All the games that I see as examples are multiplayer games with chat and have certain aspects in them that wouldn't work great for a single player puzzle game, or a super meat boy-esc 2d platformer. Do we have to include multiplayer and the chat system, or is their a way to turn them off/not use them in the first place?

Hello!

Single-player games can be created.

Each package you build with the Creator Toolkit requires a project configuration. The project configuration for a space has a setting (Server Instancing) to limit the number of people in an instance. See more here: https://docs.spatial.io/project-configuration

To turn off Spatial GUI systems, such as chat, you'd use the SpatialBridge's coreGUIService: https://cs.spatial.io/reference/SpatialSys.UnitySDK.ICoreGUIService