controller, a small, quiet nod that ties the whole series back to the people actually playing it. Few action games manage an ending this genuinely emotional. 4 'God of War' (2018) Image via Sony Interactive Entertainment Kratos (voiced by Christopher Judge) moves from Greek mythology into Norse territory here, years after slaughtering his own family and most of the Greek gods, and now he's trying, badly at first, to be a better father to his son Atreus. The entire game is shot as one continuous, unbroken camera take, without any cuts and loading screens to break the illusion, and it makes the whole story feel like it's happening in real time. Atreus doesn't know he's a god for most of the game, and watching that land on him is one of the better character arcs in the whole series. Mimir, a talking severed head who tags along for most of the journey, gives the game some much-needed humor to break up how heavy everything else gets. Baldur serves as the main antagonist, and the mysterious World Serpent narrates parts of the story in a way that only makes sense once you've finished it. 3 'The Last of Us Part II' (2020) Image via Naughty Dog Ellie (voiced by Ashley Johnson) sets out for revenge after Joel is killed early in the game, and then, controversially, the story hands control over to Abby, the woman who killed him, for a large chunk of the back half. Naughty Dog built this specifically to make you feel real empathy for someone you spent the first half of the game wanting to kill, and that choice split the fanbase hard, some players loved it, plenty didn't. The production values are staggering, this reportedly had one of the largest budgets and longest development cycles of any game made up to that point. The whole thing is built around the idea that revenge just keeps the cycle of violence going instead of ending anything, and it commits to that idea even when it makes the game deeply uncomfortable to play. Naughty Dog actually received death threats over some of the story decisions here, which says a lot about how personally people took it. It still went on to win more Game of the Year awards than almost anything else released that year. 2 'Red Dead Redemption 2' (2018) Image via Rockstar Games Arthur Morgan (voiced by Roger Clark) rides with the Van der Linde gang as it slowly falls apart, set as a prequel to the first Red Dead game in a fictionalized version of the American West and Midwest around 1899. Rockstar built an almost absurd level of simulation into this world, animals behave like actual animals, weather shifts naturally, NPCs keep their own daily schedules whether you're watching them or not. Midway through, Arthur gets diagnosed with tuberculosis, and that diagnosis reshapes how the whole back half of the game plays, including which ending you actually get based on how you've treated people. Dutch, the gang's leader, spends the whole game watching his own ideology curdle into something he can't really justify anymore, and Arthur's slow realization of that is some of the best character writing in any open-world game. The epilogue shifts to playing as John Marston, tying the story directly into the original game that came before it. Development reportedly took about eight years, and it came with real, well-documented controversy over the crunch that went into making it. 1 'The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild' (2017) Image via Nintendo Link wakes up from a hundred-year sleep with no memory, in a Hyrule that's been overrun by Calamity Ganon the entire time he was out, and the game just sets you loose to figure out what happened however you want. There's a physics-based system running under everything, fire spreads through grass, wind can carry objects, metal draws lightning, and the whole game builds its puzzles and combat out of those systems interacting with each other. It launched alongside the Nintendo Switch, and it somehow made an open world feel completely fresh again after years of games following the same formula. There's no fixed order to any of it, no required path through dungeons, you can genuinely walk straight to the final boss from the opening area if you're skilled enough to survive it. Zelda herself spent that whole century trapped, fighting to hold Ganon back alone, and her side of the story gets told through journal entries you piece together at your own pace. This one's widely credited with resetting what open-world games are supposed to feel like, and almost a decade later, plenty of games are still chasing what it did first.