Key Takeaways
- Indie games like Inside focus on environmental storytelling, creating captivating worlds without heavy dialogue.
- The Witness uses puzzles to lead players through the environment, relying on clues to complete mazes.
- Titles like What Remains of Edith Finch prioritize making the environment the main character, telling stories through exploration.
It’s quite rare to see a game that is worth playing just for its setting, and as more and more developers try to add unnecessary details to their games, they tend to lose focus on what’s important and what the main idea of the game is.
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18 Best Games With The Most Detailed Environments
These games have so much detail in their environments that it almost takes your breath away.
It's perfectly alright to make a game that has a great cast of characters with fully developed backstories, and by extension, it’s also perfectly fine, if not better in some ways, to have a game that focuses on immersion by creating a world and environments so compelling and believable that it becomes the protagonist of the game. Such games are few and far between but leave it to indie developers to take risks and focus on immersive storytelling via the environment instead of dialogues and cutscenes.
6 Inside
An Unnerving World
Inside
Systems
- Top Critic Rating:91/100 Critics Recommend:94%
- Platform(s)
- PC , Switch , PS4 , Xbox One , iOS
- Released
- June 29, 2016
- Developer(s)
- Playdead
Created by the same studio that made Limbo, this game is the perfect example of environmental storytelling. Playdead has created a weird, dystopian world that’s deadly and filled with weird humanoid beings. There is very little to the gameplay in Inside, other than the puzzles that players have to solve every now and then, but what really keeps them hooked are the varying environments and the themes explored by the game.
While players control a little boy who’s on the run from the people behind these humanoid experiments, other than moving and jumping around, there are no dialogues that can hook them into the story.
5 The Witness
From One End To Another
The Witness
Puzzle
Systems
- Top Critic Rating:86/100 Critics Recommend:80%
- Platform(s)
- PS4 , Xbox One , PC , iOS
- Released
- January 26, 2016
- Developer(s)
- Thekla Inc.
Players who are fans of puzzle games will probably know about The Witness, an indie title that’s entirely made up of puzzles scattered around in different biomes of an island. The game explores philosophical concepts via environmental storytelling and the occasional cutscene that players find hidden in different locations.
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10 Hardest Puzzles In The Witness, Ranked
The Witness is one of the best-known puzzle games for a reason: the quality of its puzzles. These, in particular, are brutally difficult.
Every puzzle in the game asks the player to do only one thing: complete the maze by drawing a line from the start point to the end. The developers managed to extrapolate this simple puzzle into multiple variations by simply adding more elements and complicating it more and more.
The Witness is the perfect example of a game where the environment takes the spotlight, as in nearly every puzzle, players will have to rely on clues scattered around the environment, such as the light patterns on a tree or the pitch of the chirp a bird makes, to complete the maze.
4 What Remains Of Edith Finch
A House Full Of Memories
What Remains of Edith Finch
Systems
- Top Critic Rating:88/100 Critics Recommend:91%
- Platform(s)
- PC , PS4 , PS5 , Switch , Xbox One , Xbox Series X , Xbox Series S , iOS
- Released
- April 25, 2017
- Developer(s)
- Giant Sparrow
The indie title that won multiple awards, What Remains of Edith Finch is more of a visual novel than a game. There are no adrenaline-filled boss fights, side missions to complete, or a huge map to unlock. The premise of the game is simple: the player returns to their house after inheriting it, but the house is cursed since every relative who had lived there died.
Annapurna Games has filled this title with memories of every member that ever lived in the house and told their stories in a very dreamy but sad way. The player explores the small house and tries to figure out what happened to every family member, old and young. If anything, the house is probably the main character in the title, and it portrays the past of every relative beautifully while merging the reason for their death with that character's ambitions.
3 Subnautica
Fishes And Leviathans
Subnautica
Survival Horror
Systems
- Top Critic Rating:84/100 Critics Recommend:92%
- Platform(s)
- Xbox One , PS4
- Released
- January 23, 2018
- Developer(s)
- Unknown Worlds Entertainment
- Publisher(s)
- Gearbox Publishing
The water-filled planet of 4546b takes the spotlight from the very moment the player crash lands into one of its shallower areas. This first-person survival game is all about exploring this strange planet filled with ancient devices, unknown creatures, and a dark and life-threatening secret.
As players craft submersibles that can take them deeper into the ocean, more of the world starts to reveal itself, and that’s all this game is about. No other sentient characters, hardly any dialogue or cutscenes, and no backstory for the character; just a submerged planet that has a story to share and depths to uncover.
2 The Stanley Parable
Don’t Listen To The Voice
The Stanley Parable
Systems
- Top Critic Rating:90/100 Critics Recommend:100%
- Platform(s)
- PC
- Released
- October 17, 2013
- Developer(s)
- Galactic Cafe
The Stanley Parable is unlike any other game. Its main gameplay mechanic lies in playing it again and again and trying to uncover a new path or a different ending.
In simple words, it's a walking simulator in which players occasionally press a button or two in a playthrough that lasts no more than 60-120 minutes. It puts players in the shoes of an office worker in a typical office environment with a talkative narrator guiding the player's movement. The only thing players can do is either follow the instructions of the narrator or take a route of their own choice, in which case the narrator will make the player’s ears off in trying to make them rectify their mistake.
There is no better example of a game where the main protagonist isn’t the player itself, but the strange environment they’re exploring and the all-observing narrator guiding their movements.
1 Observation
Sentient AI
Observation
Systems
- Top Critic Rating:76/100 Critics Recommend:72%
- Platform(s)
- PS4 , PC
- Released
- May 21, 2019
- Developer(s)
- No Code
Describing what kind of game Observation is is harder than fighting the Guardian Ape in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Some journalists describe this title as one of the very few games that play in the second-person in comparison to the first and third-person. This sci-fi mystery/thriller title follows Dr. Emma Fisher, an astronaut who’s alone on a space station, as she tries to look for her missing crewmates.
But the players don’t control Dr. Emma, instead, they’re an AI called S.A.M that helps Dr. Emma in her journey. As such, the only tasks the player can do are what Dr. Emma has enabled them to do, such as looking through cameras, unlocking doors, and completing puzzles. And all of this happens entirely via the beautifully crafted space-station environment of the game.
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7 RPGs With The Best Environmental Storytelling
Environmental storytelling is a big part of what makes open-world games so immersive, and these RPGs are perfect examples of how effective it can be.
