The best adventure games like God of War Ragnarok are God of War, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and Marvel's Spider-Man 2. 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 God of War Ragnarok 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.
Play it first. Ragnarok assumes every beat of it.
The closest structural copy of this shape, and a good one.
Sony's other big-budget action adventure of the same moment.
The same studio culture, with far better combat variety.
Norse setting and heavy, weighty single combat.
If you want the combat to demand more than the axe ever does.
The most enjoyable open world of that generation to move through.
The other enormous action game of the era, with nothing explained.
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 God of War Ragnarok that are not adventure games, so they are not on this page:
The full list is on games like God of War Ragnarok — 9 picks, no genre filter.
God of War. Play it first. Ragnarok assumes every beat of it.
No. God of War Ragnarok released on the PlayStation 5, 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 God of War Ragnarok 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.