20 Open World Games Everyone Should Play

While some of them are guilty of just chucking you in a big map and making you collect a bunch of random flowers in order to make a bazooka, there are few gaming experiences out there like an open world to help you forget your worries. Let’s take a look at just 20 amazing open world games that can distract you for an hour or a hundred from the fact that bananas don’t actually look like phones anymore.

 

Dread Delusion

If you’re the kind of person who refuses to touch a game unless it runs at 120 FPS in 4K with ray tracing bouncing off the main character’s forehead, please do stick around for a second. Dread Delusion looks like it crawled out of a warehouse for PS1 games that were too weird to ship, and that’s the point. Beneath the chunky polygons and surreal colour palette is one of the most fascinating, atmospheric open worlds in years.

Set in a skyborne kingdom held together by crumbling magic and questionable philosophy, Dread Delusion feels like an RPG dream someone half-remembered from the late ’90s. You’re free to wander floating islands, pick moral fights with cults, chat to philosophers in masks, and make choices that actually ripple through the world. It’s weird, clever, and pretty reactive too.

There’s no pointless busywork or checkbox hunting here — just exploration, discovery, and a constant sense that something’s gone terribly wrong in the most beautiful way possible. Dread Delusion proves that atmosphere and intent beat shiny textures a whole lot of the time.

 

Dying Light

Dying Light: another open world zombie game, but you can jump on and off their heads. That did it for me back in 2015, and it does it for me in 2025 too.

The game drops you into a decaying city full of infected, bandits, and questionable parkour routes, then lets you sprint, vault, and panic your way across rooftops like the world’s sweatiest courier.

You scavenge by day, then survive by night. Once the sun goes down, the tone shifts from power fantasy to sheer panic as faster, meaner creatures crawl out and start chasing you through the streets. It’s still one of the best examples of dynamic tension in open-world design.

Combat’s full of improvised weapons and crunchy strikes, and the movement system makes even simple errands feel cinematic. Even a decade on, Dying Light is just fantastic to play. The second game is also pretty decent, and there is also The Beast for you to check out after.

 

Ghost of Tsushima

Ghost of Tsushima sits right on the line between artful and blockbuster. It’s basically the kind of open world game Ubisoft forgot how to make.

You play as Jin Sakai, a samurai slowly realising that honour won’t save anyone from an invading army. What follows is a methodical unravelling of tradition, delivered through a truly stunning, contemplative game.

The island itself is the star. Fields sway, foxes guide you to secrets, and the wind acts as your compass — a genuinely clever way to keep you exploring without cluttering the screen. It’s open-world design stripped of all the noise.

Combat is pure samurai cinema, and every slice of your blade feels like a deleted scene from Seven Samurai. Every fight feels like a perfectly choreographed standoff.

Ghost of Tsushima doesn’t try to reinvent the open world machine. It just gives you a neat sword, some very helpful breezes, and the license to just feel very cool. Its sequel is also well worth checking out.

 

Gravity Rush 2

Gravity Rush 2 takes the laws of physics, says “nah” and then immediately backflips off them. It’s a sequel that doubles down on everything strange about the first game. You’ve got weightless combat, upside-down cities, and a plot that’s somehow heartfelt and incomprehensible at the same time.

You play as Kat, who can shift gravity at will, which sounds empowering until you plough headfirst into a building for the tenth time. But once it clicks, it’s brilliant. The sense of movement still puts most modern open worlds to shame.

The tone swings from slapstick to serious faster than the camera can keep up, but that’s part of the charm. Not everything lands here but it doesn’t matter when it’s taking swings like this.

Gravity Rush 2 was a bit of a failure, and its sheer existence feels miraculous, especially cos you can’t see Sony backing something like this these days.

 

Kenshi

Kenshi looked at modern open world design and decided to remove about 80% of the structure. There’s no main quest, no chosen one, and definitely no hand-holding. You start as a starving nobody with a stick and a dream — which usually lasts about four minutes before someone steals your shoes.

It’s a world that genuinely doesn’t care if you live or die, and that’s what makes it special. You can build a crew, scrape together some money, maybe start a farm or accidentally join a cannibal cult. Half the stories you’ll tell are just you failing upwards through sheer persistence. It’s ugly, clunky, and occasionally cruel, but it’s also one of the most reactive sandboxes ever made.

