There are a lot of games out there, to the point that it can be quite hard to choose what to play at any given time. And with such a plethora of more affordable indie games and even plenty of free-to-play titles, making a choice is even harder. Well how about just a single game to dedicate your life to? Seriously, that long.
If you thought 100 hours was a lot of time to give a game, just wait until you see these ones. Anything less than 100 hours will start to seem too short. Just keep in mind that most of the games listed here have some kind of end point, so MMOs, even if they are very long, have been excluded from this article.
While writing this, it was discovered that there are far too many idle games, and all of them are very long. For the sake of variety, many of them have been excluded.
Ark is well-known for being a dinosaur game, blending survival crafting mechanics with a world teeming with dangerous beasts that you can, with time, patience, and a lot of firepower, tame. Survival Ascended falls somewhere between a remaster and a remake, being a full transition of the original Survival Evolved into Unreal Engine 5.
With this new version comes every single update and DLC to the original game, and countless more updates in the years since, making it a staggeringly large game, coming in at almost 1,000 thousand hours.
9Antimatter Dimensions
1050 Hours
Of course, those are rookie numbers though. Starting with Antimatter Dimensions, we’re crossing the 1,000 hours threshold, and we’re only going further. Antimatter Dimension is the first entry in this list that is an idle game. These are games designed, in short, be be played in an idle manner. You choose some settings, and you just mindlessly click away.
It is basically about stretching further outward until you reach infinity. This gives you points that can then be spent to reach infinity again, but even more efficiently this time. You just keep going and going until you have acquired so much antimatter that the universe collapses in on itself. And that will take over 1,000 hours.
Arknights is afree-to-play gacha game, straddling a few different genres, though it mainly culminates as a tower defense game. While you can try to make many different strategies to master each mission, it works more like a puzzle with an ideal scenario to finish any given mission. In this way, even the earliest characters you recieve can be highly effective compared to randomly awarded operators.
The other side to Arknights is the base-building, which has you build facilities and assign operators to them. This gives the characters a second purpose, but also allows you to gain resources passively. It also means the game can take a very long time to see everything in. Currently, casual playtime to see everything amount to around 1,500 hours, and that is a number that is only growing.
7Mobius Final Fantasy
1666 Hours
While long gone from our lives after having been shutdown in 2020, only four years after release, Mobius Final Fantasy was a mobile game unlike many. It was fully 3D, trying to match the quality of mainline Final Fantasy games. While it was decidely more simple than those games, it still retained many of the core elements, from the pseudo-turn-based combat to the job system.
It was also hilariously packed with content. Being an episodic game, it just kept growing, with more mechanics and missions to play through, and even multiplayer in a lter update. There were countless collabs as well, both with other Final Fantasy games and other series, such as Terra Wars. All of that to average out at about 1,666 hours.
6Pixel Puzzles Ultimate Jigsaw Puzzles
1778 Hours
Taking a dramatic turn now, we have Pixel Puzzles Ultimate Jigsaw Puzzles, a name that is both too long and incredibly descriptive. It is, plain and simply, agame all about jigsaw puzzles. The ultimate is due to the sheer number of jigsaws on offer, both the many free ones within the game, and the over 100 DLC ones you can purchase.
It could be argued that building a jigsaw on a computer monitor partially defeats the point, and might be somewhat unideal compared to physically picking up the pieces. However, you will also never lose a piece either, and the amount of jigsaws on offer will keep you occupied for about 1778 hours.
5Bitburner
1804 Hours
Returning to our idle games we have Bitburner. While still an idle game at heart, it has a much more visually enticing look to keep you idling in it, and twists the typical formula in self-aware ways. Playing as an anonymous hacker, you write in actual JavaScript in-game, using them to solve problems, unlock upgrade, and even play the game for you.
Bitburner is still about efficiency, but it’s more about automating the efficiency. In that sense, you are, ironically, rarely idle as you will be working towards making certain aspects of the work play instead. So if you want something to flex your programming muscles while still giving you a depth of options, Bitburner is the one for you.
4Midas Gold Plus
1816 Hours
Midas Gold Plus lives up to its name very well. Based upon the legend of King Midas and the lucrative allure of gold, Midas Gold Plus is all about making money. It is an idle game once again, with a bit more of a combat and base-building focus. Everything takes an age, though unlike others in the genre, you can’t speed this along.
Ironically, or maybe fittingly, Midas Gold Plus makes you wait, unless you want to spend some real-life money on it. In that sense, it becomes even more of an idle game. If you don’t want to spend money on it, you have to idly wait a lot more. And much of that is what contributes to the staggering play time of around 1816 hours.
Azur Lane is a game, by all means, with a very unique look and premise. In it, you play as naval warships, which themselves are personified as female anime characters. It’s a look, by all means. Alternate World War 2 as well, if the situation wasn’t already odd enough. That said, it truly does seem to come from a love of naval combat and the mechanics of it.
Azur Lane is a side-scrolling tactical shooter, with all the warships you acquire forming fleets of a front and back row. This is used in combat, though you must still navigate your ships across a grid-based map to reach the boss, all the while conserving your fuel. It’s surprisingly deep,and packed with content. Too much, perhaps, clocking in at a massive 3,411 hours.
2NGU Idle
4775 Hours
Ah, why if it isn’t another massive idle game. Indeed, NGU Idle is an idle game, and it is staggeringly long. But in its defence, it is also one of the most visually distinctive idle games, and actually comes with quite a bit of variety in terms of its idle mechanics.
NGU Idle prides itself on its humour, and the crudeness of its drawings. By all means, it feels like a passion project, one that is incredibly personable and very rarely tries to extract money from you. You have seemingly endless progress bars, but also plentiful upgrades. The game never really has to end, but if you were to put a number on it, it would be something like 4775 hours.
The most high profile of the games in this article, and likely one of the more well-known idle games (yes, it is another idle game), Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms is a game set within the world of D&D. But it really is all about being idle. The game even performs battles when the game is closed. So what do you have to do?
For you, it’s all about unlocking characters and building out your formations, with multiple characters fighting in a single battle. On top of this, the game has a story to follow too, and with the funding of D&D behind it, it shows no signs of slowing content. That’s probably why it has over 5,000 hours of content to play. If you don’t mind waiting.
A shout-out to the MMO Knight Online which is a staggering 8645 hours. Sadly, MMOs are not included here due to being functionally endless.
