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The best indie open-world games to relax with
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Sarah Thwaites
To save your time spent running around houses, we’ve rounded up the best indie open-world games where you can kick back and relax. Our list features all kinds of genres, from a Lovecraftian fishing adventure to a multiplayer factory management simulator, with some welcome mascot management in the mix for good measure.
Windrose
Avast, ye! If looking for an open-world game packed with boats and booty, Windrose marks the spot. Developed by Kraken Express, this piratical survival game puts you in the swashbuckling boots of a captain who, after a close shave with Blackbeard, awakens doubloon-less on a tropical island. Even so, it’s The Golden Age of Piracy, and with enough grit and labour, you can reclaim your station and maybe even become the new leader of the seven seas.
Similar to other survival crafting games like Valheim and Rust, success in Windrose hinges on your ability to graft and scavenge its perilous pelagic setting. There’s wood to chop, stone to mine, and ferocious animals like wild boars to fight for their hide, all of which can be repurposed into shelter, clothing, and food. There is some guidance during this process, but a lot of the time it’s more of a hilarious game of trial and error. One day, you’ll punch a Dodo to death and find out you can fry up their eggs for a tasty meal. On another, you’ll overestimate your abilities and end up mercilessly slaughtered by a pirate foe.
Dredge
Relaxation and Lovecraftian horror don’t always go hand in hand. But, in the case of Dredge, they’re a perfect match. Set in a beautiful, painterly world, you play as a fisherman who becomes indebted to the mayor of a strange island after crashing nearby. The catch, so to speak, is that in trying to pay off your debts, you’re quickly ensnared by the strange curse infecting the seaside town, unable to escape its twisty mystery.
What makes Dredge such a worthy investment isn’t just the sticky mechanical loop of exploring and fishing up ghastly beasties across a day-to-night cycle. It’s not even the moreish process of trying to prune your cargo hold by arranging items like scaly tetronimoes. It’s the enthralling mystery that unpins the overarching story. As you upgrade your ship, you’ll sail further afield and meet cryptic characters that illuminate the shadow hanging over Dredge’s setting with tales of their own woes. The more you unearth, the more you’ll ponder why you can’t seem to leave this cursed place, and wrestle with the tantalizing prospect of one more trip out to sea when you almost certainly should be heading to bed.
Promise Mascot Agency
Have you ever wondered what it’s like to live in a world where everyone hates you? Well, Promise Mascot Agency lets you experience that warm feeling firsthand. You play as Michi, a disgraced Yakuza who, in fleeing a life of violence, has transitioned into a unique career—mascot management. This unconventional role involves a host of irreverent tasks like helping sentient tofu gain an appreciation for their own blandness, taxiing a mouthy severed finger around the map, and assisting a former strawberry model fix up their farm, to name a few. Despite how odd each task seems, clever writing and quirky character designs make it hard not to root for each of your clients. As such, you’ll often find yourself exhausted and in debt to ensure they’re all achieving their dreams.
Like any good open-world game, you also have a steed, which in the case of Promise Mascot Agency is an adorable Kei-car. Using your pint-sized Japanese junker, you’ll shred across the countryside serving your patrons and seeking out new mascots to earn some extra cash. An important note here is that, in addition to the work, the town itself is haunted by evil spirits and has been wildly mismanaged by its leaders. As such, you’ll also need to fix up the town and take out cursed objects with your vehicle to win the love of the locals—a worthy subplot to explore. By transporting you to an entirely unique world full of adorable losers, Promise Mascot Agency takes on an endearing, often calming atmosphere that makes it easy to lose hours with.
Slime Rancher 2
Slime Rancher 2 is the epitome of a soothing experience. Adorable creatures? Check. Intricate puzzles? Check. An upgradable home base that can be expanded through comforting, repetitive activities? You better believe it! Here, you play as Beatrix LeBeau, the slime afficionado from the first game who is summoned via a mysterious letter to the dreamy Rainbow Island. Here, you’ll spend the lion’s share of your time hoovering a variety of globby organisms and transporting them to your home base. From there, you’ll nurture and sell for cold, hard coins. Alas, you’ll quickly realise the island is acting strange, with advanced technology littered around and a curious voice crackling through the radio waves. What ensues is a delightful biome-hopping tale that explores environmentalism and the importance of restoration over demolition.
Perhaps the most compelling aspect of Slime Rancher 2 is the meditative flow you can enter when collecting your for-profit goopy buddies. Similar to birdwatching, you’ll first need to discern your target's behaviour and figure out how they live—do they explode when you get close, or will they disappear if sunlight hits them? This process forces you to slow down in the vast open space and appreciate the identity of each area without risking a spike in your heart rate.
Satisfactory
There are few greater ludic time sinks than factory-building simulators. Morning can turn to night in what feels like the blink of an eye when you’re tweaking setups for maximum efficiency and embarking on material-hunting ventures. Satisfactory harnesses this exceptionally moreish loop masterfully, providing you with an open world teeming with supplies and a blank canvas upon which to build your mechanized kingdom. Set on an alien planet, you play as an employee of FICSIT Incorporated, an exploitative conglomerate looking to strip the planet of its resources and collect anything that looks like it’s worth taking. It’s a simple narrative that serves as a fitting backbone to the real meat of the game: automation and resource management, blended with the reliable structure of a survival game.
As with other games on this list, your time in Satisfactory is ruled by your own growing ambition, so you can become a coveted ore seeker or lock in and brute force your way through alien organism research. There are hundreds of hours of gameplay at your fingertips, but, thankfully, if that seems slightly overwhelming, Satisfactory has a multiplayer mode that lets you and up to three friends work together to build a carbon utopia. As a team, you can divide roles into hunter, gatherer, and architect, going about your utilitarian duties, then deliberating on what you need to find to expand and serve your corporate overlords. It’s kind of like being in a positive work environment… but you’re not actually at work.
The Legend of Khiimori
Set in 13th-century Mongolia, The Legend of Khiimori is an atmospheric adventure game with a heavy focus on history and horses. You play as Nara, a spry Yam courier with the sizable dream of connecting the disparate populations of her home country, one fragile parcel at a time. Across perilous environments, including craggy mountaintops, vast deserts, and frosty peaks, survival centers on your ability not only to plot routes cautiously, but also to stock up for your journey lest you starve or fall down a slope and bruise more than your ego—think Death Stranding, just without the spine-chilling BTs and age-accelerating rain.
What sets The Legend of Khiimori apart from other fetch-quest games is the attention to detail afforded to your horse companion. In lieu of simple upgrading earned through XP alone, Aesir Interactive has implemented a more intricate system where you breed, raise, and break in your equestrian companion to earn the best stats. Imitating the complicated process of horse rearing in real life, this delightful process ensures you’ll form a special bond with your digital companions, which makes the game rewarding, but also comforting to return to with a cup of tea and a schedule-less afternoon.
Check out these open-world indies on Epic Games Store today!