Why we still care about games that work without internet

Everything wants to be online now, even games that have no reason to be. A single-player puzzle asking you to log in feels like a small betrayal.

Offline games respect where you actually are: a basement, a tunnel, a flight, a patchy rural signal. They also tend to respect your time, since they can't dangle daily-login hooks over a connection.

There's a preservation angle too. A game that works offline is a game you still own in some real sense. When the servers go dark, the offline titles are the ones that survive.

That's the whole reason this site exists. We check the airplane-mode box so you don't have to find out the hard way.