Top 30 Immersive Games That Will Transport You to New Worlds

Avowed

After two excellent Pillars of Eternity cRPGs, developer Obsidian Entertainment decided to shift gears and show the world of Eora from a different perspective.

Specifically: the first-person perspective, with an optional TTP view. The game puts you in the shoes of a special envoy sent to the Living Lands, troubled by a mysterious maladie you are immune to thanks to your divine ancestry.

Image credit: Obsidian Entertainment

The premise might sound diplomatic, but don’t worry, getting to the bottom of things will require a healthy amount of combat and exploration. Combat in particular provides an entertaining mix of melee, ranged, and magical means, often evoking Dark Messiah of Might & Magic, except with a stronger presence of narrative choice to help you lock onto the setting and your character.

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Cyberpunk 2077

For decades, Night City inspired the imagination of thousands of people who played various editions of the tabletop RPG Cyberpunk.

When CD Projekt Red made their video game adaptation of that world, Night City was an obvious, inevitable place to set the game in, and now, after all the updates and a substantial expansion, its scope and scale makes it an impressive digital metropolis.

Image credit: CD PROJEKT RED

Of course, the city alone wouldn’t be enough, so Cyberpunk 2077 taps into some of the immersive sim magic, with many methods of accomplishing objectives, based on the abilities and equipment you got for your player character, an up-and-coming merc called V. Whether you explore the city, seek side-stories, or pursue the main plot involving a mysterious chip, this science fiction game is a great time.

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Baldur’s Gate 3

Most game on the list are first- or third-person perspective, but it isn’t necessary for an immersive experience.

Baldur’s Gate 3, from veteran RPG-makers Larian Studios, achieves immersion through a mix of highly interactive environments, impressively reactive story reflecting some of the wildest choices you could come up with, and characterful writing able to pull you into the fiction.

Image credit: Larian Studios

The degree to which creativity can drive solutions to problems is unparalleled in the genre, and it doesn’t go away during the turn-based battles, which remain quite welcoming to player-driven shenanigans. If you’re hungry for a deeply story-driven, party-based cRPG in a high fantasy setting, Baldur’s Gate 3 can keep you immersed for hundreds of hours across many playthroughs.

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Half-Life: Alyx

It only makes sense to include a VR production on the list of immersive games.

Half-Life: Alyx is not the long-desired sequel to Half-Life 2. Instead, it’s a prequel, focusing on a mission Alyx Vance went on before the events of HL2 kicked off. It also happens to be an impressive showcase of what VR games can aspire to in terms of interactivity, immersion, and gameplay.

Image credit: Valve

Where HL2 had a gravity gun, Alyx has gravity gauntlets, mimicking your VR controllers. The degree is simulation is incredible, especially since the physics engine can handle even precise actions such as juggling, if you’re determined enough to try it. But it’s not just a physics playground, it is still a Half-Life game, so you can expect solid FPS gameplay and just enough plot to give things some context.

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Monster Hunter Wilds

The Monster Hunter series gets more and more immersive with every generation of hardware, and the latest installment might be the best yet, despite the deluge of notifications it likes sending your way.

Capcom put an incredible amount of effort into the ecology of the Forbidden Lands, and each of the game’s several regions teems with wildlife large and small, many of which you can capture to learn more about it.

Image credit: CAPCOM

The regions themselves also look incredible, whether it’s the lush Scarlet Forest during its plentiful season, or the mysterious ruins of the frigid Iceshard Cliffs. It’s easy to just leave your base camp and spend hours exploring, admiring endemic life, and using the ghillie mantle to observe what the monsters do when nobody is bothering them. Sometimes, MH Wilds feels like a nature documentary.

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Ghost of Tsushima

Ghost of Tsushima is a stunning accomplishment.

Not only does it present a gorgeous recreation of the Japanese Tsushima island during the first Mongol invasion, but it’s also absurdly immersive all the way through. Much of that is accomplished thanks to diegetic, atmospheric navigation, such as the wind blowing in the direction of your objectives, or animals leading you to various secrets.

Image credit: Sucker Punch Productions

You’re playing as Jin Sakai, a lone survivor from the first battle against the Mongols. Jin’s determined to push the invaders out of Tsushima, and both the story and the gameplay ask you to make harsh choices between honorable methods and being a saboteur/assassin. It’s a gorgeous game which features so many thematic elements that it’s very easy to be lost in the setting.

When the already announced sequel, Ghost of Yotei, arrives, it will surely follow in its predecessor’s footsteps in this aspect.

