GAMES LIKE ZELDA: OPEN WORLD ADVENTURES WORTH PLAYING

Breath of the Wild changed what open world games could be. Not because it was the first open world game, but because it was the first one that genuinely let you go anywhere from the beginning. See a mountain? Climb it. See a shrine? Walk to it. The game doesn't gate your exploration behind story progress or ability unlocks. You have everything you need from the start. The only thing that changes is your knowledge of how to use it.

That philosophy, trust the player, let them explore, reward curiosity, is rare even after Breath of the Wild proved it works. But it exists in pockets across gaming.

Elden Ring

The open world that FromSoftware built is enormous and almost entirely unmarked. There's no quest log. No minimap waypoints. You ride your horse over a hill and discover a castle, a catacomb, a boss, a hidden area behind a waterfall. The exploration is Zelda-like in its openness and Souls-like in its difficulty.

What Elden Ring shares with Zelda is the "what's over there?" factor. The world is designed to be visually interesting from every angle. You always see something in the distance worth investigating. And when you get there, there's always something worth finding. The scale of the Lands Between is staggering, and yet almost none of it feels like filler. FromSoftware packed meaningful encounters into corners of the map that many players never even discover on their first run.

Okami

A Zelda game that isn't Zelda. You play as Amaterasu, a wolf who is also the sun goddess, and you restore a Japan-inspired world to life using a celestial brush. The brush mechanic lets you draw on the screen to solve puzzles, create bridges, control wind, and fight enemies. It's the most creative Zelda-like combat system anyone has designed.

The art style, sumi-e ink wash painting in motion, is stunning and timeless. Okami is fifteen years old and still looks better than most modern games because the art direction is that strong.

Tunic

A love letter to the original Legend of Zelda. Top-down perspective, an isometric world full of secrets, combat that's tighter than it first appears. The twist is the in-game manual, a physical instruction booklet that you find page by page, written in a language you can't read, full of secrets hidden in the margins and illustrations.

Tunic looks simple and friendly. It is not. The late game reveals secrets that reframe everything you've done, and the true ending requires a level of observation and deduction that puts it firmly in the puzzle game category alongside the adventure. Some of those manual pages contain clues so subtle that players have spent weeks collaborating online to decode them, which is exactly the kind of community experience the original Zelda generated back in the 80s.

Immortals Fenyx Rising

Ubisoft's most Zelda-like game. Open world, puzzle shrines (called Vaults here), combat that rewards dodging and timing, a Greek mythology setting that doesn't take itself seriously. The puzzles are the highlight, with physics-based challenges that feel like condensed Breath of the Wild shrines.

It was overlooked at launch but has found a dedicated audience since. If you liked the shrine puzzles in Zelda and wanted more of them, Fenyx has dozens.

Genshin Impact

An anime Breath of the Wild with gacha monetization. The exploration is genuinely good. The world is enormous, beautiful, and full of discoverable content. Climbing, gliding, elemental puzzles, and a combat system based on combining different elemental effects. The Zelda influence is direct and unashamed, and the execution is strong enough to stand on its own.

Oceanhorn 2

The most literal Zelda clone on this list. Third-person, dungeon crawling, puzzle-solving, a green-clad hero. Oceanhorn 2 doesn't innovate beyond its inspiration but it's a competent, well-made adventure that scratches the Zelda itch on platforms where Zelda doesn't exist.

Crosscode

An action RPG that disguises deep puzzle design inside fast-paced combat. The dungeons are Zelda dungeons. Switches, blocks, enemy puzzles, boss fights that require specific strategies. The combat is more complex than Zelda, with a combo system and elemental switching, but the dungeon design is pure Zelda DNA.

What makes the Zelda formula work

Exploration plus discovery plus reward. You see something interesting. You go to it. You find something. The "something" is a puzzle, a treasure, a secret, a new area. The loop is simple and endlessly repeatable because the world is designed to always have something interesting just beyond whatever you're currently looking at.

The Zelda influence shows up everywhere in modern game design because the exploration philosophy is universally applicable: if the player can see it, the player should be able to reach it, and when they get there, they should find something that was worth the trip.