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Open World reviews

575 Open World games reviewed and scored, best first.

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575 reviews

Mashina review

From the creators of Judero, this stop-motion digging adventure sends a friendly robot beneath a whimsical claymation world to mend her community, earning near-unanimous praise for its handcrafted charm and soundtrack even as some reviewers wish its short, simple gameplay loop went deeper.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

Hideo Kojima's final Metal Gear as series director delivers what reviewers consistently call some of the best stealth mechanics ever made, wrapped around an open world whose back half is widely acknowledged, even by fans, as visibly unfinished following Kojima's public split from Konami — a split compounded a decade later by a mid-2026 Denuvo DRM addition that reviewers report caused real performance problems and broke a long-running modding community.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Metro Exodus

A well-regarded, atmospheric post-apocalyptic shooter whose reputation was genuinely damaged by a real 2019 Epic Games Store exclusivity controversy and a cluster of specific, long-unfixed bugs — but whose negative reviews have declined sharply since, consistent with a history that's now largely settled rather than an ongoing problem.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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No Man's Sky

The most complete redemption story in gaming, a decade on. The 2016 launch reviews and the 2026 ones are describing almost different games — and the newest wave of criticism has nothing to do with the old one.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Olga - Episode 1

A cozy-spooky, first-person Slavic-folklore mystery walking sim about a childhood visit to a grandparents' village, earning a unanimous Positive launch reception for its atmosphere and storytelling, tempered by honest early-release bugs and a natural episodic-format cliffhanger.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown

One of the finest metroidvanias in years, nearly universally loved on its own merits and just as consistently marked down by its own players for a mandatory Ubisoft Connect launcher — a friction so persistent it's still generating complaints in 2026, on a game whose acclaimed development team Ubisoft disbanded within weeks of release after a sequel was refused.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Puzzle Depot

Laughing Manatee Games, a husband-and-wife studio, spent over a decade building a sprawling, post-apocalyptic sokoban adventure with a level editor and hundreds of meticulously designed rooms, earning a uniformly enthusiastic reception from a review base that consistently calls it one of the genre's best entries in years, with even its harshest fans naming specific, narrow friction points rather than any fundamental flaw.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Red Dead Redemption 2

An emotionally overwhelming, near-universally acclaimed western epic — undermined for over six straight years by a mandatory launcher that reviewers say can prevent you from playing even the offline single-player campaign, and a 2024 "Labor of Love" award many felt the game's own neglect made absurd.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Rust

Eight years after release and still getting a major update every month, Rust remains the most uncompromising survival game ever made — and the one whose own veterans write the funniest negative reviews about how much of their lives it took.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Sandustry

A falling-sand physics factory game — every grain, drop and spark is a simulated resource — that went into Early Access on 13 August 2026 to a near-unanimous reception, backed by Hooded Horse and pre-release press comparing it to Factorio, Terraria and Noita all at once.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Schedule I

A co-op drug-empire sim that turned into one of the biggest word-of-mouth hits of the past two years, built almost single-handedly and beloved for exactly the reasons Breaking Bad was — right up until the empire is built and there's nothing left to do with it.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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SEASON: A letter to the future

A meditative, combat-free exploration game about cycling through a doomed world to record its final memories before a mysterious cataclysm erases it — praised almost universally as deeply moving and beautifully realized, held back at launch by real bugs and a short length several reviewers feel undercuts its own ambitions.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Fifteen years on, Skyrim's open world is still the reason people play it — walk in any direction and something is there. The systems underneath that world, from swordplay to loot to the dialogue tree, have aged a lot less gracefully, and Bethesda has spent a decade finding new ways to resell the same game. Reviewed as Skyrim Special Edition, the version Steam actually sells you today.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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THE LONGING

A game whose central mechanic is a 400-day countdown that runs whether you play or not — the most literal treatment of idle time anyone has attempted, and it's 92.3% positive six years on.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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The Planet Crafter

A terraforming survival-crafting game that turns a barren world into a breathable one in front of your eyes — beloved for exactly that transformation, and honestly criticized by a consistent minority for being addictive without offering much real friction or danger.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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The Witness

Jonathan Blow's self-published, no-tutorial puzzle exploration game asks players to learn hundreds of line-drawing puzzles entirely through observation, and reviewers are unusually candid and self-aware about how sharply it divides audiences — a real, specific audio-captioning accessibility gap adds a concrete, checkable caution alongside that divide.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Viewfinder

A puzzle game built around one genuinely brilliant idea — photographs you place in the world become the world, letting you reshape reality by swapping what a picture shows for what's actually there — undercut by a runtime and a script that its own fans agree don't live up to the mechanic carrying them.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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V Rising

A survival-crafting game with action-RPG combat and a boss list instead of a tech tree, built around a PvP fantasy that most of its players quietly opt out of. Two years past 1.0, with the studio now calling it content-complete, it's worth being precise about which version of this game you're actually signing up for.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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walk Review

A Half-Hour Walk Distilled Into a Warioware Collection walk released on July 18, 2026, from solo developer bilge, and at $1.99 it has quietly become one of the most purely beloved

8 / 10

Reviewed

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Wartales

Shiro Games' open-world mercenary RPG treats a company of sellswords as a small business — wages, food, gear repair and prisoners are the real spreadsheet, and combat is what happens when that spreadsheet goes wrong.

8 / 10

Reviewed

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