The best adventure games like Earthbound are Undertale, Mother 3 and Lisa: The Painful. Below are 8, 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 Earthbound 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.
The most obvious heir — same suburban-surreal tone, same willingness to break its own rules.
The actual sequel, and the one that follows through on the darkness.
Takes the EarthBound frame somewhere much bleaker and does it well.
Suburban RPG that switches between cheerful and horrifying with the same confidence.
Small, funny, modern-suburban RPG with real charm.
The comedy RPG that actually respects its own battle system.
For the aesthetic, if you want more 90s-suburban-surreal RPG in any form.
If what you liked was the pacing and the lack of filler rather than the tone.
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 Earthbound that are not adventure games, so they are not on this page:
The full list is on games like Earthbound — 9 picks, no genre filter.
Undertale. The most obvious heir — same suburban-surreal tone, same willingness to break its own rules.
No. Earthbound released on the Super Nintendo, 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 Earthbound 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.