The best adventure games like The Legend of Zelda A Link to the Past are The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap and Hyper Light Drifter. 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 The Legend of Zelda A Link to the Past 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 most tightly designed 2D Zelda, and the remake is easy to get.
The best-looking 2D Zelda, with a shrinking mechanic that reworks the map.
Top-down adventure with the same wordless confidence.
A Zelda-shaped game where the manual itself is the puzzle.
Compact, sharp, and paced exactly like a 2D Zelda.
An unashamed A Link to the Past homage that plays well.
The same design language moved into three dimensions.
All dungeon, all item puzzles, no filler.
Top-down action with the deepest puzzle dungeons in the genre.
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 The Legend of Zelda A Link to the Past — 9 picks, no genre filter.
The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. The most tightly designed 2D Zelda, and the remake is easy to get.
No. The Legend of Zelda A Link to the Past released on the Super Nintendo, 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 The Legend of Zelda A Link to the Past 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.