There’s a bleak sense of humour baked into it all — like the world’s laughing with you, not at you. Every decision will probably ruin somebody’s day, and it will most likely be yours when you lose most of your limbs.

Kenshi represents open world freedom without safety nets. It’s rough, ridiculous, and completely unforgettable once you get lost in it.

 

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is a mud-soaked medieval sim about doing your best to not die of bad decisions and bad hygiene. You’re Henry again, who’s still mostly winging it through a world that feels just like medieval times. I should know, I was there. Swords are heavy, armour’s expensive, and there are no funny beer drinking apps to while away the time. It was a challenging time for all.

That’s the appeal. Through botched swordfights, drunken mistakes, and dialogue choices that spiral out of control, you will learn the hard way. It’s less about power fantasy and more about getting by, and the attention to detail borders on obsessive.

The first game already nailed the atmosphere, and this sequel just builds on it. More freedom, better pacing, chunkier combat, yet still gloriously grounded. There are NPCs with routines, systems that don’t care if you’re lost, and weather that ruins your plans because of course it does.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is  the kind of open world that feels so well designed that you can almost smell the dung and low life expectancy. Warhorse outdid themselves here.

 

Mad Max

Mad Max got shrugged off as “another open-world game with towers” when it launched. Even I didn’t, as I’d come fresh off Metal Gear Solid V. That was a bit unfair because it’s one of the best examples of how to make desolation not boring. The map’s just sand, rust, and wreckage, yet it somehow never feels empty. Every ridge hides a camp to tear apart, a convoy to ambush, or a storm waiting to kill you mid-loot run.

Driving is heavy, dirty, and violent. Just like your mum. The Magnum Opus isn’t just a car; it’s your livelihood, your weapon, and occasionally your coffin. Combat’s the same scrappy brawling from the Arkham era, only grimmer, sandier and louder. It’s repetitive, sure, but the feedback loop of scavenging, upgrading, and surviving hits in a very specific way.

The story barely matters, but the tone does. The world looks sun-bleached and half-dead, the people speak in grunts and prophecies, and Max himself sounds tired of being rebooted. It’s not perfect, but there’s a reason some still go mad for it.

 

Outward

In Outward, you’re just another idiot with a backpack, trying not to freeze, starve, or get cursed to death.. It’s an RPG that takes survival extremely seriously, forcing you to actually plan before leaving town. Forget your bedroll? Congratulations, you’re dead.

It’s really not for everyone. Combat’s clunky because it should be. Again, you’re not a chosen one, you’re a villager swinging a stick and hoping for the best. The magic system’s buried under rituals and preparation, the map gives you no markers, and the only way to succeed is to keep hitting your head against a wall until it hurts less. Somehow, all that friction makes it feel more immersive than a lot of bigger budget games.

But it also can be quite peaceful. Long stretches of walking, quiet nights by the fire, the occasional sense of competence when something finally goes right. It’s not the most perfect game ever, but it is one well worth checking out. Ward.

 

Outer Wilds

Outer Wilds starts like a cosy little space adventure and becomes Groundhog Day meets Interstellar. You’re an astronaut from a backwater species, hopping between planets to poke at ancient ruins and figure out why the sun keeps exploding every 22 minutes. Then you realise you’re stuck in a time loop, and everything you do is just another way of learning how small you really are.

Each discovery changes how you see the world rather than what you can do in it. The planets are small but full of surprises. There are sand drains between twin worlds, gravity bends caves into knots, and entire ecosystems collapse in slow motion. You’re never told what to do; you just follow curiosity until it leads somewhere wonderful or horrifying.

There’s nothing else quite like it. No combat, no filler, it’s…just a perfect mix of melancholy and awe. It’s the rare open world game that trusts you to care, and by the end, you absolutely do.

 

Pathologic 2

Pathologic 2 is here to watch you slowly unravel while insisting you’re helping. You’re a plague doctor returning to a dying town, trying to save people who mostly hate you, in a sandbox world that doesn’t pause when you’re tired, hungry, or lost. Everything’s decaying and the game’s only real question is how long you can pretend to cope.

It’s miserable in a fun way. We promise. Sometimes. Every decision costs something, every success feels hollow, and every failure can feel brutal. You’ll ration medicine, barter for food, and realise halfway through that the town has more personality than any of its residents. The plague’s random, time’s cruel, and you can’t save everyone. Sometimes you can’t even save anyone.

