The best adventure games like Horizon Zero Dawn are Monster Hunter: World, Horizon Forbidden West and The Witcher 3. 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 Zero Dawn 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 genre Horizon is really in — study the creature, prepare, then hunt it.
The sequel, with better traversal and a bigger machine roster.
Preparation-led combat and the best open-world writing.
The most enjoyable open world of that generation to simply move through.
If you want the exploration with far more demanding combat.
The same era of open-world design, and the closest structural sibling.
Sony's other big adventure, with a much tighter story.
For the post-collapse world and the sense of a mystery underneath it.
Approach-planning as the core pleasure, in an open world.
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 Zero Dawn — 9 picks, no genre filter.
Monster Hunter: World. The genre Horizon is really in — study the creature, prepare, then hunt it.
No. Horizon Zero Dawn released on the PlayStation 4, 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 Zero Dawn 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.