10 Great Adventure Games That Are Immediately Fun

The image of arriving home tired from university or work, wanting to play a video game, and having to dedicate five hours to it before it gets interesting is exhausting, and I know because I've been there.

While I greatly appreciate games that take their time establishing the tone of their plot, world, and mechanics, it's also true that I love when a video game doesn't take too long to reveal its true nature.

There are games for all kinds of players and all kinds of circumstances, and nothing is better for de-stressing than those creations that know how to value your hours of entertainment from the very first moment.

Therefore, in order to recognize these adventures that manage to captivate us as soon as we take control of the character, I invite you to discover these ten great adventure games that are fun from the start.

10 Slime Rancher

A Farmer of Adorable Substances

Management games are usually great options when you're looking for lighthearted fun, but Slime Rancher takes a twist I personally find fascinating.

Instead of confining you to a square, expandable plot of land, it ties the development of your land to the exploration of a sizable world, complete with its own biomes, resources, and even challenges.

Following in the footsteps of Metroidvanias, you gradually progress across the map to previously inaccessible locations, increasing both your slime farm and the resources you can extract to continue expanding into new horizons, both in terms of the terrain and your character.

There isn't a strong narrative component, but honestly, once its gameplay loop settles in, and you start wandering through its rich lands while improving your settlement, you realize the full potential of Slime Rancher.

9 Haste

Gotta Go Fast!

I'll never forget seeing the first Haste video in an early stage of development, as I knew this game was going to be amazing when it came out, and time proved me absolutely right.

With incredible character design, stunning art direction, a catchy soundtrack, and, above all, sensational platforming and movement mechanics, it's a magnificent roguelite that grabs you from your very first run.

Moving at hundreds of kilometers per hour while chaining jumps that boost your momentum and dodging fantastical and surreal obstacles is phenomenal, even when you're not trying to reach the finish line but to defeat a boss.

Between the reflexes required, quick decision-making, and sheer joy of going at top speed, Haste takes five seconds to reveal all its intentions and six to win you over completely.

8 Baobabs Mausoleum

Twin Peaks Meets The X-Files

There's nothing I love more than an absolutely bizarre indie game that, from its story to its gameplay and even its aesthetics, does things I don't recall ever seeing before, and that's exactly what the amazing Baobabs Mausoleum is.

Throughout its three chapters, wandering through Flamingo's Creek is a fever dream where every line of dialogue read, character encountered, mechanic discovered, and story unraveled is stranger and more captivating than the last.

Its inspiration from Twin Peaks and The X-Files is readily apparent, permeating a detective story that constantly shifts its gameplay, doing things I'm not even sure actually work, but the adventure convinces you in an almost mystical way.

Baobabs Mausoleum is among those tiles that probably lose a bit if you get too technical and scrutinize everything, though if you just let yourself go… You're facing an unforgettable journey that you'll probably want to replay every few times to see its legendary intro again.

7 Superliminal

It's a Matter of Perspective

Puzzle games that make you an active participant in solving their dilemmas, instead of turning you into a passive clicker, are impressive to me, which explains the presence of Superliminal on this list.

This short but intense adventure has some of the most creative and intriguing sequences I've had the opportunity to enjoy in the genre, as the way it plays with perspectives, angles, and out-of-the-box thinking is exquisite.

More than just a game where you solve cognitive problems, it's a journey where the excitement lies in how they'll continue to expand the core mechanics without losing swiftness, and let me tell you, the game never stops outdoing itself with each new room.

Superliminal is certainly brief due to the impossibility of maintaining such a level of excellence for too long, though that's precisely why I value it: it knows it doesn't have much time to win you over, so it doesn't waste a single minute proving it's among the greats.

6 Bionic Bay

When Platforms Become Puzzles

After years without playing a pure platformer, where the main and only objective is to move around or create spaces to do so, Bionic Bay is a superb reminder of why it's one of the greatest genres in history.

Thanks to its unmistakable aesthetic and physics-based platforming, its more than 20 levels are an impressive display of imagination, with increasingly unbelievable mechanics that truly sell you on the concept of being in a dystopian world with technologies beyond our comprehension.

Teleporting, changing the direction of gravity, manipulating time, interacting with dozens of objects in real time, performing jumps with pinpoint precision, moving in sync with obstacles… From the first room to the last, Bionic Bay captivates you as if it were the last platformer in the world.

Perhaps it was its unique art style that attracted me, though what convinced me to stay was how addictive it was from the beginning and, even more so, how it manages to surpass itself with each episode despite having started so strongly.

