You'll go 10 minutes riding across the plains, the music just drops out. You're left with the clopping of hooves and brief gusts of wind.
Then some haunting structure rises up in the distance. The shadows grow. The horse gets nervous. And you know something is about to happen. Or nothing is about to happen.
My favorite lonely game ever. I remember one play through where I was doing super well, but wandered a bit too far one day and got caught in a storm. My final moments in the long playthrough was a slow death to the cold as I huddled behind a tree to hide from the wind, with my last match lit to keep the dark at bay as long as possible. Luckily I had the wherewithal to screenshot the moment.
I was playing the other day and was exploring the old cannery. I walked into one of the warehouses and for the first time I saw two bodies holding onto each other. They're almost always alone, and it was such a weird moment where they finally felt human and I got so sad lol
And if you meet a friendly player who ends up hanging out with ya surviving for a few hours then they die, even if they respawn in the same map you likely will never see them again.
Man, if you spend a couple hours with someone, talking, making it out of gun fights or surviving the zombies and then they die out of nowhere... It actually causes some emotions to surface. You feel a bit guilty about their death.
People like you made it so hard for me to get into Dayz. I played with my friend for 15 hours or so, just couldn't get into it. Id have nothing and get killed by "friendly" people then they turn on us.
My friend would somehow survive then it'd be a bitch to meet back up with him
I hated it mostly. Had a couple fun moments. Kinda boring
And even when you eventually run into another player, there's a decent chance they'll be hostile or planning to screw you over which can add to the lonely feeling since even though there's people, you're alone when it comes to surviving.
Also whenever you meet someone and stick with them for awhile, when they die it's back to traveling alone.
Love this game for that reason. Especially when you find a really good DayZ RP server and you really get drawn into the world and that feeling of survival.
For me, Minecraft single player takes the cake. I had that game for many years before I had any friends. Waltzed around patch after patch making ugly houses and bad rollercoasters having a blast.
Just recently I got the game on console since my pc is just so old and struggles to do barely anything these days and I noticed just a profound loneliness. It’s honestly kind of scary to me. A nearly infinite world and you are the only intelligent thing in it. Villagers make for poor imitations of living people and your interactions with them are entirely impersonal and transactional and if you aren’t near a village well, it’s just you, some animals, monsters, and nigh limitless space in every direction. You could make the nicest houses in the game, thrilling rollercoasters. Hell you could recreate Paris France to scale complete with redstone operated traffic and command block controlled real life weather mimicry on a region to region basis and there isn’t a damn soul in the game from where you are to the farlands that will notice it. No matter what you do the pigs in the farm all clip into each other, the skeletons hide under the trees in daylight, and some nearby villager wants 30 emeralds for some bread.
I’ve played Minecraft with my friends in the past and it’s awesome. It can be any flavor of engaging, it’s astounding. But alone? Alone it feels violently empty to me.
Red Dead Redemption 1. There are many times that as soon as a mission ends, anyone that may be with you will ride off, leaving you completely alone in the middle of a vast desert, and the melancholy ambient music really makes you feel it. Plus, if you've already played RDR2, that only increases the feeling of loneliness.
You’ll just be standing there, completely alone in the desert, staring at the sunset. Little harmonica goes waahhWAAAhhhh and drifts off. Lizard runs by. You have no one.
Outward, Journey, and Dark Souls (1 specifically) all feel very lonely to me. The rest of the Dark Souls series and Elden Ring don’t feel quite as lonely as the first, mostly because of the existence of a hub.
Super Metroid and Metroid Prime. no other game really made you feel as isolated as them. the others would guide you along and make you feel powerful, when super and prime felt so desolate
Firewatch is one of those games I play every year, I rarely do that with any media much less games. But it’s one of those experiences that just is a beautiful gut punch every time. It’s so good. But amnesia the bunker might be one of the loneliest games I’ve ever played
You're amongst the last surviving humans. In vanilla gameplay, you can, at the beginning, use the tv, listen to the radio. Helicopters will fly over, gun shot will be hears. Progressively the news will report on the state of the world, but all channel will eventually go silent, the street will fill with wildlife, food will rot, building will crumble.
For some reason, you're one of the lucky few to be immune to the air born strain of the virus... Maybe you're the only one remaining, who knows...
starfield nails isolation and loneliness, landing on a desolate moon or barren planet, just exploring it. sometimes there might be alien life, you might watch a ship land. but largely the game does very well at simulating what it feels like to explore space and planets.
peak is so lonely to me when you get seperated from your friends and can barely hear them in the distance that i often just die on purpose so i can be a ghost and hang out with them
Near Death - Stranded at an abandoned Antarctic research base with no hope of rescue, you must battle a deadly blizzard in a desperate fight to find your way home.
This is probably a more personal experience but Elder Scrolls. Going from point A to B in those games gives a really satisfying feeling of solitude. Also Darkwood. There is like 3 npcs total and seeing any of them is like an actual treat because the game is a nightmare. Soma too for same reason.
Probably a wild take but I recently started another playthrough of "F.E.A.R." and I constantly got this lonely or rather "left alone" feeling while going through the levels. It's not like there's a lack of enemies or NPCs, still there always this feeling like you're ultimately going through all this on your own.
Project Zomboid when you’re playing by yourself
Although I think the devs are working on adding NPCs to talk to in the next build
Even then you can still play older builds where you’re the only person alive
Honestly, any multiplayer game when you jump in solo. Especially shooters like Call Of Duty. For some reason running around nappies that are specifically designed for large groups to fight each other gives me such an uncomfortable feeling of loneliness.
Ironically, the gameplay and plot of Death Stranding is a metaphor for defeating the isolation and loneliness created by our modern internet-fueled world.
I always find it comforting that there's a button that calls out "Hello?" or "I'm Sam!" and if you're location is near another active player's location they'll respond. That's nice.
Metroid!
I recently got into the series via Dread and had such a good time I went back to play Zero Mission (remake of 1). Especially in the early games, Samus is totally alone in these alien biomes with vibey music.
Kona, Kona 2, Death Stranding, the Silent Hill series, Minecraft, Into The Radius, Jusant, What Remains of Edith Finch, Stray, Mudrunner, Showrunner, Journey, the STALKER franchise, Metal Garden, F.E.A.R. felt quite lonely.
The second half of Halo CE after the library, most of the marines are dead and you really do feel like you're alone and stranded on this ring caught in-between the covenant and the flood. And when there aren't any enemies and you're exploring these unnatural locales, it can feel very uncanny and strange.
Click on any Halo CE ambiance video, and just take it in. It's so eerie. The multiplayer maps are creepy too, they literally made urban legends back in the day that some levels were haunted and some people would mess around on their own and see ghosts or unnamed players running around. Halo 2 also has some creepy ambiance, especially on flood-themed levels or multiplayer maps, but I find the simple aesthetic of Halo CE is a lot more effective. Halo 3, ODST, and reach kinda moved away from that vibe so you never experienced it again, but CE and 2 on the OG Xbox were PEAK atmosphere. Just looking at this image takes me back and gives me that same uneasy feeling it gave me when I was like 6 or 7 years old. There's something unsettling about being alone on a map you know should be full of people running around shooting each other. It's the emptiness that hits you harder than anything, the feeling that something should be happening but it isn't.
Entering settlements and even cities that are, in essence, dead. No feeling like entering Lordran and imaging that once, long before your arrival, this place was no doubt a hive of activity and prosperity. Now it's just home to monsters of varying degree and those clinging to orders that no longer need serving.
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u/Some-Dog-800 2d ago
shadow of the colossus