The best rpg games like Horizon Forbidden West are Horizon Zero Dawn, Monster Hunter: World and Ghost of Tsushima. Below are 7, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to rpg costs you.
Filtering to RPG means you want progression — a character to build or a party to grow — layered on top of whatever else you liked.
What you get: A reason to keep going after the novelty wears off. RPGs are the genre that reliably converts hours into feeling more capable.
What made Horizon Forbidden West worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the rpg part of that answer, and only the rpg 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.
The same era of open-world design and the closest structural sibling.
Open-world fantasy where the monsters are the content.
Immediacy. Almost every RPG asks for a slow first few hours, and the systems that make hour forty good are the same ones that make hour one a menu.
Specifically, these are strong answers for Horizon Forbidden West that are not rpg games, so they are not on this page:
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.
Whether the stats are the point. In an RPG the build decides what you can do; in an action game with stats the build only decides how fast you do it.
No. The picks below span turn-based, real-time and action RPGs, and each one says which it is.
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 rpg — 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 rpg guide for where to start in the genre generally.