10 Videogames With The Best Worldbuilding
A whole new world! A new fantastic point of view! No one to tell us no, or where to go! Well, except for the giant robots, the vicious monsters, and the cosmic horrors—they’ll definitely limit our options a little bit. While promises of a “new world” might be enough to seduce someone into a magic carpet ride, the realities of traveling to fantastical faraway places can certainly be harsh (sometimes fatal). Video game worlds are some of the most dangerous travel destinations around, but hey, they’re also the most breathtaking. It’s a tradeoff! Is getting eaten by an extraterrestrial monster worth a gallivant around a distant planet? That’s for you, the gamer, to decide. In these 10 games with the best worldbuilding, you’ll have plenty of time to weight the pros and cons for yourself.
Disco Elysium
Arguably more of a work of literature than a video game, Disco Elysium offers one of the most politically, socially, and ethically complex worlds in the entire medium. You play as Harrier “Harry” Du Bois, a lieutenant of the Revachol Citizens’ Militia—this post-war world’s equivalent of a drunk disaster cop. While nursing the final boss of all hangovers, you have to figure out both the details of a murder case and the world you live in (you got so blasted you forgot literally everything). An RPG where combat is conversation and your party members are the voices in your head, Disco Elysium is set in an island nation reeling from the fallout of a major global conflict. Capitalists, fascists, socialists, and moderates are all attempting to fix the broken nation of Revachol, and it’s up to you to decide your politics and your morals. The days of disco are over, and a broken-down, has-been cop like you better learn to adapt to the Bad New Days of the present, or else you’ll end up yesterday’s news.
Grand Theft Auto 5
While Red Dead Redemption 2 is arguably Rockstar’s most vibrant open world, Grand Theft Auto V‘s has the clearest point of view. A pastiche of Los Angeles, the city of Los Santos is a fake, plastic world full of fake, plastic people. The game perfectly lampoons 2010s American culture, its setting a mirror world of the rat-race capitalistic hellscape that is the modern-day United States. Happy to exchange morality and kindness for money and status, the citizens of Los Santos are a satire of the celebrity-obsessed, tech-crazed, influencer culture that dominated the era. Whether it’s a gangster, a mogul, or a global superstar, everyone in this city wants to be somebody, and this game’s protagonist trio is no exception. Well, except maybe Trevor, he just wants to blow $%*&^ up. Combining the black comedy cynicism of BoJack Horseman with the epic sweep of Scarface, this hard-hustling world is not for the faint of heart.
BioShock Infinite
BioShock Infinite takes place in a world that is a dark twist on the American Dream. A haven for crooked capitalists, religious zealots, and racist xenophobes, the floating city of Columbia was marketed as a paradise—where modern-day extremists could pursue their ideals free from U.S. government intervention. Hired to recover a young woman named Elizabeth, private investigator Booker DeWitt infiltrates the sky-city and brings it crashing down. A false paradise built on violence and instability, Columbia is a city primed for demolition, and Booker and Elizabeth prove to be the flint and tinder that blow the place sky high. BioShock Infinite builds the vilest of worlds, then allows the player to destroy it—the results are gloriously satisfying.
Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon
Set in the greater Armored Core universe, Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon gives a player a glimpse into one of the most underrated sci-fi settings in gaming history. Interstellar mega-corporations vie for control of the universe’s dwindling resources, fighting proxy wars on distant planets with Armored Cores: giant mechs piloted by cybernetically augmented humans. The dictionary definition of “grimdark,” Fires of Rubicon is one of the most frighteningly dystopian worlds ever conceived. Megalophobics be warned, the entire game takes place in industrial wastelands full of machine-cut monoliths that dwarf Mount Everest. Never has a video game world made humans feel so small, so fragile, and so painfully irrelevant. But hey, at least we get to pilot mechas! It’s every anime enthusiasts dream!
