Games

Best RPGs With Mysterious Worlds

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2 months ago

October 13, 2024

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Role-playing games come in all shapes and sizes and, while some are better known for their moment-to-moment gameplay and/or build-crafting (ARPGs in the style of Diablo, for example), others are more often enjoyed for their intriguing worlds, open or not.

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The Best Action-RPGs To Play If You Love Diablo

Table of Contents

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Games such as Dark Souls, while featuring innovative gameplay that spawned an entire genre, are known for their mysterious, often interconnected environments, most of which aim to confound the player at every turn. The lore that sprouts from these vaguely-painted worlds, the density of their secrets, the hidden nooks and crannies, and the labyrinthine design, all work together to provide an enigmatic atmosphere that’s often incredibly memorable.

5 TUNIC

A Zelda-Inspired Adventure Built Around A Lack Of Information

Released: March 16, 2022
Developer(s): Andrew Shouldice

This lightweight RPG/action-adventure game is practically built around its mysterious world, instantly creating a sense of mystery by depriving the player of key information. TUNIC is clearly inspired by older games in the Zelda franchise with its focus on lock-and-key exploration in condensed environments, but features elements of the Dark Souls series with its combat system, involving mechanics for dodging and parrying alike.

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Much of TUNIC’s enigmatic atmosphere is built from a lack of information right out of the gate, something that is supported mechanically through the in-game instruction manual. This manual’s pages are scattered across the world, written in a mysterious language, and players are able to learn about the game, its systems, and its world, through collecting and studying these pages. The game’s RPG mechanics are minimal, but players are able to level up their various stats using specific items found throughout the world. However, while the gameplay is rewarding and there are a variety of memorable boss fights, TUNIC’s mysterious world is arguably its greatest strength.

4 Elden Ring

An Expansive World Packed With Secrets Waiting To Be Discovered

Released: February 25, 2022

Elden Ring’s world is ambitious, expansive, and packed with places to discover. From tucked-away caverns and dense forests to castled cities and sprawling underground dungeons, Elden Ring’s mystery hinges on players experiencing the game with almost no prior knowledge of its lands. The expansive, secretive nature of the world offers up a mysterious atmosphere that rewards players with a sense of discovery at almost every turn, propelling players through its world and leading them from one place to the other with curious breadcrumbs.

In a lot of ways, Elden Ring is similar to the previous games of its developers, FromSoftware, but Elden Ring is markedly different from Dark Souls with the absence of a smaller, interconnected world. Elden Ring doesn’t lock the player away in the same way Dark Souls does, and not nearly as often. Because of Elden Ring’s massive scale and pure open-world, it’s not nearly as easy to get lost, something that many fans of games such as the original Dark Souls may miss.

3 Lunacid

A First-Person RPG That Practices FromSoftware’s Art Of Getting Lost

Lunacid

Systems

Released: March 15, 2022
Developer(s): Kira Llc

Lunacid is heavily influenced by older games developed by FromSoftware, before the advent of Dark Souls, when the now-iconic studio was still developing first-person dungeon crawlers such as Shadow Tower and King’s Field. This horror-tinged ARPG is incredibly similar to the aforementioned titles, drenched in gloomy atmosphere and first-person dungeon-crawling action, interspersed with thoughtful and oftentimes labyrinthine exploration.

This action RPG’s dark and gloomy fantasy world is smothered in fog and mystery, packed with memorable moments to experience, locations to be discovered, and characters to meet. The characters in particular, like Dark Souls, tend to be on the quirkier side, making for a welcome reprieve from the somber atmosphere.

2 Caves Of Qud

A Hand-Crafted, Utterly Strange, Retro-Futuristic World Complemented By Procedural Content

Caves Of Qud

Systems

Released: July 15, 2015
Developer(s): Freehold Games

From the cozy and relatively safe town of Joppa and its friendly moisture farmers, and the towering Six Day Stilt, to the rusted caves of the dungeon Golgotha and the humble underground community at Grit Gate, the world of Caves Of Qud is diverse with strange and mysterious locations. There’s an underlying sense of mystery to the atmosphere and setting as a whole, with the game taking place in a retro-futuristic world of sci-fi fantasy replete with ancient artifacts, cybernetics, and mutated creatures.

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The careful balancing of hand-crafted and procedural content also allows Caves Of Qud to keep its sense of mystery for hours on end, extending across multiple playthroughs. The hand-crafted locations may become familiar over time, but the procedural wilderness and sprawling underground caves never lose their mysterious nature.

1 Dark Souls

A Dark, Atmospheric, Interconnected World With Mysterious Lore

Released: September 22, 2011

The brutal difficulty and oppressive nature of this notorious ARPG is one thing, but the curiosity-inducing, atmospheric, and deeply mysterious world of Dark Souls is an important aspect of the game and helped a great deal in solidifying it as a modern classic. Dark Souls throws players in at the deep end, with very little preamble and even less explaining, dangling a mere handful of vague narrative threads to keep the player invested early on.

The vague nature of the game’s narrative, its charismatic and often mysterious characters, and the sheer scale of its world all contribute to a setting dripping with mystery. There’s a lot to discover in the kingdom of Lordran, and it’s easy for players to get lost in its non-linear, labyrinthine world, making for an experience that offers a consistently mysterious atmosphere as players stumble down its many twisting paths.

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