The best adventure games like Horizon Forbidden West are Horizon Zero Dawn, Monster Hunter: World and Ghost of Tsushima. Below are 9, 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 Horizon Forbidden West 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 — the story reveal only works once.
The genre Horizon is really in, done at greater depth.
The most enjoyable open world of that generation to move through.
Exploration that rewards curiosity rather than marking it.
Open-world writing at a standard Horizon never reaches.
Sony's other big adventure, with a much tighter story.
The same era of open-world design and the closest structural sibling.
For the post-collapse world and a mystery underneath it.
Open-world fantasy where the monsters are the content.
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 Horizon Forbidden West — 9 picks, no genre filter.
Horizon Zero Dawn. Play it first — the story reveal only works once.
No. Horizon Forbidden West 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 Horizon Forbidden West 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.