Best Adventure Games Like Shadow of the Colossus

The best adventure games like Shadow of the Colossus are Ico, The Last Guardian and Praey for the Gods. Below are 11, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to adventure costs you.

Why Adventure Is a Good Answer for Shadow of the Colossus

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 Shadow of the Colossus 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.

11 Adventure Games Like Shadow of the Colossus

  1. 1. Ico

    Same director and the same restraint — an empty castle, one companion, almost no dialogue.

  2. 2. The Last Guardian

    Team Ico's third game: the colossus is on your side this time, and it does not always listen.

  3. 3. Praey for the Gods

    An unashamed homage — climbing huge bosses in a frozen open world, plus survival mechanics.

  4. 4. Journey

    Wordless, small, and built almost entirely from scale and silence.

  5. 5. Rain World

    A hostile, indifferent world where you are small and nothing explains itself to you.

  6. 6. Titan Souls

    Boss rush distilled: one arrow, one hit, sixteen puzzle-bosses in a quiet overworld.

  7. 7. Death Stranding

    The long empty traversal between objectives is the game, not the filler between it.

  8. 8. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

    The closest big-budget game to that feeling of riding into somewhere nobody has been.

  9. 9. Elden Ring

    For the boss-as-landscape scale, if you want the combat to be genuinely hard.

  10. 10. Sable

    A whole game of riding across emptiness towards something on the horizon, and no combat at all.

  11. 11. The Pathless

    Traversal as the entire pleasure, punctuated by five enormous hunts.

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.

The full list is on games like Shadow of the Colossus — 11 picks, no genre filter.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best adventure game like Shadow of the Colossus?

Ico. Same director and the same restraint — an empty castle, one companion, almost no dialogue.

Are all of these on the PlayStation 2?

No. Shadow of the Colossus released on the PlayStation 2, 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 Shadow of the Colossus 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 Shadow of the Colossus

More Adventure Games Recommendations

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