10 Most Original Open-World Games Of All Time

At this point, most gamers know the deal when it comes to open-world games. Vast, wide-open maps, a multitude of traversal mechanics, roaming NPCs, bustling villages, and collectibles to track down; these are all tropes that have become virtually mandatory for any new entry in the genre. While the open-world “boom” of the early and mid-2010s has died down a bit, they’re still some of the most popular games on the planet.

That’s why it’s so impressive when an open-world game comes around that is truly original. It’s not easy to innovate on something that is so prevalent, even more so when that thing has a boatload of established norms that gamers expect to be included. These games may not have completely reshaped the genre, but they are the most original open-world games of all time, blending unique ideas with established norms to create experiences that stand above the masses.

Shadow Of The Colossus

Still The Undisputed King

We’re approaching the 20th anniversary of Shadow of the Colossus, and not only does it remain one of the most beloved open-world games of all time, but it is virtually unchallenged in its own space. It’s a game that sits in a very sparse subgenre of “empty” open-world games, and in the nearly two decades since its release, it has yet to relinquish the throne, with a surprising few games copying its systems to even attempt to challenge its reign.

That’s due largely to its tight focus and pitch-perfect combat design. While there isn’t much to do outside of battling the 16 colossi scattered around the map, those battles are standout combat challenges, and not a single one misses the mark. The added layer of solving the “puzzle” of climbing each colossus to find its weak points gives the experience a genuine David vs Goliath feel, and it makes victory sweet when it arrives. At least, until those stunning colossi topple to the ground and players start to wonder if killing these magnificent beasts is making them into more of a villain than a hero.

Baby Steps

The Depths Of Despair And The Heights Of Elation

The “painfully difficult” trend in gaming has been ongoing for a while now. Developers have started to key in on the fact that players are infinitely more satisfied when they’ve overcome challenges to complete a game than they are frustrated by failing those challenges in the interim. Few games have keyed in on that sentiment better than Bennett Foddy’s Getting Over It, where players control a man in a cauldron who uses a pickaxe to scale an impossibly tall structure. One missed pickaxe swing could send them tumbling back to the ground, costing them potentially hours of progress. That formula was translated into an open world in Foddy’s follow-up walking simulator, Baby Steps.

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In this case, players control Nate, a slobby mid-thirties man who is sucked into his TV and spat out into a surreal, untamed landscape. Bare-footed and wearing nothing but a dirty onesie, Nate must find a toilet and a place to rest, but his awkwardness prevents him from asking for any of it. Instead, players must guide him—literally one step at a time—up the nearby mountain. There is no combat in Baby Steps; the game’s challenge is conveyed entirely through precisely placing Nate’s feet on uneven surfaces. Learning how to walk is a challenge in itself, but as the environment becomes more treacherous, players must take every step carefully, because Nate can and will take a tumble if they don’t, eliminating their progress as he falls. This absurdist approach to open-world gaming is surprisingly affecting. The despair players feel when they fall after a lengthy climb is intense, yet so is the elation of finally reaching level ground. There’s nothing else like it, but it’s spectacular nonetheless.

Sable

Nothing But The Sand For Company

Sable

8/10

Released

September 23, 2021

• 

Speaking of open-world games that are largely empty, Sable takes the opposite approach to Shadow of the Colossus. Where the latter is based almost entirely around combat and platforming, Sable bases everything around exploration. There is no firm mainline quest, no direction that players need to travel. Instead, they simply hop on their hoverbike, pick a direction, and see what there is to see.

Much like a game further down this list, the joy of Sable is in the discovery of its world. There are NPCs to find who offer snippets of dialogue, revealing details about the world’s current state and the lost civilization that makes up its history. Puzzles and platforming challenges litter the landscape, but they aren’t particularly difficult, instead providing context for the titular protagonist’s coming-of-age journey and her quest to find an appropriate mask. It’s all very whimsical, calming, and oftentimes almost zen. Yet its desolate sci-fi world and deeply personal stakes provide an urgency that fills in for the lack of combat and cinematic drama, making it a strange yet moving experience that is hard to compare to anything else.

Horizon Zero Dawn

Patchwork Perfection

The fascinating thing about Horizon Zero Dawn is that, when all its pieces are broken down into individual segments, each one can be traced to another successful game. Post-apocalyptic games are a dime a dozen, but Fallout and The Last of Us jump out. Aloy’s signature bow feels a lot like what Lara Croft uses in the Tomb Raider reboot trilogy. Shooting the parts off of enemies; well, that’s just Dead Space with extra steps. Parkouring up ledges and cliffs, that’s Uncharted to a tee. Climbing towers and stealthing through tall grass? Hello Assassin’s Creed. Hell, even the giant robot dinosaurs are drawing inspiration from the old Beast Wars animated series.