Mass Effect
One of the greatest space operas ever written, the Mass Effect series pits a found-family spaceship crew against a galaxy-destroying threat. After the discovery of the mass-altering “Element Zero,” humanity went from “alone in the universe” to “new galactic next-door neighbor” in an instant. The Milky Way is teeming with organic and synthetic life, from carbon-based alien races to sentient machine intelligences—not all of them friendly. The galaxy is under threat from genocidal mecha-squids called “Reapers,” and you and your sexual-tension-infused starship crew are the only ones who can stop them. But you won’t want to, you’ll be too distracted reading Codex entries explaining the ins and outs of space politics and alien biology—practice for your human/alien romantic trysts.
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of The Patriots
An alternate military history of the world, The Metal Gear Solid franchise is one of the most complex video game epics ever conceived. On a planet where walking nuclear platforms continuously threaten the global status quo, war is forced to evolve constantly. While the Cold War drama of Snake Eater and The Phantom Pain are the stuff of alternate history greatness, the series reaches its worldbuilding apex with Guns of the Patriots—the game set in the franchise’s far future. In a world where a billionaire cabal fights endless proxy wars using private military companies and AI-controlled guns, Metal Gear Solid 4 feels like an eerily prophetic prediction of the state of conflict to come. But it also predicts cybernetic ninjas, so at least we have that to look forward to!
Bloodborne
While Elden Ring and the Dark Souls series feature some of the finest dark fantasy settings ever created, Bloodborne reigns as supreme as FromSoftware’s most original world to date. Set in the Victorian City of Yharnam, the player takes control of a leather-clad hunter wielding steampunk instruments of torture. After sawing through the werewolf-like beasts that plague the city, you soon stumble across Gothic cathedrals dedicated to the worship of eldritch entities, and eventually come face to face with the dark gods themselves. Plucking inspo from Catholicism, BDSM, and Lovecraftian horror, Bloodborne‘s world is curated like a Pinterest board from Hell—there’s no other game like it.
The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask
While Breath of the Wild is easily the most visually impressive world in The Legend of Zelda franchise, the setting of Majora’s Mask is the most emotionally powerful. A nightmarish parallel of Hyrule, the land of Termina will be destroyed by its falling moon in three days, unless Link can stop it. Dead oceans, haunted canyons, frostbitten mountains, this cursed world is dripping with melancholy and regret. Termina’s people feel the most human of any Zelda characters, responding to the coming apocalypse with complex emotions: grief, rage, and denial. Most video games are set in worlds that need saving, but Majora’s Mask‘s world needs healing, and this game teaches players a mature lesson in learning to tell the difference
Undertale
Undertale proves that video game worlds don’t need to be sweeping, gorgeous, and graphics-card-torturing to be great; they just need to be specific. One of the most delightfully idiosyncratic games ever created, Undertale is set in a subterranean world that runs parallel to our own. The Underground is technically populated by “monsters,” but its spaghetti-loving skeletons, David Bowie lookalike robots, and monogamous dog-warrior couples are a far cry from standard video game antagonists. Full of fantastical creatures that are just as emotionally complex as human beings, Undertale makes the player think twice before resorting to violence. If the player meets monsters with love, love is what they’ll receive in return. If the player treats Undertale like a standard RPG and kills monsters for EXP, they’ll certainly change the game’s world, making it lonelier, meaner, and sadder than how they found it.
Horizon Zero Dawn
Prehistoric, post-apocalyptic, cyberpunk, and fantastical, Horizon Zero Dawn contains more multitudes than a Walt Whitman poem. The game is set in a world where the robot revolution already happened. The result? Humanity is dragged back to the Stone Age, becoming a tribal society that views ancient technology with old-world mysticism. You take control of Aloy, a young warrior who uses an arsenal of tech-enhanced ancient-world weapons to fight robotic wildlife. Yes, the robots have taken the form of sabertooth tigers and T. Rexes, forming a complex synthetic ecosystem that is exactly as cool as it sounds. How did the former United States become Neo-Neolithic? The mystery of Horizon Zero Dawn‘s world is what makes the game truly great (and the ability to shoot arrows at robot dinosaurs, that’s a contributing factor).
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