Grand Theft Auto VI, the latest installment in the legendary crime series, is poised to deliver staggering sales when it launches next year—much like Grand Theft Auto V before it. A big part of its anticipated success lies in Rockstar Games’ continually evolving open-world design, a formula it first revolutionized 25 years ago with Grand Theft Auto III. Since then, the genre has exploded, spawning sprawling worlds filled with guns, cars, and often both.
But recently, I’ve found myself drawn to a different kind of open-world experience. I’ve been playing some of my favorite interpretations of the genre to date—games that feel refreshingly offbeat compared with their louder, more chaotic peers. And they’ve led me to a surprising realization: The open-world games I love most aren’t the ones packed with nonstop action, but the ones that embrace minimalism, quiet moments, and so-called “boring” design.
“Boring open-world games are good, actually” is a hot take I’ve been brewing for years, but what finally unlocked it for me was playing Baby Steps, an open-world indie comedy. Baby Steps’ three main developers are Maxi Boch, Gabe Cuzzillo, and Bennett Foddy, and if you recognize the last name on that list, suddenly everything inexplicable about the title makes sense. From QWOP to Getting Over It, Foddy’s games burden players with movement mechanics so clumsy and confusing that they lead to hilarious pratfalls. Similar to Octodad, they give you so much control over locomotion that you overthink a task most of us perform automatically in real life.
Baby Steps is no different. You play as a middle-aged man-child who must survive and escape from a harsh wilderness by simply walking. But to walk, you must press buttons and move control sticks to manually move the character’s feet, while dealing with environmental hazards, physics, and momentum. Instead of fluid footwork, stepping forward on a flat path becomes an embarrassing staccato display. Baby Steps is a comedic indictment of how a lack of self-respect can make even basic progress feel impossibly demanding.
Although I haven’t stuck with Foddy’s other games for more than a few minutes, I’ve been playing Baby Steps nonstop. It’s gone from a witty gag to one of my favorite games of the year, and it’s due to the open world. There are destinations to reach and cutscenes to watch, but Baby Steps gives you the freedom to wander wherever you want, provided you have the skill to get there. This flexibility makes me focus less on my constant failures and soothes the overwhelming friction. Any setback becomes an excuse to pick a new direction. All the while, I grow more accustomed to and enamored with the controls, manipulating my guy’s feet with the confidence of playing an instrument. I find myself better understanding the environment, anticipating how I’ll approach a particular steep hill or looking for natural staircases in rock faces. Baby Steps is the best moody walking simulator since Death Stranding.
These worlds may be imperfect, but so is ours, and there’s plenty of fun in their faults.
The vibe would be ruined if Baby Steps were afraid to be boring and opted to clog its world with content and superfluous extra mechanics. The magic comes from the intrinsic pleasure of achieving a self-motivated goal, rather than marking off a checklist. In fact, the game frequently mocks you for even wanting a map. If the unwieldy controls aren’t alienating enough, it’s easy to see many players being turned off by the map with seemingly nothing to do but walk around. However, the purity of walking around, which requires some effort, is the point. Remember being amazed when Skyrim’s devs said you could visit any mountain in the distance? Baby Steps recaptures that awe simply by making you take one step at a time.
Mario Kart World: Experiencing Relaxing Roads Between Races
Baby Steps made me realize that, whether it’s in real life or in video games, I just love wandering around. I adore exploring game worlds with no stakes, backed up by stripped-down systems that let me create my own intent. It’s satisfying and meditative to exist in an unhurried virtual world that doesn’t pressure me to do anything specific. These are my “cozy games.” Many people find that lack of direction unfulfilling. But more and more, that’s the therapeutic feeling I’ve been chasing in open-world games.
Mario Kart World is one of my favorite games of the year, and it’s largely due to Free Roam. Sure, I love Knockout Tour’s competitive elimination races, but over the past few months, the thing that’s drawn me back is cruising through the open world at my leisure. Every detail that makes it polarizing is what makes me such a fan. When I need a break from the rush of racing, Mario Kart’s world is a relaxing rest stop.
I adore treating Mario Kart as a huge road trip, a sightseeing tour through a gorgeous, fully realized cartoon continent. I love the remarkably chill soundtrack that lets me vibe while driving. In addition, I thoroughly enjoy casually switching between aimless driving and mastering the trick system to better understand the course layouts. It doesn’t matter if I get a collectible or not, or if I stumble across a mission I don’t like; I can bail and quickly discover another one. I’ve driven up waterfalls, grinded ice cream cones, and escaped from dinosaurs. My time in Mario Kart World’s Free Roam is exactly as fun as I make it, and I find that sense of self-motivation intoxicating. There’s nothing stopping you from playing any open-world racing game like this.
Games are designed to make you play them a certain way, and to get such a freeform experience means intentionally ignoring much of their crafted content and progression systems. This change may even happen to Mario Kart World. After all, Nintendo updated Free Roam with more ways to track your progress. It’s a good addition, but it’s a change that shifts you toward the traditional open-world paradigm of making checklists rather than living in the moment. But for now, Mario Kart World’s “boring” open world encourages me to stop worrying and just go along for the ride, and I gladly accept.