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Death Stranding

Death Stranding is a game that’s easier to play than explain.

It takes place in the USA years after it was ravaged by a bizarre cross-dimensional phenomenon. Toxic rain ages things rapidly, bizarre creatures seemingly from beyond reality stalk and threaten travelers, and physical communication is busted, which why you, a courier called Sam Porter Bridges, have a very important job.

Image credit: Kojima Productions

You’ll traverse the vast maps carrying packages to isolated colonies, and reforge physical connections between places by making new roads, establishing ziplines etc. It’s a bizarre game, as we’ve mentioned, but when you actually play it can become an oddly relaxing, engaging experience and the solitary travels and can draw you into Death Stranding’s weird fiction.

With the sequel coming in June 2025, there is no better time to get started on that journey.

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The Legends of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Sometimes immersion in a game means being able to do things that should be possible.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild gives you several tools and lets you freely play around with their physics, including solving various puzzles in a creative and, frequently, quite spectacular manner. Add to that a vibrant (and verdant) open world and you get a game worth immersing yourself in.

Image credit: Nintendo EPD Production Group No. 3

As for the story, you begin the game by waking up as Link, apparently after a century of magical healing slumber, to see that Zelda is still keeping a magical barrier around Calamity Ganon, and the Hyrule he knew is diminished. Your mission is grow in power and face Ganon in battle… but it’s up to you when to do it. You can do it right away, or keep Zelda waiting while you hunt Korok seeds.

The sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, takes some of your toys away and gives you certain replacements, such as the ability (and resources) to build machines and fuse items together, which has already led to the community designing incredible stuff for fun and function alike.

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No Man’s Sky

Several years after its infamous release No Man’s Sky has become a fantastic game about exploring infinite galaxies.

It has mild survival aspects, but the key experience is all about flying from planet to planet and seeing what new mysteries and alien life forms wait for you there. Numerous updates also added many new features, such as multiplayer and base-building.

Image credit: Hello Games

The size of NMS universe means never running out of planets to visit, and presents interesting challenges to pursue, such as decoding alien languages or trying to reach the center of the galaxy following the overarching mystery of the game. If you’d like a space game to get lost in, No Man’s Sky absolutely delivers on its promise of wondrous exploration.

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Grand Theft Auto 5

The GTA series is one of the world’s most famous immersive urban landscapes, and Grand Theft Auto V is, so far, the latest, and the grandest of them (GTA6 hasn’t yet launched at the time of writing).

Once you get through its introductory sequences you can start exploring a wonderfully detailed city of Los Santos, and live a life of crime or pursue leisurely, but still immersive and thematic, minigames.

Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced, Image credit: Rockstar North

GTA5 depicts a slice from the lives of three criminals: Michael, Trevor, and Franklin. They are forced by circumstance to work together despite occasionally clashing motives and personalities. When you’re not doing one of the game’s many missions and roam freely, you can switch between the three to experience the world from their perspective.

Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced

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Red Dead Redemption 2

Coming from the same developer, Red Dead Redemption 2 went all in on immersion. Instead of a modern Californian city, in RDR2 we are thrown into the Old West of late 19th/early 20th century.

As Arthur Morgan you’ll witness and play an important part in the events leading up to the end of a notorious group of bandits led by Dutch van Der Linde. Or you could just live in the world.

Image credit: Rockstar Games

The attention to detail in Red Dead Redemption 2 is staggering. Rockstar created detailed animations for every activity. You can hunt animals, engage in gunslinger duels, use an early model of a camera to snap pictures, and more. You can even spend time brushing your horse or using a fluid dialogue system to endear or antagonize NPCs! There’s a lot to engage with.

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Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Deus Ex games are, by all accounts, immersive cyborg sims. In Human Revolution you play as Adam Jensen, a former cop and current security chief at Sarif Industries, a corporation specialising in creating cybernetic augmentation and prosthetics.

You got beat up in an attack on the research division, and your injuries were so severe only extensive cybernetics could save you. You never asked for this.

Image credit: Eidos Montreal

Existential problems aside, the cybernetics give Adam a chance to interact with the world in very fun ways, and the first-person perspective is styled as the actual retinal display of your character. The world feels tangible, especially when you get strong enough to pick up extra-heavy objects, or learn to snoop around hacking into computers. Reading people’s emails is rude, but makes the world feel much more real.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

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Dishonored

Dishonored is an immersive sim putting you in the shoes (and a creepy mask) of a supernaturally gifted bodyguard/assassin, Corvo Attano.

