Best Adventure Game Maps

Considering the vast majority of video games involve violence to some degree, it's always liberating to find titles that go beyond conflict.

Although many of my favorite video games involve action, I also enjoy experiences focused on more than just combat, which can't always carry the entire experience on its shoulders.

Sometimes I just like to walk around, solve puzzles, or read dialogue, because I've learned to value the interactive industry far beyond the dopamine rush that the most popular experiences can provide.

However, these titles I'm referring to are what they are, among other things, because of their magnificent environments, so I invite you to read this list of the ten best adventure game maps.

10 Solar Ash

The Most Colorful Apocalypse

Being the sole exception to the pacifist tone of this entire article, the first game that came to mind when I started writing was Solar Ash.

Heart Machine is a studio that had already won me over with their wonderful Hyper Light Drifter, but with Rei's adventure, they cemented their status as a great independent team that also has more tricks up its sleeve than initially thought.

With a game designed for exploration and movement in a glorious, dreamlike, and decaying world, the Ultravoid is an exceptional location, both for feeling the pressure of the impending apocalypse and for fully enjoying the satisfaction of skating all over the place.

It boasts a lot of verticality, numerous secrets, a colorful art style, and even bosses that take advantage of the environment to turn each battle into a challenge of platforming and spatial awareness, with the bonus of having a natural background as vibrant and dynamic as Solar Ash's.

9 Firewatch

A Forest to Care For

I've always said I don't hold Firewatch in nearly the same high regard as the vast majority of players, but that doesn't mean I don't appreciate its magnificent presentation.

From every walk to every change of color in the game's skybox, the adventure offers a constant stream of stunning visuals thanks to its gorgeous art design, which feels alive like few others in the indie scene.

Firewatch knows exactly how to put you in the shoes of a park ranger, allowing you to become intimately familiar with your surroundings almost as if they were the back of your hand, precisely because everything is meticulously designed to be intuitive and accessible.

While its beauty is always striking, what I truly loved about the game was its ability to make you connect with the environment, creating a ludonarrative coherence with our character's profession that I think is underpraised, considering how well it works.

8 Pentiment

Tassing Will Be Your Second Home

I know immersion usually comes from a video game's ability to achieve sufficient graphical fidelity to feel like virtual reality without headsets, though Pentiment strikes me as an extraordinary example of how to achieve the same objective by doing the opposite.

Through a magnificent story and tremendous secondary characters, with whom you end up connecting and empathizing as if they were lifelong friends, the city of Tassing comes alive beyond its spatial function.

You learn all the paths, recognize where all the citizens are, know which points to investigate to advance the story, and so on, because the map absorbs you, becoming a second home to which you happily belong.

It certainly helps that Pentiment has one of the best visual designs ever seen in video game history, but the mastery of its boundaries goes beyond its beauty, extending to its superb design and layout.

7 Sword of the Sea

The Beauty of Nature

Giant Squid has become one of my all-time favorite developers, both for their work under thatgamecompany (Journey) and for what they've done accomplished with their new company, especially Sword of the Sea.

All the studio's games bear an undeniable mark of quality, but their latest release goes a step further, fully showcasing the great maturity they've reached and creating what, for me, is their most polished and enjoyable game to date.

The transitions between its dunes and seas permeate a silent and intriguing campaign where you become one with the environment, paired with a narrative that invites you to connect with the natural history that precedes the decayed world we originally arrive in.

Watching every corner of the map regain its luster as we pass through it, gradually piecing together events while reveling in its glorious sword-skating mechanics, is among the best feelings of 2025, just as Sword of the Sea is among the year's most distinguished titles.

6 What Remains of Edith Finch

The House of Hardships

I've always been amazed by the ability of certain video games to offer an experience that lasts for hours despite taking place in a single location, though few possess What Remains of Edith Finch's level of magic.

Visiting the Finch family residence is among my most treasured, fantastic, and even inexplicable memories as a gamer, since each room conceals a world of complexities, both personal and collective, within a captivating and enthralling story.

The walls of the house not only narrate the events of each family member's life but also communicate them through unique mechanics, preventing you from anticipating what's coming and how the game will break your heart in the most human way possible.

Add an unforgettable soundtrack, and you get a video game that you can't erase from your mind even if you want to, as well as a mansion that will stay with you despite the inherent melancholy that emanates from its floors.

5 Sludge Life

Living in the Mud

While I understand that most people use video games as an escape, I use them to remind myself how disarrayed the world is and to reaffirm my fight for a better life, so it's easy to see why I love Sludge Life.

