Ten single-player games worth replaying with cheats enabled

Not every game rewards a cheat run. Turning on god mode in a Souls game removes the entire point of playing it. Turning on god mode in Fallout: New Vegas frees you to actually explore the wasteland instead of grinding it. The difference is whether the systems the game is built around are the challenge or the content. When the systems are the content, cheats let you see more of them. Here are ten games where that has been true for us.

1. The Sims 4

motherlode gives you 50,000 simoleons. bb.moveobjects lets you place anything anywhere. cas.fulleditmode lets you edit any Sim's traits and appearance. The Sims 4 without cheats is a resource-management game. The Sims 4 with cheats is a doll house, and the doll house is what people actually want to play.

2. Skyrim

tgm for god mode, tcl to walk through walls, player.setav carryweight 5000 so you can pick up everything. A replay of Skyrim with these on lets you actually finish the questlines you always meant to — the College of Winterhold, the Dark Brotherhood, Solstheim — without the grind of leveling up between them.

3. GTA V

The single-player cheats in GTA V are jokes: HOTHANDS gives you flaming melee attacks, SKYFALL drops you out of the sky at freefall speed, SLOWMO bullet-times your world. They are not efficient shortcuts. They are toys. Playing GTA V with the cheat list open is basically a physics sandbox.

4. Minecraft

Turn on cheats, type /gamemode creative, and Minecraft becomes the game most people actually enjoy: a building tool with unlimited materials. Survival mode is fine. Creative mode with cheats is what people spend a thousand hours in.

5. Cities: Skylines

Money cheats plus unlock-all-tiles cheats in Cities: Skylines turn the game from a slow economic simulation into a design canvas. If what you want out of a city builder is to design a good city — not to unlock the ability to design a good city over 40 hours — this is the way to play it.

6. Fallout: New Vegas

tgm, player.setav speedmult 150, and the ability to jump to any quest with sqt and setstage unlocks the game's incredible writing without the friction of its combat. New Vegas is a novel-length narrative wearing an RPG's clothing. Cheats let you read the novel.

7. Baldur's Gate 3

Mod-based cheats in BG3 do not remove the challenge — they let you rebuild your party mid-run when your composition is not working, which the base game punishes you for by forcing a total restart. This is the "quality of life" case for cheats: the systems are great, but the friction around iterating on your build is not.

8. RimWorld

RimWorld's dev mode is officially supported and the community treats it as a legitimate way to play. Spawn colonists, edit their stats, trigger raids you want to see. RimWorld is a story generator, and dev mode is the writer's room.

9. Kerbal Space Program

Infinite fuel, no crash damage, and the ability to teleport a vessel anywhere in the solar system turn KSP from an engineering game into a tourism game. Both versions are fun. The tourism version is a lot more accessible.

10. Red Dead Redemption 2

The cheat menu in RDR2 is intentional. Enter it and you can unlock every horse breed, every weapon, and set the weather. Playing the story mode of RDR2 a second time with the cheat menu open is one of the best ways to actually appreciate the world Rockstar built — you spend the time looking around instead of loading ammo.

What the list has in common

Every game on this list has systems worth exploring and content worth seeing, but the friction between the player and the content is high enough that a second playthrough almost never happens without cheats. That is the case for cheats in modern single-player games. Not "I want to skip the game" — "I want to see the game a second time without paying the tax."