He has some avenging and rescuing to do, because Empress Jessamine, whom he was protecting, was assassinated, her daughter was kidnapped, and Corvo himself thrown into jail, wrongly accused of murder. There’s a lot on his plate.

Dishonored - Definitive Edition, Image credit: Arkane Studios

A large part of Dishonored’s immersive quality is the fact that powers you have aren’t used only in scripted, pre-planned locations: you are free to Blink virtually anywhere, combine certain abilities in creative ways, and the game will accommodate your plan. The world is also just as tangible as in Deus Ex, you can even pick the bullets shot at you if you use the Bend Time ability.

Dishonored - Definitive Edition

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Fallout: New Vegas

Obsidian Entertainment’s shot at the modern Fallout games resulted in one of the cult classic RPGs of the 2010s.

You’re playing as the Courier whose recent assignment was delivering a precious poker chip to New Vegas. Unfortunately, you get shot in the head a good distance away from the destination, and the chip gets stolen. But you don’t have to get it right away, you can go just about anywhere.

Image credit: Obsidian Entertainment

The map of Fallout: New Vegas is massive, and it’s very easy to get lost in its exploration or by navigating the strife between political powers vying for control over the Hoover Dam. With a flexible, class-less progression you can customize your Courier to a great degree, helping you get into a role you imagined during character creation. The world isn’t very dynamic, but it’s complex and interesting.

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Gothic 2/Risen

Few studios, if any at all, make action RPGs that are as immersive, or give as strong a sense of the world, as those of Piranha Bytes.

Gothic 2 and Risen are the finest examples of that style of video game worldbuilding, and they share quite a few traits. One of them is the minimal UI which includes the lack of a minimap: you have to navigate by opening a map from your inventory… once you can afford to buy one from a cartographer.

Gothic 2, Image credit: Piranha – Bytes

Another aspect is that while the worlds are smaller than usual, they are meticulously designed so that every location looks unique and after a while you become so familiar with them that you rarely even need to reference the map. This familiarity, unique locations, and hand-placed secrets and rewards make exploration feel worthwhile and rewarding, especially since there are few locked-off areas, even if their denizes could one-shot you.

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Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice

The kind of immersion offered by Hellblade isn’t a warm blanket of escapism offered by many other games.

Instead, especially when you’re playing on headphones, it’s the kind of immersion that hits you right in the soul in a similar way it hits the eponymous protagonist Senua. See, she is a Pict warrior who is suffering from psychosis, and one of the symptoms are the voices she hears.

Senua, Image credit: Ninja Theory

Especially the voices she calls the Furies are always speaking to her, sometimes advising her, sometimes leading her astray, and if you have your headphones on, they can really mess with you too. There’s also no user interface when you play the game, making Furies and Darkness your only guides. It’s unpleasant, but it really puts you in the mind of Senua, which is a powerful kind of immersion.

The sequel, Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II shares this approach, while also telling a new story, another chapter of Senua’s life.

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice

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Kingdom Come: Deliverance

Kingdom Come Deliverance has the distinction of being one of the most historically accurate games out there.

The developers, Warhorse Studios, spent a lot of time researching Kingdom of Bohemia, which would eventually become the Chech Republic. You get to travel around the region as Henry, a blacksmith’s son, who gets tangled up in a large succession conflict.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance | Royal Edition, Image credit: Warhorse Studios

The immersion in KCD comes from several angles. One is that the game pays attention to time, and it’s possible to come late to an event or miss it altogether. There’s also a degree of survival mechanics like hunger, and the immersive, reasonably realistic melee combat and armour systems. Henry even has to learn how to read, and until he does books are almost unreadable due to scrambled letters.

The sequel, Kingdom Come Deliverance II, is no slouch in the immersion department as well, putting Henry on a new path with all the causality of the original game boosted by better graphics and polished interactions.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance | Royal Edition

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Mad Max

Mad Max didn’t get a lot of attention, which is regrettable.

Not only does it capture the atmosphere of Mad Maxian post-apocalypse, especially the post-Fury Road one, but it’s also a really cool world to explore in your car. Most of the map is the sea floor, except all the water evaporated years ago. You’ll drive under ruined bridges, hide from sandstorms in a dilapidated lighthouse, and loot shipwrecks.

Image credit: Avalanche Studios

Deep canyons, uneven „roads”, enemy and allied bases set up in oil rigs and other maritime infrastructure make for a really cool, unusual world to explore. You need to find water, which doubles as a medkit, while your (highly customizable) car needs fuel and occasional repairs especially after a convoy battle. Even your progression is linked to doing specific things in combat and exploration.