As a satirical title where you just wander around tagging walls and talking to the most bizarre beings the human mind can conceive, it's an incredibly accurate snapshot of our times, capable of understanding our problems and worries.

The game presents a muddy world as a metaphor for the material and immaterial substances that prevent us from growing and force us into a permanent state of stagnation, where it seems we have no choice but to accept we live in the mire, even though no one wants to.

Its map is a plastic sphere filled with thick, black liquids, burger joints of dubious hygiene, and people living in shipping containers, so if Sludge Life doesn't make you feel seen and understood, I don't think any video game in history ever will.

4 Blue Prince

An Unforgettable Mansion

From the moment I played it until now, I've taken every opportunity to sing the praises of Blue Prince, because I truly believe it's one of the best puzzle games of all time.

Given its roguelike nature and its focus on both logic and exploration challenges, the Mount Holly Estate becomes a fairytale setting where so many secrets lie hidden that even today I'm still amazed at how they can coexist.

From an anti-monarchy subplot you only fully understand after 100 hours to underground journeys that connect puzzles in different rooms and combinations so improbable they seem impossible, the game never ceases to amaze you with its depth, that is, the depth of the mansion itself.

Blue Prince's heart and soul are its map, including the permanent upgrades you unlock by accessing new parts of the estate and rooms that can only be drawn in a specific grid, and it utilizes it better than most big-budget games.

3 Return of the Obra Dinn

The Most Iconic Ship

Speaking of games where the campaign itself is a giant puzzle that ultimately delivers the greatest sense of satisfaction the genre can offer, Return of the Obra Dinn is a marvel every indie fan should experience.

Lucas Pope has been a genius since he released Papers, Please, but what he achieves with his high-seas detective game goes even further, immersing you in a perfectly woven plot where you rewind time and make logical deductions about events until your eyes dry with pure enjoyment.

However, unlike most games whose objective is to investigate a specific event, Return of the Obra Dinn fulfills its grandiloquent purpose within a ship and nothing else, expanding and widening it in unpredictable ways to make every inch of space a kilometer of enigmas.

The Obra Dinn is the vessel for a sensational campaign, with so many cabins, compartments, and stories that it is unlikely not to become fond of it or, even more, to feel its strong presence is the only thing that keeps you focused on achieving your great objective: discovering what happened within its confines.

2 Disco Elysium

You Will Carry Martinaise in Your Heart

If there's one city that has captivated me with its brutal honesty, it's Revachol, the town where I spent all my hours in Disco Elysium before recognizing it as a timeless masterpiece for which humanity is unprepared.

Combining the grittiness and stubbornness of Sludge Life's world with the sense of belonging and familiarity of Pentiment's Tassing, this little corner of Revachol becomes both your life and your graveyard as the story unfolds, because you slowly die as you know you have less time left until you finish the game.

The human complexity emanating from Martinaise's characters, whose writing is worthy of the best literature, surpasses anything we've seen in any other video game, creating dialogues, circumstances, and emotions that simply haven't been replicated outside ZA/UM's creation.

When you stop to look at the architecture, to analyze the urban planning, to examine the colors in detail, to appreciate the history, and to sing the worst karaoke ever conceived, you come to the unshakeable conclusion that the only reason you don't move to Martinaise is that you already live there, since Martinaise is all the places in our world.

1 Outer Wilds

A Mini Galaxy Full of Wonders

Even so, when it comes to maps, the minigalaxy of physical wonders and stories about the decline of a civilization and the rise of a new world in Outer Wilds is the epitome of adventure, the perfect companion for understanding why the interactive nature of video games makes them so impressive.

The first time you fall into Giant's Deep, pass through a black hole, find Feldspar, discover your first anglerfish, understand how Hourglass Twins work, experience your first cycle… These are simply transcendent memories that immerse you in an intergalactic experience.

Because of its diegetic forms and its tremendous world design, where each planet to visit has its own characteristics, challenges, and contributions to the grand puzzle Outer Wilds presents, the feeling of genuinely exploring an ecosystem and actively deciphering its physical rules and laws is utterly divine.

Each piece is individually excellent, but when you combine them all, you have an interplanetary circuit whose grand scheme looks as perfect from afar as it does from a few centimeters up close. Whether you see a single tree or the entire forest, this game is a life-changing experience, and its presentation of space has a lot to do with that assertion.