9 Best Open-World Games That Respect Your Time

Open-world games can feel mildly antithetical to the concept of time management. One could argue that the entire point of an open-world game is to lose yourself in said open world, let time get away from you. As fun as that can be, though, I ain’t made of free time, and I do have other things to do, so I appreciate it when even a relatively large-scale game can meet me in the middle a bit.

There are any number of ways an open-world game could respect your time, whether it’s just being a smaller open world in general, or doing its best to guide you and keep you on task through its large expanses. You still get that distinct satisfaction of exploring a large slice of virtual space, but when I say “exploring,” it’s more tangible fun and objectives rather than just sort of aimlessly tooling around in the vague hope of finding something interesting to do.

9 Lil Gator Game

An Afternoon Playdate

The world seems so much bigger when you’re a kid, doesn’t it? Obviously, that’s true in the literal sense, but it’s also true in the metaphorical sense. What might seem like a couple of acres of empty park can become a world in itself with a little imagination, as we see in Lil Gator Game.

This compact open-world exploration platformer follows a young alligator and their friends as they chart out a public park island in an effort to create a fantasy game large enough to draw their visiting sibling away from college work. After a brief tutorial on a smaller island, you’re given pretty much free run of a larger island with a handful of distinct sectors, each full of kids to recruit and cardboard baddies to smash.

Lil Gator Game’s open world may be on the small side compared to other games on this list, but by letting you freely run, sled, climb, and glide around the whole thing, it feels bigger than it actually is. It helps that you’ll find more kids to recruit around nearly every corner, so you’ll almost never get stalled out by progression goals.

8 South Park: The Stick of Truth

Be Home by Dinner

Speaking of kids making elaborate games in mundane settings, that’s effectively the thesis statement behind South Park: The Stick of Truth. Nearly every kid in the titular town has joined in a fantasy war for the legendary artifact, a cool-looking stick, and whether the townsfolk like it or not, the whole town is fair game for this battle.

Part of the appeal of Stick of Truth, both now and when it first released, was that it was the most complete game realization of the town of South Park in the IP’s history. It wasn’t just a fun turn-based RPG, it was an opportunity to really explore the show’s setting, get a feel for where everything is relative to everything else, while also peppering it with lots of sidequests and opportunities to make Facebook friends.

Of course, your interest in such things is directly proportional to your interest in South Park. If you’d prefer, you can just stay on the critical path, going from point A to point B as the plot dictates with little consequence. Goodness knows, I didn’t have the attention span to explore my whole town growing up.

7 Dredge

Hook Goes Down, Fish Comes Out

It feels mildly paradoxical to expect a game about fishing, the longest and slowest of all pastimes, to respect your time. As Dredge demonstrates, though, it’s more than possible to put some pep in a fisherman’s step. All you need is the ever-present threat of being devoured by a gigantic, eldritch leviathan.

Unlike a lot of fishing-centric games, Dredge is not a game of patience, but one of urgency. Even when you’re engaged in normal fishing, the process usually only takes a few seconds with your ship’s massive hook and powerful reel. That leaves plenty of time to putt about the open ocean, either looking for more fish to catch or hunting down the eldritch artifacts that advance the story.

Dredge does have some side activities you can get up to, some of which can be mildly time-consuming if you can’t find the right fish you need, but you can feel largely free to disregard them if you’d like. You’re a fishing professional, you’ve got a quota to meet. And also you want to get to shore before the darkness drives you insane. That’s an important factor.

6 Prey (2017)

We’ve Got an Experiment to Do Here

An open world doesn’t necessarily have to be a large, untamed wilderness or packed city. Sometimes a sufficiently large building or complex can serve the same purpose, so long as you have mostly-free reign of it. That’s what gives the 2017 Prey its scope, though it certainly doesn’t hope that said complex is floating out in space.

Prey is an open-world immersive sim throughout the massive Talos I space station, teeming with otherworldly critters and malfunctioning technology. Both in-universe and on a meta-level, Talos I is designed to be a single, continuous locale, rather than something broken up by levels. You can reach many parts of the station right off the bat, but if you just wander willy-nilly, you won’t have the skills or tools necessary to find everything you need, nor the frame of reference of the main quest to actually accomplish anything.

The game’s questlines help to familiarize you with the station’s layout, encouraging you to learn shortcuts and optimal paths from place to place, occasionally stepping into the vacuum of space to quickly hop between airlocks. It’s kind of like a really labyrinthine office building, except some of the hallways are empty, airless voids.

5 Control

Surprisingly Concise for a Non-Euclidean Office

On the subject of labyrinthine office buildings, it doesn’t get much more labyrinthine than the Oldest House, the central setting of Control. Considering the whole shtick of this place is that it’s an ever-shifting, almost living building, you’d think it would be impossible for anyone to get around. Of course, Jesse Faden isn’t just anyone.