What makes Horizon Zero Dawn so special is how it takes all of these influences and balances them perfectly against one another to create something that feels entirely unique. Despite being a patchwork of ideas inspired from other games, it never feels derivative. Instead, Aloy’s adventure is enthralling. Learning about the collapse of society through old data logs, unlocking the secrets of the cauldrons, manipulating the machines’ AI to be friendly instead of hostile, and exploring the stunning world that is so completely foreign and yet often feels painfully familiar, it all just flows. It’s like a fantastic bowl of soup; it may be made up of familiar ingredients, but the whole is vastly superior to the sum of its parts.

Grand Theft Auto 3

An Original Sound Makes A Hundred Echoes

If we’re talking about original open-world games, it would be a mistake to ignore the original open-world game. While the genre is so widespread now that its tropes are identifiable from a 30-second teaser trailer, back in 2001, a wide-open world where the players could travel in any direction whenever they wanted was simply not something developers thought they could do. It was a pie-in-the-sky dream of what video games might one day become, and then Grand Theft Auto 3 hit the shelves.

It’s not easy to go back to GTA 3 today for anything other than nostalgia given its dated visuals and mechanics, but to ignore its influence on the open-world genre would be foolish. Without this game, there wouldn’t be an open-world genre. It established much of the formula that these games still use to this day, and with GTA 6 set to break financial records next year, there’s no denying what GTA 3 did to establish its franchise as the one true leader in the open-world scene. It may not be the most original open-world game today after influencing so many other games over the last 25 years, but at the time of its launch, GTA 3 wasn’t just original; it was a revolution.

Death Stranding

Oh, to be a fly on the wall when Hideo Kojima was coming up with this one. Death Stranding’s plot isn’t the easiest to explain, but the gist is that ghosts from the afterlife have “beached” themselves in our world, bringing about the apocalypse. Humanity has fled underground and become completely disconnected from a wider civilized community. It’s up to Sam Bridges and his fellow Porters to make the trek across the vast, empty wastelands of America and deliver materials to the dozens of isolated human settlements, connecting them to the Chiral Network in the process in an attempt to rebuild society.

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Death Stranding is the game many cite as the first triple-A walking simulator, but it has a lot more going on under the surface. There’s combat, stealth, driving, construction mechanics, and some of the most detailed equipment load management systems ever. It’s all buoyed by a fantastic narrative about Sam and his growing bond with his BB (Bridge Baby), Lou, as they form a deep relationship throughout the game’s lengthy campaign. Anyone who has played Death Stranding knows that there isn’t another game like it (except for Death Stranding 2, of course), and while it was a bit hard to parse at launch, it has since become a beloved video game and one of Hideo Kojima’s finest works.

Pathologic 2

Cutting Your Losses

“Weird” horror is a niche subgenre in itself, and one that only occasionally rears its head in the gaming sphere. It certainly has its hits—Alan Wake 2, Deadly Premonition, and Scorn, to name a few—but it’s even rarer for this subgenre to branch out into the open-world space, a realm where even traditional horror games rarely tread. That’s why Pathologic 2 is such a standout creation. It’s the strangest, most surreal example of a horror game. It’s definitely creepy, it will cause players to feel a depth of despair like nothing else out there, and it demands serious focus to even sniff its conclusion. It’s also a masterpiece.

The game follows Artemy Burakh, who returns to his rural hometown after his father’s death. Artemy’s father was the town doctor, and Artemy is expected to take his place. However, shortly after his arrival, a deadly plague rips through the town, infecting indiscriminately and sending entire districts into a state of squalor seemingly overnight. With little to go on, Artemy must investigate the plague in the hope of finding a cure. There’s a lot that’s unusual about Pathologic 2, from the futility of its combat to the strange, too-close perspective it takes during dialogue scenes to the equally strange theater shows put on by a devilish figure every night. On top of it all, the plague spares no one. Important NPCs can still get sick, and without a cure, they will die, reshaping the narrative based on the player’s failure. Even Artemy can be infected. This blend of an inscrutable setting, a seemingly hopeless mystery, and the desperation to postpone the inevitable evokes tension in a way that very few other horror games can match.

