The best adventure games like Paper Mario are Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Bug Fables and Mario and Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story. 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 Paper Mario 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 peak of the series, and the remake is faithful.
An indie Paper Mario, and better than it has any right to be.
The other Mario RPG line, and the best-written of them.
Where the timed-hit idea started, and the remake is good.
Timed hits in every battle, with a much bigger story.
Turn-based battles where dodging is a real-time skill.
Short, funny, timed-hit RPG for the same audience.
The best-paced turn-based RPG there is.
The other funny turn-based RPG people never stop asking about.
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 Paper Mario — 9 picks, no genre filter.
Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. The peak of the series, and the remake is faithful.
No. Paper Mario released on the Nintendo 64, 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 Paper Mario 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.