The best adventure games like Ape Escape are Bug Fables, Pikmin and Bugsnax. Below are 6, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to adventure costs you.
Filtering to adventure means the place and the story are what you want back, not the challenge. It is the right filter when the thing you remember is where you were rather than what you did.
What you get: A world with a reason to wander it, and writing that survives being read rather than skipped.
What made Ape Escape worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the adventure part of that answer, and only the adventure part.
For the tone — a cheerful hunt through small worlds full of characters.
The other Sony-era-adjacent game about catching and herding small creatures.
A modern creature-catching game where every catch is its own contraption puzzle.
The PS2 platformer that inherited Ape Escape's collect-everything structure.
A gadget-driven 3D platformer with far stranger levels.
Capture mechanics turn every enemy into a new gadget.
Mechanical depth. Several of the best adventure games have combat that is deliberately unsatisfying, because they want your attention somewhere else.
Specifically, these are strong answers for Ape Escape that are not adventure games, so they are not on this page:
The full list is on games like Ape Escape — 9 picks, no genre filter.
Bug Fables. For the tone — a cheerful hunt through small worlds full of characters.
No. Ape Escape released on the PlayStation, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
Anywhere the story and the place matter more than the skill ceiling — point-and-click, walking sims, narrative thrillers and most open worlds. The label alone tells you very little, which is why each pick here says what it actually is.
They split hard. Open-world adventures run to a hundred hours; the narrative ones are often finishable in an evening, and the short ones are usually the better written.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Ape Escape list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is adventure — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the adventure guide for where to start in the genre generally.