8 Indie RPGs That Are More Fun to Explore Than Skyrim

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is among the past decade's greatest RPGs, having cemented a legacy that remains relevant even today in order to establish itself as one of the best in history across all its categories.

However, the video game industry embodies the metaphor of standing on the shoulders of giants, as the impact of a single work can transcend to make all subsequent releases far superior, demonstrating a rate of growth unmatched by any other audiovisual medium.

While I don't believe this implies past creations have become outdated and obsolete, it's a reality that highlights the contrasts of time, allowing unexpected contenders to surpass even the most monumental experiences.

Consequently, to showcase this evolution and draw comparisons with a video game icon like the Dragonborn's adventure, I invite you to read this list of eight indie RPGs with better exploration than Skyrim.

8 Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon

A Refined Clone

Many titles have attempted to capture Skyrim's essence with near-perfect accuracy, but I dare say Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is the only one that has truly captured the experience's core.

While it's clearly a smaller-scale project following in the footsteps of a blockbuster titan, there are many aspects in which the title, taking advantage of the simple passage of time, surpasses its inspiration, primarily regarding narrative and combat.

Thanks to these improvements, Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon allows exploration to be more than just the main attraction, as in the icy landscapes of Bethesda's game. Instead, it gives real weight to the combat and the decisions we make, creating an immersive experience that goes beyond the visual beauty and the lore of the setting.

It's a much more direct and compressed journey, which may discourage those looking for an enormous adventure, though it's that same compact characteristic that allows it to feel more direct and with less filler, which is commendable.

7 Look Outside

Inexplicable Benefits

One of Skyrim's realities you realize as the hours pass is that, aside from faction quests, the rewards for exploration are limited to mere loot, unlike what happens in Look Outside.

Besides linking its most spectacular endings to optional content, this wonderful indie game hides its most astonishing environments and fights behind layers upon layers of exploration, including potentially team members that are fascinating from a narrative and mechanical point of view.

Although it confines the entire adventure to a single building, the way it progressively expands is perfect, ensuring you never feel overwhelmed but always letting you know there are still things to uncover, from a door that won't open to a cosmic entity that can only be fought in the dark.

Look Outside replaced horizontality with verticality, making use of a narrow yet deep architecture that hides so many intriguing secrets that it's impossible to count them all, each one contributing more to the experience than just attack or defense buffs.

6 Salt and Sanctuary

A Flawless Progression

Open worlds often face an insurmountable problem regarding progression, usually centered on whether the world should scale with the player or remain static, though Salt and Sanctuary completely bypasses this debate thanks to its Metroidvania structure.

In Skyrim, many players are frustrated by the proportional growth in power between their avatar and their surroundings, making it feel less natural and discouraging exploration, as they know they won't find anything out of the ordinary.

In contrast, Salt and Sanctuary focuses on a beautifully interconnected world with clearly defined paths that guide you, preventing you from wandering aimlessly and allowing you to concentrate on the fascinating areas.

It's a somewhat unfair comparison, but the reality is that the progression and exploration in Salt and Sanctuary are a virtually perfect crescendo, replacing the uneven way Skyrim makes you travel through its points of interest.

5 Hyper Light Drifter

To Truly Wander

Despite the above, it's undeniable that certain games transform the act of wandering mystically through mesmerizing environments into a marvel in itself, and few have achieved this in recent years, like the outstanding Hyper Light Drifter.

Instead of repeating a formula that allows you to anticipate what you'll find around every corner, Heart Machine changes the rules of the game by preventing you from knowing them directly, as it communicates nothing through dialogue or cutscenes.

The sense of adventure is magnificently amplified by forcing you to experiment and understand how the world around you works, helping you connect with the events rather than just exploring a context that's clearly waiting for you to pass through and interact.

Hyper Light Drifter creates a living, unknown world that powerfully sparks curiosity through the player's naiveté, achieving a masterful result where it's virtually impossible to forget your experience with its campaign.

4 Fear & Hunger

Actions with Consequences

Considering that a fundamental aspect of role-playing titles is the ability to make decisions that significantly impact the gameplay and narrative experience, I think it's easy to understand why Fear & Hunger is on this list.

Few video games in my more than 20 years as a gamer have made me feel so deeply the weight of every step I take, every battle I fight, and every line of dialogue I deliver, because nothing truly goes unnoticed.

The feelings these dungeons evoke are incomparably harrowing, and since survival isn't guaranteed, you're forced to analyze every possible eventuality to increase your slim chances of making it through.

While Skyrim lets you belong to any guild, faction in the civil war, and so on, Fear & Hunger assures you every move can be the turning point of your game, raising the stakes to a level almost impossible to compete with.

3 Dread Delusion

Reminiscence of the Classics

Dread Delusion struck a nostalgic chord in me that I can't quite explain, but I think its lack of indicators is an excellent starting point to explain the grandeur of its adventure.

I've always felt Skyrim suffers from doubting the player, relentlessly guiding them with markers and overly informative dialogue, which prevents you from feeling the satisfaction of figuring things out on your own.

At the opposite extreme, Dread Delusion drops you into a dark fantasy where conscientiously experiencing it is the only way to understand it, which means transcending the comforts of modern games' quality-of-life emphasis to embrace manual notes, instincts, and the use of logic.

I fully understand this type of game isn't for everyone, but if you're among the audience that can properly appreciate its risky approach, Dread Delusion becomes a true delight.

2 Kenshi

This is What True Freedom Looks Like

Despite what the game's scale might suggest, Skyrim has extremely significant limitations regarding player freedom, as there are numerous characters you can't kill, factions you can't join, decisions you can't make, and so on.

Kenshi, taking a complete 180-degree turn from the aforementioned approach, offers you a sandbox entirely at your disposal, allowing you to be, in the most literal sense of the expression, whoever you want to be, with so few barriers to your free will that they seem nonexistent.

The openness is such that, to a large extent, the game's narrative is constructed by the players themselves, whose experiences shape the kind of world they inhabit, influencing character relationships, combat approaches, and resource management.

This is something Kenshi can afford by limiting aspects like graphics, story, and technology to the maximum, but if I'm being completely honest, these are sacrifices I accept without any problem if the result is this level of autonomy, precisely because it gives a value to exploration that no other game has.

1 Disco Elysium

Perfect and Accessible Cohesion

Due to its schematic nature, divided by clearly defined indicators and structures, Skyrim constantly reveals its seams, making it feel like the result of hundreds of developers piecing together their work at the end of development, not at the beginning.

Meanwhile, Disco Elysium is the ultimate expression of a cohesive adventure from the first second to the last, with a narrative, gameplay, spatial, and audiovisual coherence so absurd that it's difficult to believe it's an indie game and not a AAA title.

This is a masterclass in how to make the player one with their environment, motivating you to exhaust all the dialogue lines of every NPC, complete every quest, and even do multiple playthroughs to experience everything by making different choices, because everything is interconnected.

Without vast maps, hundreds of characters, or thousands of objectives, Disco Elysium makes each room a cosmos, brimming with details and nuances that would take hours, perhaps even days, to fully decipher.

As with all other games, these are simply different philosophies from those of Skyrim, which is undoubtedly a masterpiece, but they offer Bethesda valuable lessons on how to approach The Elder Scrolls 6, so that this article is not applicable to the new installment from its release.