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Mount & Blade series

The Mount & Blade series is essentially a big faux-Medieval sandbox letting you play the part of a newcomer to the land, trying to make a living, preferably through warfare.

You are completely free to move around the overworld map and enter cities to do business, accept quests, or participate in tournaments for gold and renown. Battles and sieges are the most important here, however.

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, Image credit: Taleworlds

Once armies clash, you’re transported to a battle map alongside the forces you’ve assembled and you fight until somebody wins or retreats. The losing side may end up becoming prisoners of the victors, so there’s a chance you’ll spend some time in shackles yourself. Although the world is fictional, there are no fantastical creatures or magic, and the factions are inspired by real-world nations and cultures.

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord

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Subnautica

The immersion offered by Subnautica is twofold.

Your character is immersed in the ocean of the alien planet he crashed on, and the game presents it so well that you get inevitably immersed in the aquatic world. The first-person perspective helps, because it not only removes the distinction between you and the protagonist, but also lets you admire the gorgeous vistas of the sunlit waters.

Image credit: Unknown Worlds Entertainment

The flipside is that it also puts you closer to the less friendly animals, many of which will be eager to attack you. As it’s a survival game by default you need to take care of your meters, most importantly the oxygen supply. Subnautica’s ocean is stunningly created, with amazing wildlife (some of which you can domesticate). If you aren’t unsettled by the water environment, you will have a great time.

The game was enough of a success to receive a spin-off, Subnautica: Below Zero, taking place in the frigid waters or the arctic regions of the planet, and at the time of writing still awaits a full-scale sequel set to arrive some time in 2025.

Subnautica

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Yakuza (series)

The Yakuza series is somewhat notorious for its detailed recreation of Tokyo’s Kabukichō district, in the games called Kamurocho.

The series can be over-the-top in the way it presents combat and minigames, but otherwise it is remarkably well-grounded in reality, and unlike Kingdom Come’s medieval Bohemia, people can actually visit Kabukichō in real life, and they have.

Like a Dragon: Ishin!, Image credit: Ryū Ga Gotoku Studios

A large part of Yakuza games are its numerous playable elements. You can race small RC cars, sing karaoke, play table tennis and plenty more. Each game has a different set of minigames for you to participate in, and they do a great job making the small slice of Tokyo feel fleshed out and full of life. The first two games even got remakes, making them easier to get into.

The series also ventured beyond Japan, exploring Hawaii in Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth and Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, starring Ichiban Kasuga and Goro Majima, respectively..

Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii

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S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

Based loosely on a science-fiction novel by the Strugatsky brothers, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was an unexpected hit of the year 2007.

It is set in an alternate timeline version of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, which is peppered with spots of bizarre, seemingly supernatural activity, which bloomed after the power plant tragically malfunctioned again.

Image credit: GSC Game World

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was possibly one of the most immersive and brutal games of that year, depicting a fascinating and viscerally believable place. It even made sure to include several endings to account for the players’ progress and decisions, to help make the story of the Marked One truly their own. The first-person perspective, and survival mechanics were a great boon too. Watching out for the radiation and staving off the hunger do a great job selling the reality of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.’s setting.

It was no wonder that the audience kept hopes up for the sequel, which finally arrived in 2024 and delivered more the immersive, harsh experience people fell in love with so many years ago. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 definitely did its predecessor proud.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

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The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

What sells the reality of The Witcher 3 world, aside from its expansive open world, are people going about their business whether you see them or not.

They talk to each other, and in general appear to have their own lives to take care of, instead of just waiting to give you a quest for a magic sword. They would hide from the rain, shout insults at Geralt, or bark out an off-key song.

Image credit: CD PROJEKT RED

Also: watching the day seemingly turn into night as the storm comes over the horizon and the pines sway in the wind is a one-of-the-kind experience. If you use the Quen sign you can even see rain splashing against the protective barrier, and if you use Aard while standing in water you can see it ripple under the sign’s power. That’s a beautiful attention to immersive detail.

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BioShock

Another game from 2007! BioShock went for much more spatially oppressive environments than S.T.A.L.K.E.R..

The game provides a subtly and aptly guided tour of the half-ruined underwater city inspired by the aesthetics of the early 20th century. BioShock works on many levels, and it finds a way to close the gap between the player and the protagonist in a spectacular twist.

BioShock: The Collection, Image credit: 2K Australia

Although the game itself is almost twenty years old now, there are still people who may remain oblivious of the big reveal, so we have one thing to ask of you: would you kindly refrain from spoiling it for others and let them experience it for themselves? Especially since there is a solid remastered version available.

