The best adventure games like Flower are Journey, Abzu and Gris. Below are 10, 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 Flower 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 same studio's next game, and the one most people mean when they talk about this feeling.
Made by Journey's art director. Underwater, wordless, and the same shape.
A wordless platformer built entirely on colour and movement.
Thatgamecompany again, with Journey's anonymous company made permanent.
Painting a town back to life, and the closest in tone to Flower on PlayStation.
Same era, same PlayStation art-game moment, built on one idea.
Wordless, warm, and paced for looking rather than solving.
Small, kind, and finished in an evening — the modern version of this idea.
A whole game of walking through a generated island while it changes around you.
If the pace rather than the movement was the appeal.
Mechanical depth. Several of the best adventure games have combat that is deliberately unsatisfying, because they want your attention somewhere else.
The full list is on games like Flower — 10 picks, no genre filter.
Journey. The same studio's next game, and the one most people mean when they talk about this feeling.
No. Flower released on the PlayStation 3, 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 Flower 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.