I like a good adventure game, as anyone does. For as much as I enjoy linear action affairs, I’m certainly not one to turn my nose up at a well-realized open world with a healthy spattering of interconnected dungeons, questlines, and stories. Of course, there’s a fine line between “a healthy spattering” and “more pointless busywork than your average grade school class.”
10 Open Worlds That Feel Great Just To Exist In
These open worlds aren’t just well designed. Simply living within them is enough to create joy.
High-production adventure games have gotten a bit carried away with themselves in the last decade and change, plopping you into hilariously oversized maps and peppering them with pointless, uninteresting minutiae. If you’re hankering for an adventure, but not that much of an adventure, there are a variety of games, big and small, old and new, that can help to scratch that particular itch. These games can also run the gamut of genres and subgenres, whether they’re sidescrolling Metroidvanias or top-down horror games. As long as it’s an open-ended adventure, and it’s not full of collectable bird feathers, you’ve got plenty to choose from.
10 Gato Roboto
A Bite-Sized Vania
The Metroidvania genre has long been a great choice for those looking for a more condensed adventure. It’s hard to make your open world bloated when it’s all in a big cave or what have you. The big names of the genre are all quality choices, but if you want to keep things as compact as possible, hop into the cockpit of Gato Roboto.
Gato Roboto is a bite-sized Metroidvania adventure, in which a space traveler’s pet kitty takes up a robot combat suit to rescue its owner. Compared to most games of this genre, Gato Roboto is exceptionally short, with even a fairly thorough playthrough only lasting around 4 hours and change. Short though it is, it’s still a proper Metroidvania, with multiple paths to pursue and explore and a map gradually opening up thanks to new power-ups and mode-changes.
In addition to being short, it’s not especially hard, but that can be nice if you’ve gotten a little burnt out on adventure games that beat you over the head for just trying to explore. Sometimes, an adventure can be as simple as taking a little walk around the block. You know, in a robot suit. With a big laser gun.
9 Cryptmaster
Explore A Crypt, Learn To Type
I sincerely miss the age of typing tutor games. I don’t care what anyone says, they were really helpful in getting my WPM up in my fledgeling years. Putting the practical applications aside, it’s also a surprisingly good framework to base an adventure around. Cryptmaster, for instance, gave me a typing workout I haven’t had in years.
Cryptmaster is a puzzle-adventure game centered around swiftly typing out single words and phrases as your shambolic adventurers’ party explores an underground dungeon. Whether you’re chatting with the residents, solving word puzzles, or battling monsters, you need to type quickly and decisively to get your point across. Despite its relatively simple gameplay, it’s a full-sized adventure, with towns to visit, dungeons to explore, and surprisingly climactic boss battles.
Cryptmaster embodies the adventure game spirit in that it encourages you to be inquisitive and creative in your approaches. Saying the right word to the right person may help to open up unexpected avenues and solve puzzles in untraditional ways. There’s even a word-based fast travel system, so you can quickly leap anywhere you’ve previously been as long as you know its name.
8 Crow Country
Accurate Local Theme Park Simulator
Before it became a more action and shooting-focused series, Resident Evil was an adventure game, first and foremost. The original game was more about exploring, solving puzzles, and conserving resources than anything else. I like the newer games fine, but if you want something more in line with the old format, you’ll get it out of Crow Country.
Crow Country is an action-adventure horror game in which young Mara Forest explores the titular abandoned amusement park to unravel the mysterious, monstrous mystery that originally shuttered it. It’s a clear love letter to PS1-era Resident Evil, right down to its CRT filter, but it also has more in the way of modern sensibilities, like easier aiming and unlimited saving. The map is very well laid out, large enough to surprise you, but not so large that you get completely lost at every turn, with plenty of little secrets to uncover.
That layout also ties quite well into the game’s lore and story, with little notes and posters to find here and there that help you piece together the overarching mystery. It’s not required to find all of it to finish the game, but it helps put the whole thing into a clearer perspective, and you’ll be glad you did.
7 Dave The Diver
Seafood, See Food
Here’s a fun science fact: approximately 71% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water. The ocean, in particular, is a treasure trove of fascinating sights and interesting (not to mention tasty) creatures. Even most big-budget games don’t dare to tackle a world that big, but Dave the Diver gives us a very engaging little slice of it to explore and enjoy.
Dave the Diver is a hybrid adventure and business management game, taking the titular diver into the depths of a giant blue hole in search of mysteries and seafood during the day, then having him run a sushi restaurant at night. The game marries these core concepts brilliantly, with nearly every discovery on the seafloor feeding directly into your sushi business, and the profits from sushi funding better equipment and deeper dives. The layout of the giant blue hole changes after major story beats, but its various sectors are just large enough to be worth exploring without becoming overbearing.
Dave the Diver also has some very mild roguelike elements, including the aforementioned layout changing, as well as the fact that you can only bring as much fish as you can physically carry to shore. This helps keep the pace tight and focused, instead of having you bumble around underwater for hours on end with no idea what you’re doing.
6 Dungeons Of Hinterberg
More Interesting Than Any Vacation I’ve Taken
I don’t like traveling vacations. Sightseeing is boring, I don’t like meeting and sharing space with people, and it’s too expensive. Maybe if said vacation involved entering supernatural dungeons and vanquishing goblins with a broadsword a la Dungeons of Hinterberg, I’d be more interested. Probably wouldn’t solve the cost problem, but two out of three ain’t bad.
Dungeons of Hinterberg is a, well, dungeon-crawling adventure game with light shades of life simulator. When the Austrian village of Hinterberg becomes connected to a network of genuine magical dungeons, tourists flock from all over, including burnt-out young adult Luisa, to become adventurers. It’s a great premise for a contemporary adventure story, and a nice setting for both comfort and mystery besides.