5 Dredge

Cosmic Horror and Cozy Management

Speaking of management games that focus as much on resource management as on exploration itself, Dredge's cosmic horror is an intriguing marvel that transforms fishing into a tense yet enchanting adventure.

The surface level of its excellence, of course, lies in how satisfying both the simple fishing minigame is and the ability to upgrade your vessel to hunt larger and more fantastical targets, giving it an almost Pokémon-like feel as you delve deeper into its vast biomes.

Then, when night falls, and your senses become limited, Dredge truly convinces you that it's unique, as it trades its coziness for inexplicable beasts pursuing you as you try to profit from your nighttime catches.

It's a magnificent duality, and it works perfectly both at the beginning, when you have a barely-there boat, and at the end, when you face beings that defy description, thus reflecting the game's magic.

4 Road 96

A Beautiful and Unwanted Journey

There are journeys we don't want to take but that we still have to, and I'd say few people can speak to this as vividly as those who have been forced to emigrate from their countries in search of a better future.

That's Road 96's premise, which immediately draws you in with its human story and the pervasiveness of this demographic phenomenon. However, if that weren't enough, it presents you with a kind of narrative roguelike that amplifies its themes to the fullest.

With each new youngster we choose to escort and cross the border, we not only experience an intriguing game of exploration and decision-making but also an intense journey with magnificent characters, profound symbolism, and a completely unforgettable soundtrack.

The first time you have to decide between eating or taking the bus, just like picking between smuggling across the border in a truck or climbing a mountain, those moments are seared into your memory, though this can be said of the entirety of Road 96.

3 Sludge Life

A Bizarre Radiology of Our Time

Games that fully embrace their political nature are as unusual as they are fascinating to me as a political scientist, though I dare say very few do so with the charisma, certainty, and oddness of Sludge Life.

First and foremost, it's a satisfying platformer where you traverse its muddy world, encountering hysterical and hilarious characters while tagging every wall imaginable, and just the sheer satisfying movement and witty dialogue alone make this game an incredibly fun ride.

Nevertheless, when you see how it reflects on the current state of the environment, overuse of fossil fuels, monopolies surrounding the planet's strategic resources, the futility of attempts to combat systemic injustices, and other highly relevant issues in the 21st century, you recognize Sludge Life is a very, very self-aware satire.

At said point, you decide to talk to every last character, create every last piece of graffiti, and discover every last ending, because Sludge Life convinces you of its intentions. Of course, it's a game devoid of clear objectives, but if you're happy to play for the mere joy of it, you have a gem on your hands.

2 Mirror’s Edge

Doing Parkour is an Art

As a foreign parkour fan, Mirror’s Edge wasn't only my first experience with a discipline that fascinates me from afar, but also the establishment of first-person platformers as a truly rewarding subgenre.

We're approaching two decades since its release, and even today, we yearn for Faith's leaps and spins, which amazed everyone with some of the most iconic, spectacular, and immersive movement sequences ever conceived in the industry.

The satisfaction derived from the ability to chain together jumps, wall runs, flips, slides, and balances has few historical parallels, especially when you have such a stunning art direction to make you feel immersed in a dystopia as beautiful as it is unsettling.

You only need to go through the tutorial to realize Mirror’s Edge is in a league of its own, and you only need its first main mission to recognize that, currently, the interactive medium can't offer anything quite like it. Perhaps the future will change things, but for the moment, it hasn't been surpassed.

1 Portal 2

Physics and Pure Wonder

As the greatest puzzle game of all time, and probably the title with the highest average of "interesting events per minute" in our medium, Portal 2 is a masterpiece that is simply living video game history.

While the first game is magnificent, the second is among the finest examples of how to create a sequel: bigger, more refined, bolder, more creative, and more ambitious, without losing sight of the roots that captivated enough to make a successor desirable in the first place.

Returning to Aperture Science is a magical descent into madness, with increasingly inventive and exciting physics-based puzzles and platforming that make you question whether there are any limits to the creativity with which Valve develops campaigns.

Portal 2 generates widespread consensus regarding its candidacy for the top tier of the best games in history, both because it hasn't been outdone and because it's easy to foresee it probably never will be, as it seems like the result of planets aligning at a virtually unrepeatable historical moment.

Even so, like everything in art, it can leave you indifferent, but if there's one game with a high probability of making you feel like you're in heaven, it's this one. Portal 2 is an interactive masterpiece we'll study until the end of time, so the best thing to do is play it and join the cult.