8 Great Video Games That Take Place In A SINGLE Building
Bigger isn't always better.
It's rare for a game to take place entirely in a single structure.
Most buildings just aren't big enough to sustain your average dozen-plus-hour video game, and even if they were, variety is the spice of life so setting your game in one place is an easy way to bore your audience pretty quickly.
It's not like "takes place in one building" is something you can use as a selling point either, so most developers don't think about going through the struggle.
But that doesn’t mean games that take place in a single building don’t exist, sometimes it’s part of a developer's vision.
Games that take place in one building are often smaller experiences. That or the structure the game takes place in has magical properties which can justify it being huge enough to fit an entire lengthy game in it.
There are benefits to making your game take place in one building, too. There's something satisfying with truly getting to know a place and its characters.
Across a sizeable runtime, you're almost guaranteed to create a memorable video game on the other end.
8. Luigi’s Mansion 3
Whilst we all love the mansion from the first Luigi's Mansion, The Last Resort from Luigi's Mansion 3 is just infinitely more interesting. With the excuse of magic, every floor of this huge hotel is widely different from the last.
Yeah, you get more standard hotel floors like a lobby, a shopping area, and the basement but there are also floors that look like Ancient Egypt, a film set, and a pirate ship.
You would think that this would lead to the building feeling like a set of levels and not a singular structure but there's enough hotel imagery scattered around each floor to remind you that you're indeed in a magical tower and not an actual desert.
Luigi's Mansion works well as a franchise that takes place in buildings instead of wide-open areas. The joy of Luigi's Mansion is getting to know every room of a building, searching them all rigorously for treasure, coins, ghosts, and secrets, not running around an open field.
Whilst the series can technically work having you explore multiple buildings, just look at Luigi's Mansion 2. It works better when it's just you, Luigi, and a single building to conquer.