GOOD OFFLINE GAMES WORTH PLAYING

I wrote this blog post on a plane. Not drafted it on a plane and polished it at home, actually wrote it on a plane, with no wifi, while the guy next to me played Fallout New Vegas on a Steam Deck and occasionally muttered "ring-a-ding-ding baby" under his breath. That was the moment I decided the topic was worth writing about. Offline games are having a quiet renaissance right now, and it has nothing to do with nostalgia. It is because live service keeps eating games and then spitting them out dead.

Here is the thing that broke me. I went to boot up a shooter I had sunk fifty hours into a couple of years back, and the servers had been sunsetted. Not the multiplayer servers. The login servers. I could not play the single player campaign because the game wanted to phone home and there was no home anymore. The game was just gone. I owned the license. I had the files on my hard drive. But the publisher had decided that the game was no longer commercially viable to maintain, and so my purchase had silently expired.

That is a kind of theft, and it is going to keep happening until consumers push back. One way I push back is by buying offline games. Real ones. Games that sit on my drive and will still sit on my drive in ten years, running the same way they ran on launch day, no account required, no internet handshake, no chance of being yanked away because a server farm in Dublin got decommissioned.

This is my list. These are all single player, all offline, all long term safe bets, and all worth your money even if the internet in your area cuts out twice a week or you spend your life in airports.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

If you have never played The Witcher 3, you are about to have the best two hundred hours of your gaming life. If you played it back when it came out and have not come back, the next-gen update added ray tracing, better foliage, faster sign casting, and a third person camera option pulled from the Netflix show. It looks absurdly good in 2026 and runs like a dream on mid-range hardware.

The reason The Witcher 3 is on this list and not just an RPG list is the way it treats its side content. You do not collect feathers for an outpost. You walk into a village, a woman tells you her dead son is haunting the well, and the answer to that situation is more nuanced than yes or no. It is a game about being a working class monster hunter in a world where the monsters are often less monstrous than the people hiring you. You can finish the whole base game and both expansions without ever talking to a server. Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine are two of the best pieces of DLC ever made. Blood and Wine alone is bigger than most full RPGs ship today. I go back to it every couple of years and it never stops being a delight. For more on this one and its peers, I covered the full landscape in my piece on the best RPGs right now.

Elden Ring

Elden Ring does technically have online components. You can summon helpers, leave messages, invade people. None of that is required. You can play the entire game, including Shadow of the Erdtree, completely offline, and the experience is still the best open world game FromSoftware has ever made.

The Lands Between are built to be gotten lost in. There is no map marker telling you to go east. There is a big golden tree in the distance, and you can go toward it or away from it, and the game trusts you to figure out the rest. When a boss is wrecking you, you can just leave. Go do something else. Come back with better gear, a better build, a better understanding of the systems. No other open world game respects the player's intelligence the way this one does. Shadow of the Erdtree is brutal but essential. The whole package on a modern PC or console is probably the best hundred and fifty dollar gaming purchase you can make right now.

Fallout New Vegas

I am putting this one high up because a lot of people know it is good but have not actually played it, and that is a problem I want to fix. New Vegas is the best written first person RPG ever released, and it is not particularly close. Obsidian had eighteen months and a reused Fallout 3 engine, and somehow they delivered a Mojave wasteland full of factions that all have real, defensible political philosophies, a main quest with four radically different endings, and companion characters who are written like people instead of skill dispensers.

The game is fifteen years old. It still holds up. The Ultimate Edition collects all the DLC, including Old World Blues, which is one of the funniest things anyone has ever written for a video game. There is a thriving mod scene, but you do not need any of it. Vanilla New Vegas on a Steam Deck with a pair of headphones on a long flight is close to a religious experience. The game never phones home. It will run on anything with a CPU. It will keep running forever.

Disco Elysium

I will fight you if you say Disco Elysium is not an RPG because it does not have traditional combat. The skill system is the most interesting take on character building I have ever seen in a game. Your stats are voices in your head. Logic argues with Empathy. Inland Empire whispers conspiracies to you. Visual Calculus reconstructs crime scenes. Electrochemistry wants you to do drugs. They all weigh in on every decision, and the voice that wins is whichever one you have leveled up the most.

You play a detective who has drunk himself into amnesia and has to solve a murder in a city that has lost its mind. The writing is the single best thing any game has ever done. I do not say that lightly. The political and philosophical material is handled with a wit and melancholy that nothing else in the medium comes close to. The Final Cut has full voice acting and it is the definitive version. Twenty hours from start to finish. Completely offline. Runs on a toaster. I have replayed this game four times and found new dialogue every run.

Outer Wilds

I do not want to tell you anything about Outer Wilds. I want to beg you to play it and then come back and talk to me about it, because it is the kind of game that is genuinely ruined by spoilers. So I will keep this vague.

You are an astronaut exploring a tiny solar system. The solar system has a secret. The game is about figuring out the secret. Every piece of information you learn changes how you look at every previous location. It is a game about curiosity, and I have never played anything else like it. The Echoes of the Eye expansion is probably the single best expansion in any game of the past decade, including Blood and Wine, which is a sentence I never thought I would write.