Pathologic is what happens when you take STALKER and make it more miserable. It’s not an easy recommendation, but it’s the kind of game that sticks. You don’t beat Pathologic 2 so much as survive it.

 

Project Zomboid

Project Zomboid is the most convincing end of the world ever made. It opens with one simple message: This is how you died. From there, it’s all on you: foraging, barricading, cooking, panicking, and dying in increasingly stupid ways. Oh it does have multiplayer, so take that and add other idiots too.

There’s no story, just a slow apocalypse that unfolds however you let it. You build a base, stockpile beans, and then burn it all down because you left a shrimp in the oven. The systems work together brilliantly to ruin your day.

It’s brutal but honest. Just the cold reality of trying to last another night. When you finally slip up, it’s usually because of something mundane, like tripping over a fence or misjudging a window jump. Every death feels stupid, and every stupid death feels earned.

It’s the best kind of survival sim, and I could easily lose thousands of hours to it if I didn’t have a job.

 

Red Dead Redemption 2

The best compliment you can give Red Dead Redemption 2 is that it’s such a shoo-in for 1000 different lists that it can feel like a boring inclusion.  It’s stunning and so committed to realism that even picking up a can of beans feels like a moral choice. You play as Arthur Morgan, an outlaw watching his world collapse in slow motion.

Rockstar built a ridiculous level of detail here. Every routine, every horse testicle, every conversation feels handcrafted. The pacing, the quiet moments by the campfire — it’s all there to make you feel like you’ve lived something, not just played it.

The story’s excellent. It’s long, sad, occasionally meandering, but anchored by one of the best character arcs in any game. Arthur’s weary decency cuts through the noise of a world that’s already over.

It’s arguably a bit slow, but that’s the point. The wild west is dying, and revolution doesn’t happen overnight.

 

Satisfactory

In Satisfactory, you’re dropped onto an alien planet and told to build a factory. Then a bigger one, then a city-sized one that exists purely to feed the first. What starts as a tidy little assembly line quickly becomes an industrial nightmare made entirely of your own decisions. The only thing it needs is tax dodging and you’ve got a Jeff Bezos simulator.

There’s no real goal beyond “make it more efficient,” which is code for “make it worse.” You’ll spend hours chasing the perfect conveyor belt layout, convinced this next redesign will finally be clean and logical. It never is. The more you fix, the uglier it gets.

It’s surprisingly peaceful, though. The world’s gorgeous, the music’s calm, and the only real enemy is your own perfectionism. You build, you optimise, you delete half of it because the alignment’s off by a pixel. Then you do it again.

Satisfactory doesn’t need drama or spooky monsters that come out at night, It just lets your inner engineer spiral quietly into madness.

 

Sleeping Dogs

Sleeping Dogs is the best open-world crime game that everyone forgot about. It’s basically GTA if GTA kept the same feature creep madness of San Andreas going. You play as Wei Shen, an undercover cop in Hong Kong, which sounds like a bad action movie setup — and that’s exactly why it works.

The driving’s tight, the city’s dense, and the melee system’s still one of the best in the genre. Fights are quick, brutal, and full of environmental takedowns that makes it all feel punch and fulfilling. You can suplex a guy into a fan, kick another through a fish tank, then calmly walk away like you didn’t just commit light manslaughter in a noodle shop.

The story actually holds together too, though obviously it’s a bit tropey. You got a mix of loyalty, identity, and how far you can push an undercover role before it stops being an act. It’s not deep, but it is sharp.

It’s a shame it never got a sequel, because Sleeping Dogs did open-world storytelling with style, restraint, and also Emma Stone. Yep, she’s in it too.

 

Subnautica

Subnautica starts off like a survival game and slowly turns into an anxiety simulator with beautiful lighting and nice fish. You crash-land on an alien ocean planet, scavenge some junk, build a base, and then realise you’ve spent three hours putting off going deeper. It’s equal parts discovery and dread, and the balance is what makes it so damn good.

The deeper you go, the stranger it gets. There’s glowing ecosystems, rumbling leviathans, and some super impeccable sound design. You’re always a few metres of oxygen away from disaster, but the pull to see what’s next never really fades.

