Best Adventure Games Like Grounded

The best adventure games like Grounded are Grounded 2, Subnautica and Valheim. Below are 8, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to adventure costs you.

Why Adventure Is a Good Answer for Grounded

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 Grounded 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.

8 Adventure Games Like Grounded

  1. 1. Grounded 2

    The follow-up, same premise, larger garden.

  2. 2. Subnautica

    The other survival game with a real story and an ending.

  3. 3. Valheim

    The best co-op survival building game, and generous with progress.

  4. 4. Smalland: Survive the Wilds

    The closest premise match — tiny character, huge world.

  5. 5. Raft

    Small-scale co-op survival with a clear direction to progress in.

  6. 6. Sons of the Forest

    If you want survival with real horror pressure.

  7. 7. Palworld

    Survival crafting with creature collecting on top.

  8. 8. Astroneer

    Gentle co-op survival with no combat pressure at all.

What This Filter Leaves Out

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 Grounded that are not adventure games, so they are not on this page:

  • Enshrouded — Survival building with proper action combat.

The full list is on games like Grounded — 9 picks, no genre filter.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best adventure game like Grounded?

Grounded 2. The follow-up, same premise, larger garden.

Are all of these on the Xbox Series X|S?

No. Grounded released on the Xbox Series X|S, 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.

What counts as an adventure game?

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.

Are adventure games long?

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.

How are these chosen?

By hand. Each pick was written for the full Grounded 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.

Other Angles on Grounded

More Adventure Games Recommendations

Or read the adventure guide for where to start in the genre generally.