It is fully offline. It is short by modern standards, around twenty five hours. You can only really play it once, because once you know the secret, you can never un-know it. I think about it weekly. If you want more recommendations in this specific flavor, I put together a full list of games like Outer Wilds that scratches similar itches, but honestly, play Outer Wilds first.

Tunic

Tunic looks like a cute isometric action game about a little fox with a sword. It is not that. It is that plus one of the best puzzle games ever made plus a love letter to the weird old game manuals that used to come in the box back when games came in boxes.

The gimmick is the in-game manual. You find pages of it scattered around the world, and the manual is written mostly in a made-up language you can not read, except for the occasional English word or hand-drawn diagram. The game teaches you systems through the manual, not through the actual gameplay, and figuring out what the manual is telling you is the actual game. I spent an afternoon with a notebook and a pen decoding a single puzzle. That afternoon was one of the most satisfying gaming experiences I have had in years.

Tunic is entirely offline. It takes around fifteen hours for the main path and double that if you want the true ending. Pack it on your next flight. You will not regret it.

A Short Hike

Sometimes you do not want an epic. Sometimes you want to climb a mountain in ninety minutes, talk to some frogs on the way, and watch a sunset. A Short Hike is that game. You play a bird named Claire going to the top of a provincial park to get cell signal so you can receive an important phone call from your mom. That is the whole game. You climb a mountain. You talk to people. You find shells and coins. You can paraglide.

It is the most sincere, kind, well constructed little game I have ever played. It runs on absolutely anything. I finished it on a domestic flight with change to spare. When it was over I sat in my seat and felt better about my life for a few hours, which is not something I say about a lot of games.

Hades

Roguelikes sound like a weird fit for an offline games list because their whole structure is short runs and infinite replay. Hades is on here because that structure is perfect for airports, long train rides, hotel rooms with spotty wifi, and any other context where you want something fun you can pick up and put down in chunks.

You are Zagreus, son of Hades, and you are trying to escape the underworld. The gods of Olympus give you powers. You die. You try again. What elevates Hades over other roguelikes is the way the story progresses across runs. Every death advances the narrative. Every NPC back at the house has new things to say after your last attempt. Supergiant wrapped a traditional roguelike in a character drama, and the combination is incredible. The sequel is also excellent but I still prefer the original for the writing. Both are fully offline. Both run on anything.

The Talos Principle 2

First person puzzle games are my weakness. The Talos Principle 2 is the current best of breed. Croteam built a game that asks genuinely hard philosophical questions about consciousness and purpose while you are solving spatial puzzles involving lasers and connectors and recording devices. The puzzles are excellent. The philosophy is, somehow, not eye-rolling, which is a miracle for a game that quotes actual philosophers by name.

It takes about thirty hours to get through the main content, more if you chase the hidden puzzles. It is offline end to end. If you liked The Witness or Portal 2, you owe it to yourself to check this one out.

Stardew Valley

I should not have to write this paragraph but I will. Stardew Valley is the single best cozy game ever made, it is entirely offline if you play it solo, and the developer has been updating it for free for a decade. It is the model for what a game can be when a creator genuinely loves what they built. Buy it on every platform you own. Play it on planes. Play it on trains. Play it in bed when you can not sleep. It will not let you down.

Why This Matters for Travel

I do almost all of my serious gaming on planes and trains now. Partly because I travel a lot for work. Partly because a handheld in airplane mode is the most focused gaming context in the world. No notifications. No Discord pings. No patch downloading in the background. Just you, the screen, and whatever you packed in your queue.

Every game on this list is a handheld friendly offline pick. The Steam Deck runs all of them. The Switch runs most of them. A decent laptop with a charged battery runs all of them. You do not need wifi. You do not need an account login at the gate. You do not need to worry about servers going down mid flight. You load the game, you play the game, you close the laptop, you land in whatever city you are landing in.

Why This Matters in General

The industry is in a weird spot. A lot of the biggest releases of the last few years have been live service games that require a constant connection, even for single player content. Some of them have already shut down. Some of them will shut down. You can not rely on the cloud to hold your games forever, because the cloud is not a noun, it is other people's computers, and other people turn off their computers when the lights stop blacking.

Offline games are a hedge against that. They are also, in a lot of cases, better games, because developers who are not chasing engagement metrics tend to make more interesting things. Every game on this list is a self contained artistic statement. None of them will ever ask you to log in to keep playing. All of them will still work in 2036 if you kept the files.

Buy offline games. Play offline games. Support developers who respect you enough to sell you something that actually belongs to you. The next time your internet goes out, you want a library worth reaching for.

What I Am Playing on My Next Flight

In case anyone is curious. I am three quarters of the way through a second run of Disco Elysium, this time as a full on communist cop, and I have Tunic loaded up for when my brain wants to do logic puzzles instead of feel things. My Steam Deck battery is at ninety percent. My boarding pass is in my pocket. I am going to miss the in-flight meal because I will not want to stop playing to eat it. This is fine. This is good, actually. This is what offline games are for.