Outer Wilds

A Feast For The Curious

Existentialism is a hard thing to capture in any art medium, because it’s not really a concrete thing so much as it is a feeling. The sense that all things will end, that even with the finality of our lives, any lasting legacy we leave will be wiped away by the death of our sun is a hard thing to convert into an experience. Boy, Outer Wilds sure does pull it off, though. Players are a nameless Hearthian pilot on their first day on the job. They get a ship of their own and set off to explore the solar system. Unfortunately, exactly 22 minutes later, the local sun goes supernova, wiping out everything in the vicinity. The good news is that players are actually trapped in a time loop. Shortly after their demise, they’ll reawaken on their home planet and take to the stars again. They’ll have 22 minutes to try and solve the mystery of the sun’s sudden collapse, along with the other questions they’ll uncover while exploring the nearby planets, before the loop resets.

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Outer Wilds quickly puts players in the same mindset as Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. Death and/or failure can’t stop them, because they know they’ll get another shot. It’s surprisingly freeing in a way that the standard character respawn doesn’t capture, because they’re guaranteed a clean slate every time. Meanwhile, the only guidance they have is their own curiosity. There are no quest markers to follow, no NPCs giving directions, so experimentation is not only encouraged; it’s essential. It’s one of the most captivating feelings in any video game, because progress is not grounded upon success. Instead, to progress, players simply need to learn a little bit more, try something a little bit differently, and before long, they’ll have mastered an entire solar system.

Driver: San Francisco

Instead Of Being A Driver On The Road, How About Being Every Driver On The Road?

The Driver series was a dark horse contender in the mid-2000s racing genre, going head-to-head with the likes of Need for Speed, Gran Turismo, Midnight Club, and Forza Motorsport. It never quite made a name for itself to the same degree as those classic series, but it tried to stand out by taking a more narrative-focused approach to its campaigns. In an unfortunate twist of fate, arguably the series’ greatest narrative, and its most creative game, was also its last major release: Driver: San Francisco. The game acts as a direct sequel to Driver 3 and sees returning protagonist and FBI agent John Tanner hunting his nemesis, Charles Jericho, after he escapes from prison. During his pursuit, an explosive car crash places Tanner in a coma. The rest of the game takes place through his unconscious visualizations as Tanner realizes that he can inhabit the body of any driver in the Bay Area.

This is no plot device; players can actively jump between vehicles at any point while playing. What may initially seem like a convoluted gimmick so that players can “drive any car” quickly becomes a brilliant tactical mechanic. Car chases are the bread and butter of Driver: San Francisco, and Tanner’s newfound abilities open up a wealth of creative possibilities for coming out on top. If a target is getting away, simply hop into a car that is ahead of them. Even better, hop into a semi-truck and veer into the oncoming lane to block traffic. Jump from one car to the next and initiate crash after crash to slow the target down, then jump back into Tanner’s car to deal the final blow. It’s a brilliant system, one that’s endlessly fun and, tragically, will never be expanded upon. Other than a 3DS exclusive in 2011, Driver: San Francisco was the final game in the series.

Gravity Rush

Freedom To Fly

What is with video games and their aversion to flying? Sure, there are flight simulators, but in terms of actual characters with the ability to fly, they’re basically nonexistent. The best we get are characters like Jesse Faden in Control, or Cole MacGrath in InFamous, who can kind of “hover,” but it’s hard to say they’re truly flying. Some might say that it’s because of technical limitations, that flying requires assets to load faster than modern systems can manage. They might have a point, except Gravity Rush managed to pull it off on the PS3 all the way back in 2012. That’s why it’s baffling that the game is so wildly underrated.

Created by Keiichiro Toyama, the mastermind behind Silent Hill, Gravity Rush stars Kat, an amnesiac living in the vertical city of Hekseville who discovers that she has the power to control gravity. Manipulating these powers to her benefit, Kat takes up the mantle of local hero, helping the Heksevillians fight back against the Nevi, monsters that emerge from massive storms that brew nearby. To be fair, Kat is not technically flying, she’s falling (with style) in any direction that she chooses. However, for all intents and purposes, she can fly up and down the environment, turning on a dime and launching herself after Nevi and collectibles alike. It’s an incredible movement system, one that is unanimously beloved among the small community of gamers who have played Gravity Rush. Between that, its unique story (which becomes surprisingly moving in the third act), and a sequel that improves upon everything about the foundation that this game established, Gravity Rush is arguably the most underrated open-world game of all time, on top of being one of the most original to boot.

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