It’s clever in how it handles pacing. The game gives you just enough safety to relax before throwing something colossal at you in the dark. The crafting and exploration loop feels purposeful, and the world design really was lacking a bit in the follow up.

Subnautica makes fear and fascination work together. You keep diving not because you’re brave, but because you just have to see what’s down in the depths.

 

Sunset Overdrive

A one time Xbox One exclusive from Insomniac’s troubled years, Sunset Overdrive is all colour, explosions, and bad energy drinks. It’s set in a city overrun by mutants after a corporate sugar bomb goes wrong, which is really just an excuse to grind on power lines while blowing things up. The story’s nonsense, the humour tries a bit too much, but it’s hard to care when it feels this good to move.

The traversal is what you should play for. You bounce, slide, grind, and wall-run through the city, chaining movement into endless combos. It’s fast, silly, and genuinely satisfying once you find the rhythm.

Yeah, the city’s a bit empty once the novelty wears off, but the movement keeps it alive. Even after the missions blur together, just zipping around feels great. It’s not deep or ambitious, but it’s got style and confidence to spare.

Sunset Overdrive doesn’t want you to think too much. It just wants you to keep moving, blowing things up, and enjoying the mess.

 

The Long Dark

The Long Dark is a game about constantly learning how to be a little less cold. It drops you into the frozen backcountry of Canada after a geomagnetic disaster and lets you slowly freeze and starve. There’s no zombie twist, or no secret lab. Just weather, hunger, and wolves. Also bears.

It’s brutally slow in a good way. Every step matters because every step costs you warmth or calories. You start planning routes like military operations. You plan to reach the cabin before dark, ration the matches, maybe don’t eat that rancid venison. When something goes wrong, you will genuinely know the meaning of survival.

The atmosphere’s incredible: quiet, lonely, and peaceful, in a the world I know is gone kinda way. The sound of snow underfoot does more for tension than most horror soundtracks.

The Long Dark is the rare survival game that’s all about acceptance. You don’t conquer the cold. You just learn how to live with it for another day.

 

The Saboteur

The Saboteur is a completely underappreciated send-off for mid-2000s open worlds. You play as an Irish race-car driver turned resistance fighter in Nazi-occupied Paris — a premise that sounds like it was pitched in a pub. It’s great.

The world shifts between black-and-white and colour depending on how much of the city you’ve liberated. A pretty neat trick. The driving’s great, the climbing’s clunky, and the accents are all over the place, but it somehow gels.

The Saboteur is not worried about structure or tone, just about being cool and fun. Pandemic Studios went under right after releasing it, which really is just a huge shame.

It’s imperfect, but that’s what makes it feel so charming these days. The Saboteur is the kind of open world that doesn’t exist anymore, probably because nobody’s reckless enough to make one. Get it for a couple of quid and have a blast.

 

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

The Witcher 3 is still an open world benchmark for a reason.

You’re Geralt of Rivia, monster hunter, part-time shagger, and full-time grump, wandering through a war-torn countryside full of peasants who stare at you like a baby on a plane.

Every side quest feels like it belongs in its own short story collection. You go in expecting busywork and end up in a moral disaster about love, curses, or body parts that talk. The world is dense enough to keep you hooked for a hundred hours without noticing.

The combat’s fine, and is maybe a bit long in the tooth today, but can have real moments of fun. The real draw is the atmosphere and the storytelling. There are quests here you will never forget.

Even now, The Witcher 3 feels complete in a way most big games don’t. And then it has two massive expansions for you to complete after. Pretty good deal.

 

Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip

If you’ve been missing The Simpsons: Hit and Run, this one’s for you.

Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip is a small, chaotic sandbox about a guy who decides he’s going to drive his car into space, and somehow, that’s all the setup it needs. No gritty realism, just one weird town full of even weirder people and your dumb determination to leave it behind.

It’s scrappy, fast, and proudly stupid. You run around helping locals with nonsense tasks, collect junk, and upgrade your beater car until it’s more dream than machine. The driving’s janky, the jokes land about half the time, and none of that matters because it’s just fun.

The world’s tiny but dense with charm, the soundtrack’s pure good vibes, and the whole thing feels like something a dev made as a dickabout with mates Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip might not take you far, but it’s impossible not to smile while it lasts.

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