BioShock: The Collection

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Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines

Years pass and nobody has yet created a better game not only about vampires, but also about being a vampire, except maybe for Dontnod’s Vampyr.

VtMB is a real treat, and allows you to immerse yourself fully in being a child of the night and go to a club to dance wildly to some sweet goth/rave music. Yes, it’s a thing you can do here.

Image credit: Troika Games

The necessity to keep your supply of blood at reasonable levels, maintaining your ever flimsier Humanity to stave of the bestial side of your new nature, and keeping up the secrecy of vampires’ existence in a centuries-old Masquerade make Bloodlines much more than just an edgy power fantasy. It also happens to be a great adaptation of the legendary RPG system by White Wolf, under the same name.

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The Stanley Parable

Stanley Parable is something of a curiosity here, because it being extremely meta doesn’t hurt immersion one bit, quite the opposite.

In SP you play as a corporation drone named Stanley, who through irrelevant contrived circumstance is left alone in the office building he works in. He also happens to have a Narrator commenting every step of Stanley’s attempt to leave the premises or do pretty much anything.

Image credit: Galactic Cafe

It’s not a game one can easily describe, because so much of it relies on the surprise and discovering new situations and commentary, but believe you me: before long you’ll be fully invested in the game. If you’d like a fresher version, there’s an “Ultra Deluxe” edition, released in April 2022, offering a bigger and prettier experience.

The Stanley Parable

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Alien: Isolation

We’ve been experiencing something of an upsurge of immersive survival horror games recently, not the least of which is 2021’s Resident Evil Village.

There is, however, something especially gripping about Alien: Isolation. Maybe it’s the familiar threat of a Xenomorph that does it for many people? It’s easier to immerse oneself in a setting we are already so familiar with.

Image credit: Creative Assembly

Hiding from the Alien is different from hiding from obscure monsters, if only because we know all too well what’s going to happen if we’re discovered without our power loader. Alien: Isolation is terrifying, well-designed, and pays incredibly respectful homage to the now-retrofuturistic vision of space tech from the original movie.

Alien: Isolation

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The Elder Scrolls

The Elder Scrolls in general are the go-to solution if you want to immerse yourself in a world.

Every title in the series is full of stories to tell, places discovered and still to discover, and multi-layered systems emulating things you’d expect to be possible, from alchemy to crafting, to tomb raiding.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition, Image credit: Bethesda Game Studios

Systems may differ from game to game (spellcrafting missing from Skyrim is a wasted opportunity), but the essence is kept: create your character, finish the tutorial section, and then do whatever you want, indefinitely. You can ignore the main quest forever and the game won’t force you to pick it up, content with letting you roam the lands being heroic, villainous, or just gathering resources to craft something magnificent.

The Elder Scrolls

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Dead Space

Interfaces in video games are the kind of arbitrary features we’ve come to just accept as an intrinsic part of the experience, unless they are absurdly obtrusive and make playing the game harder than intended.

Dead Space solves this problem by ditching an arbitrary interface completely. Health bar? Now it’s represented by a glowing tube in the back of your character’s suit. Ammo? A holographic display of your weapon shows how much you have left.

It makes you pay more attention to the surroundings, instead of the interface, which boosts the immersion significantly. Suddenly the confrontations with the grotesque Necromorphs are much more engaging when you don’t have a convenient and fast way of checking how you’re doing on the resource front.

Dead Space was so beloved that it received a full-scale remake in 2023, giving it a new coat of current-gen paint and aligning it a bit closer in some aspects to the original game’s sequels.

Dead Space Remake

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Metro 2033/Redux

Another, after S.T.A.L.K.E.R. post-nuclear first-person perspective game. Metro 2033 is based on Dmitry Glukhovksy’s novel under the same title.

Released in 2010, it quickly gained popularity, large enough for a more complete Redux version and sequels Metro: Last Light and Metro: Exodus. It’s similar to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. in a way, but puts more emphasis on travelling through the corridors of the Moscow Metro and Metro-2 housing a community which survived a nuclear strike in the game’s alternate history of 2013.

Metro 2033 Redux, Image credit: 4A GAMES

While not as flexible as S.T.A.L.K.E.R., it provides a very vivid scenery and enables both gung-ho and stealthy playstyles. It also offers some moral decisions to make, although the game doesn’t draw attention to them. In a way Metro mixes some of the best aspects of BioShock and S.T.A.L.K.E.R., creating a deeply immersive and memorable experience.

Metro 2033 Redux

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