Best Adventure Games on the Xbox One

The adventure games worth playing on the Xbox One start with Ori and the Blind Forest, Quantum Break, Sea of Thieves.

The Xbox One and Adventure Games

A generation where the first-party output thinned and the value moved to the subscription. The library's highlights are mostly the games that arrived through it.

Adventure Games are a solid rather than a defining part of this library — worth knowing, but not the reason anybody owns the machine.

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.

The Adventure Games Worth Playing

  1. 1. Ori and the Blind Forest

    Follow the link for hand-written recommendations if you want more like it.

  2. 2. Quantum Break

    Follow the link for hand-written recommendations if you want more like it.

  3. 3. Sea of Thieves

    Follow the link for hand-written recommendations if you want more like it.

  4. 4. Hellblade Senua's Sacrifice

    Follow the link for hand-written recommendations if you want more like it.

  5. 5. Dead Rising 3

    Follow the link for hand-written recommendations if you want more like it.

  6. 6. Recore

    Follow the link for hand-written recommendations if you want more like it.

  7. 7. Ryse Son of Rome

    Follow the link for hand-written recommendations if you want more like it.

  8. 8. A Plague Tale Innocence

    Follow the link for hand-written recommendations if you want more like it.

  9. 9. The Outer Worlds

    Follow the link for hand-written recommendations if you want more like it.

What Makes a Good Adventure Game

A world with a reason to wander it, and writing that survives being read rather than skipped.

Mechanical depth. Several of the best adventure games have combat that is deliberately unsatisfying, because they want your attention somewhere else.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best adventure game on the Xbox One?

Ori and the Blind Forest is the usual first answer, and there are 9 in the library we cover.

Was the Xbox One good at adventure games?

It is a solid rather than a defining part of the library.

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 is this list put together?

From the games this site covers on the Xbox One, matched against hand-mapped gameplay categories rather than a storefront's genre tag. A page only exists where there are at least four, which is why some console and genre combinations have no page at all.

Adventure Games on Other Consoles

More From the Xbox One

Or browse the whole Xbox One library.