10 Best Cozy Games With Huge Maps
The perfect games for players who love calm vibes and open-world adventures.
You have a series of dungeons to conquer, tour-style, dotted with swordfighting combat, and magically-enhanced puzzle-solving. Outside of dungeons, you can explore the town and befriend the locals, gaining helpful perks in the process. While it’s a similar kind of daily gameplay loop to Persona, the vacation lasts as long as it needs to, so there’s no pressure to see everything or be productive. That’s the best kind of vacation, really.
5 The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess
Embrace Your Wild Side
For as successful and well-liked as the Switch-era Legend of Zelda games like Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are, there’s been some mounting exhaustion with their super-open, see-a-mountain-climb-a-mountain approaches. There’s been some hankering to return to the relatively smaller-scale 3D Zelda format, and if you haven’t played those games, you really ought to. One of my personal favorites is The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.
Originally released in 2006 for the GameCube and Wii, Twilight Princess is one of the darker Zelda games, both in terms of tone and literal lighting, as Link takes up his green mantle to beat back the encroaching darkness of the Twilight realm. The game’s primary gimmick is its dual-world setup, wherein Link shifts between human and wolf forms in the light and dark realms, both of which offer different avenues of exploration and combat.
It’s a large-scale adventure, but far, far smaller compared to the likes of Breath of the Wild. There are oodles of secrets and sidequests to pursue, and even the main story will take you back and forth across the land a few times. Unfortunately, it’s not available on any current Nintendo platforms as of writing, but hopefully that’ll change at some point.
4 God Of War (2018)
Father-Son Road Trip
The original God of War on the PS2 was a strictly linear action platformer affair. That was back before open-world games really took off, and before they became obnoxiously bloated. The series’ revival in 2018 carries a portion of that linear design, but much like how Kratos grew with age, it too became more flexible and open-ended.
God of War is an action-adventure game in which Kratos, having fled the Greek pantheon for the Norse one, embarks on a journey to memorialize his late wife with his son Atreus. Like its predecessors, the game follows a mostly-linear trajectory through locales and setpieces, though unlike in those games, you can freely return to any area you’ve already been to in order to hunt for secrets, farm currency, or tackle hidden challenges and sidequests.
The maps do keep to designated paths, so it’s not that open-ended, but some of these paths do a surprisingly clever job of hiding goodies just out of your line of sight. Rather than running all over a desolate patch of land, it’s a kind of exploration that rewards observation and clever approaches. It certainly helps that the combat is a hoot, especially once Kratos and Atreus start working in better sync with one another.
3 Dead Rising 2
Duct Tape Can Solve Any Problem
Something a lot of sandbox adventure games don’t quite get is that you need to have a central mechanic that makes the notion of playing in the world interesting. For example, Dead Rising 2’s central mechanic is taping random junk together to create tools for brutalizing the undead. It ain’t rocket science.
Dead Rising 2 is a sandbox adventure in which belabored single dad Chuck Greene is trapped in a neon-soaked casino resort in the midst of a massive zombie outbreak. It follows the same basic premise as its predecessor, that being setting you loose in a large sandbox filled to the brim with the shambling dead, but with a much bigger, multifaceted map instead of just a mall, and the ability to combine items into lethal combo weapons.
Dead Rising 2, as well as its spin-off, Off the Record, remain the gold standard for the entire series. Their maps are just big enough to be interesting while still being easy to navigate, and while there is a story to follow, it’s also very easy to just ignore it and make your own fun if you prefer.
2 Okami
There’s Art Everywhere
You know, I didn’t even realize I put both Okami and Twilight Princess on this list together until I started writing it. I guess wolves just make great adventure game protagonists. It’s a winning formula, especially when it looks as good as Okami does.
Okami is an action-adventure game with a similar vibe to The Legend of Zelda, in which the Shinto sun goddess Amaterasu descends to the Earth in wolfy guise to fight back a horrible, encroaching darkness. Like in Zelda, things are broken up into an overworld, villages, and dungeons, all full of puzzles and combat encounters, though what Okami brings to the table is its signature Celestial Brush. By drawing on the screen, Amaterasu can conjure all kinds of phenomena, from the rising sun to bolts of lightning.
I could spend hours in Okami’s world, reminiscent of traditional ukiyo-e art as it is. Again, as in Zelda, there are various side quests and secrets you can sniff for if you’re so inclined, but just getting to traipse across Shinshu Field every now and then is a treat in itself.
1 Yakuza 0
Smaller, Yet Denser
Even before the franchise made it big in the west, Yakuza/Like a Dragon made its name on a more compact kind of open-world adventure compared to its western contemporaries like Grand Theft Auto. The burghs of Kamurocho and Sotenbori may be geographically smaller than you’d expect, but they’re also very densely packed, which is best exemplified in Yakuza 0.
A prequel to the main series games, Yakuza 0 follows the early years of Japanese gangsters Kazuma Kiryu and Goro Majima during the 1980s Japanese bubble economy. The game is set in two large neighborhoods, both of which you’ll become very familiar with very quickly because they’re absolutely jam-packed with stuff to do. When you’re not getting into fistfights on the streets, you can visit game centers, hit up the disco, become a real estate mogul, run a cabaret club, and much more.
Yakuza 0’s main story is fantastic, but the side activities are ridiculously engrossing, to the point that most players won’t even progress the main story until they’ve had their fill. It just goes to show that an adventure doesn’t need to be more than a few blocks in size as long as it’s fun enough.
10 Best Semi-Open World Games
For players who want to explore, but not be overwhelmed by a world larger than the story.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