The Many Paths of Open-World Freedom
It feels heretical to say this as a gamer, but I don’t care all that much about winning. Competition is mostly interesting to me as a means to incentivize expressive interactions, rather than competition for its own sake. This is why I’m also smitten with Street Fighter 6’s somewhat shaggy open world. It’s novel to participate in fighting game activities in the big, wide world. I hate achievements, trophies, numbers going up, and all these other arbitrary external annoyances that try to convince me a game isn’t worth playing just on its own merits. I prefer to zone out and lock in. Puzzle game developers have understood this for a long time (something I realized recently upon picking Puzzle Quest back up again), but open worlds can harness this energy, too. All they need to do is calm down.
If Mario Kart World isn’t your thing, 2025 also delivered Wheel World, a serene open-world indie bike game. Between the music, visuals, and vibe, Wheel World transforms racing across the countryside into a spiritual experience, with only a limited number of actual activities to do.
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Since 2016, No Man’s Sky has steadily introduced more and more substance into its procedural sci-fi universe, all for free. But even from the beginning, it understood the power of unleashing players into a striking galaxy full of open alien worlds, and letting them drink it all in however they wanted.
I’ll die on the hill that No More Heroes‘ barren open world is crucial to its artistic point, a parody of the modern video game industry and its dumb, unquestioned AAA design priorities. Suda51’s punk art strikes again.
I even have a bit of a soft spot for Sega’s botched open-world experiment, Sonic Frontiers. Because, at least on paper, letting Sonic run across a world too immense to imagine sounds amazing. And Pokémon Legends: Arceus, despite its issues, remains my favorite modern Pokémon game because it provided peace and tranquility in making you collect and battle monsters in an undisturbed natural open-ish world.
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Even if a game isn’t a complete open world, its self-contained and low-key open sections provide a nice respite between more scripted action. They can make a game feel bigger and less linear than it actually is. Halo Infinite‘s campaign spreads the battle across a larger map, and Gears 5 lets you travel between encounters in a vehicle. It was during this “boring” downtime that I felt more connected to those characters, not just experiencing their greatest hits. Metroid Prime 4: Beyond appears to be doing something similar by letting Samus ride a motorcycle across various environments. Considering how well that franchise understands the value of atmosphere and methodical pacing, I’m curious to see more.
AAA Games Can Chill, Too
A game can absolutely be so boring that it’s bad, like Endless Ocean: Luminous. And I’m certainly not opposed to all games that use the more traditional, content-heavy, open-world style. I’ve come to appreciate the patched-up Star Wars Outlaws on the Nintendo Switch 2, which closely adheres to the Ubisoft formula. The PlayStation 5’s big holiday release is Ghost of Yotei, a follow-up to Ghost of Tsushima’s marriage of samurai thrills with a familiar open-world structure. However, a superficial desperation to avoid dullness, with maps cluttered with icons and points of interest, can turn games into thoughtless exercises of going through the motions.
Although I don’t enjoy most battle royale games, I’ve always respected how that genre is brave enough to use long stretches of boring nothingness in vast maps to ratchet up tension between frenetic firefights. When you’re not dodging bullets, you must think about and engage with what you’re doing, and that’s thrilling.
You don’t have to choose one style or the other. Often, the most masterful open-world games feel understated and effortless, yet still huge and jam-packed. I’m talking about games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Far Cry 2, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, and The Witcher 3. In these games, the fun emerges organically, rather than being handed to you.
Embrace the Boring
Being a little boring can go a long way, and even the original open-world auteurs at Rockstar Games understand this. Arguably, what makes Red Dead Redemption 2 so fascinating is that it triples down on deliberate pacing in a way that feels true to its Western influences. Few experiences can top a long, winding, and contemplative horseback ride. I’m eager to see if GTA VI has any of that spirit.
Sometimes you want a video game to be a roller-coaster ride, something that forces you to have fun exactly as intended. Other times, you just want the tools to mess around, so you can create your own good time. After all, Minecraft became a juggernaut simply by giving kids a vast array of virtual blocks with no limits. The promise of open worlds lies in their freedom, and developers should recognize that this freedom can also mean being free from hyperactive distractions. These worlds may be imperfect, but so is ours, and there’s plenty of fun in their faults.
About Our Expert
Jordan Minor
Senior Writer, Software
Experience
My PCMag career began in 2013 as an intern on the company’s Software team. Now, I’m a Senior Writer on the Apps and Gaming team, using the skills I acquired at Northwestern University to write about dating apps, meal kits, programming software, website builders, video streaming services, and video games. Besides PCMag, I worked as the Senior Editor for Geek.com, and wrote for The A.V. Club, Kotaku, and Paste Magazine. I’m the author of the gaming history book Video Game of the Year: A Year-by-Year Guide to the Best, Boldest, and Most Bizarre Games from Every Year Since 1977, and the reason everything you know about Street Sharks is a lie.
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