As the newly-appointed Director of the Federal Bureau of Control, Jesse has clearance to open most of the doors and gates around the Oldest House. Since the internal architecture is constantly shifting, though, you physically can’t reach some parts of the building without the right traversal abilities. Still, you can note down any place you haven’t been yet, and it’ll stay where it is, even if it is just a random hole in a wall somewhere.

Something neat that Control does is that it gives you lots of hints for sidequests and content, then peppers that content across the critical path. So long as you just follow where the game is trying to lead you, you’ll almost certainly stumble across more things to check out, if you’re so inclined. If only every 9–5 could be so efficient and engaging.

4 Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales

A Quick Trip to the City

I have a lot of love for New York City in my heart. It’s a beautiful place to visit, full of distinctive, friendly people. Of course, actually visiting and walking around the city is tiring and takes ages, so if you’d like a more concise visit, you can probably get the gist out of Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales.

A sorta-sequel, sorta-spin-off to the first Marvel’s Spider-Man, Miles Morales follows the titular spider-successor as he manages Manhattan while Peter and MJ are off doing humanitarian stuff. The game largely recycles the map from the first game, though the focus of the plot is narrowed mostly to Harlem over the entire city. You can still swing about Manhattan freely, and there are lots of little collectables to find and random crimes to stop if you’re so inclined.

Compared to the original game, Miles Morales has a generally much shorter total runtime, due to its tighter focus and slightly less varied side content. If you specifically want an open-world game you don’t need to invest as much time in, though, that’s perfect. You get all the web-swinging fun and combat of the first game, but you can finish it with a fraction of the time and effort of actually circumnavigating NYC.

3 Metroid Dread

Samus is the Best at What She Does

When it comes to open-world games that keep things on task, the Metroidvania genre is a pretty consistent watering hole. You may be free to explore, but it’s generally much clearer where you need to go and what needs to happen. With all that in mind, if you’re jonesing for a quick adventure, Metroid Dread will sate your cravings.

Like the rest of its predecessors and fellow genre titles, Metroid Dread is set across a large, seamless map, ready and waiting for you to run, jump, and Morph Ball through. The apparent scope of the map can seem intimidating, but the combination of fast-paced gameplay and clear objective markers helps to keep you on task and cut down time spent fumbling around, directionless.

Every time you unlock a new traversal ability, every little undiscovered nook of the map feels like an opportunity, either to find another way forward or uncover some manner of power up like a missile upgrade. Even factoring that in, though, Metroid Dread isn’t that long of a game, especially compared to some other Vanias. There’s a reason Metroid is still a favorite for speedrunners, after all.

2 Batman: Arkham City

Batman’s Used to Methodical Patrols

Batman’s entire established shtick is that he is the lone protector of the entirety of Gotham City, Robin and Nightwing notwithstanding. That’s a lot of ground for one dude with no superpowers to cover, but boy, if he hasn’t gotten really good at it over the years. This is likely why, in Batman: Arkham City, it doesn’t take much time or effort for him to make his way around the walled-off city-prison.

Compared to the more linear action stylings of Arkham Asylum, Arkham City obviously has a larger breadth of content to engage with and physical space to navigate. Whether during story missions or just for kicks, you can tussle with foes in combat or pick them off Predator-style, occasionally shifting to detective mode for solving environmental puzzles. The game’s major side quests are definitely worth getting into for a chance to tangle with the major villains, and the critical path is easy enough to stick to.

The only real aspect of Arkham City that doesn’t respect your time, somewhat unsurprisingly, is all the Riddler stuff, which is kind of a constant for the entire series. You could go to the trouble of solving all the puzzles and getting all the Riddler trophies, but I feel like it’d be funnier to just ignore them all. It’d probably drive Nygma bonkers.

1 Outer Wilds

You’ve Got All the Time in the Universe, and Then Some

Here’s a fun science fact: space travel takes forever. It might seem relatively close up in the sky, but it took the Apollo 8 mission nearly three days to fly from Earth’s orbit to the Moon’s orbit. Thankfully, Outer Wilds doesn’t adhere to our real-life laws of physics, which is good, because we don’t exactly have three days before the solar system explodes.

Outer Wilds is an open world puzzle exploration game where you’re exploring the various planets of an alien solar system in order to solve an ancient mystery encompassing the whole thing. The twist is that you only have about 20 minutes and change before the sun goes supernova, after which you’re sent back to the start in a time loop. It’s a game that respects your time largely because time is the game’s most abundant resource, at least on a meta level.

At the start of the game, and even after your first couple of loops, you’re in no particular rush, because you’re just exploring and gathering information. As you progress, though, time starts to become more precious, as certain aspects of the system move on a strict schedule. You start to feel the squeeze, learning to optimally pilot your rocket and get where you need to be right on time or risk having to start the loop over.