Highlights
- Some games create engaging experiences by confining players to a single room, forcing them to make tough choices and survive.
- Titles like "60 Parsecs!" and "Twelve Minutes" challenge players to navigate a single location, making the most of limited space.
- Games like "Five Nights at Freddy's" and "Do Not Feed The Monkeys 2099" prove that intense experiences can be found in a single room setting.
Players are likely to notice that the majority of games have players exploring a specific location or an open world. However, some titles have been known to limit the amount of places a player can discover while still creating a highly engaging and interesting game to play.
Great Sci-Fi Games Set In One Location
There are plenty of great sci-fi games that are set in a single location, although some of them make a much bigger impression on players than others.
These titles, no matter what genre the game is, are set in a single room that the players may be free to navigate during the play time of the title. Therefore, these are by far the best games that are set in one room, even if certain mechanics allow the player to use cameras to look into other ones.
8 60 Parsecs!
Metascore: 68
- Platform: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, Android, and iOS
- Released: 2018-09-18
- Developer: Robot Gentleman
- Genre: Adventure, Simulation
60 Parsecs may start with the player rushing around a space station for 60 seconds, grabbing as many supplies as possible, but after this point, the rest of the game is set in an escape pod that is drifting across the galaxy.
Players must make all sorts of difficult choices, from rationing out the soup supply to deciding who adventures outside the emergency shuttle to find more resources. Each day brings new issues as players hope to eventually find a new place to call home before all the crew turns on each other.
7 Twelve Minutes
Metascore: 76
Trapped in a time loop, Twelve Minutes is an interactive thriller that works perfectly when set in a single room. It is up to the player to make different choices and experiment with their theories in the hope of finding the true ending to the game.
With the game lasting twelve real-time minutes, a player will need to think fast about where they have and haven't clicked in the top-down view of the single room of the apartment where the vast majority of the game is set. Breaking the loop is the only goal players have, and the way to do it is hidden somewhere in the player's apartment.
6 Five Nights At Freddy's
Metascore: 78
Five Nights at Freddy's is a phenomenal franchise that has created plenty of intense experiences. However, the original game is by far one of the greatest for making a horror experience that is set in one room. While players can check the camera for the rest of the restaurant, they are still unable to move from the security guard office, which only has two doors to protect them from the animatronics that roam the rest of the building.
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Future titles like Sister Location allowed players to explore various rooms of the facility. Five Nights at Freddy's only features the one room that the player must survive in for the five days they work if they hope to get paid, and they have no way of hiding.
5 Welcome To The Game
Metascore: N/A
- Platform: PC
- Released: 2016-06-15
- Developer: Reflect Studios
- Genre: Horror, Simulation
Some of the best games set in one room are those that create a horror experience, especially when things happen around the player, but they are stuck in their seat, praying that they aren't caught by whatever lurks around them. In Welcome to the Game, players are stuck at their desk, scrolling through the deep web with the single goal of finding a Red Room.
Looking for the right website, and searching through others, all while not getting caught by nefarious individuals that also use the Deep Web makes for an intense experience, especially when a player is unable to barricade the door and has their back to the rest of the room.
4 Do Not Feed The Monkeys 2099
Metascore: 81
Do Not Feed the Monkeys 2099
- Platform(s)
- PC
- Released
- May 25, 2023
- Developer
- Fictiorama Studios
- Genre(s)
- Management , Simulation
Players who enjoy peeking at surveillance footage like Five Nights at Freddy's need to look no further than Do Not Feed The Monkeys 2099. In this puzzle surveillance simulator, players may be sitting at a single office desk but will find themselves looking into various homes and situations of various people in 2099.
The rules stay the same for the Primate Observation Club, as seen in the first Do Not Feed The Monkeys, and that is the single rule of not interacting with them. Players are likely to do it anyway, with them solving the various issues each person has and finding new ways to mess with them through the camera footage.
3 Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes
Metascore: 84
Cooperative games like Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes are larger than the game worlds they are set in. While one player looks at the manual, either on their phone or printed off, needed to disarm the various puzzle-filled bombs, the other is left sitting in a virtual room with only a table and the bomb itself to keep them company.
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Putting anything in this room would only work as a distraction for the player given the role of disarming the bomb and, therefore, keeping this room mainly plain is sure to have both players focusing on working out the puzzles in the fastest time without setting off the bomb.
2 Inscryption
Metascore: 85
Inscryption is another game that has plenty of content for players to get lost in, but technically the entire game is based in a singular cabin, even when the game starts getting deeper and stranger. Players can freely walk around this wooden cabin at the start of the game, looking for puzzles to solve as well as hints on how to beat Leshy.
Then, when they sit down at the table, they are transported to an intense card game, where players will need to think tactically if they hope to have a chance. When a player fails – and they will fail – they are created anew and are trapped in the cabin again.
1 Papers, Please
Metascore: 85
Players may be surprised to see that one of the greatest games set in a single room is Papers, Please. While some players may question how this title fits onto the list, Papers, Please spend the majority of the game being set in the singular booth of a border checkpoint.
Players are stuck within these walls as the various folks approach from the outside to seek permission to cross the border, as long as their papers are in order. While players may return to their apartment at the end of every shift, players do not see this building and, therefore, the only actual room they see is the desk of their workplace.
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