The Best Sandbox Games in 2022 | Updated

RimWorld

RimWorld is a science fiction cousin of another indie game, discussed further down the list: Dwarf Fortress.

Instead of a fantasy realm, we get an alien planet and a bunch of mostly luckless colonists trying to make a living. Your toons are randomly generated and come with unique sets of skills and traits, and a bit of backstory for extra flavor. Of course, they also have specific needs you must cater to.

While you have the silly colonists to manage, and the clever AI Director makes sure your life is interesting, but you’re mostly left to your own devices, with no grand goal beyond just, you know, making sure the colony survives as long as possible against the environment, raider, aliens, incompetence… RimWorld is quite complex, and lets you just have fun with that complexity.

RimWorld

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Don’t Starve

Don’t Starve is driven by two truths: you must find a way to discover in a Burtonesque world, and you probably should find a way out of this stylish misery. It’s a survival game through and through, with setting up a flimsy campfire to defend against the darkness, building useful contraptions, and exploring the wilderness for resources…and running away when something tries to eat you.

The flipside is that if you die, you’re dead, and you get to potentially cash in the XP you earned for a different character. Indeed, Don’t Starve is both a survival and a roguelike game, and it’s great at being both. The game’s core mode is Sandbox, but if you’d like a bit more info on the characters and some driving story, you go into the Adventure mode, which is more structured.

Don’t Starve

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Cities: Skylines

Like many city-builders before it, Cities: Skylines is as happy putting before you some goal to accomplish, as it is willing to just let you do anything you want.

The game provides a huge chunk of land to build your glorious metropolis on, and in the creative mode you’re pretty much free to design districts, manage public services, and do all the traffic work as you please.

You can try to optimize things to make everyone’s lives better… or try to conduct some harebrained scheme or urban experiment, even if it might have disastrous consequences. Cities: Skylines also has a ton of mods available on Steam Workshop, and a whole bunch of DLCs, so there’s little risk you’ll run out of toys for your urban sandbox.

Cities: Skylines

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Universe Sandbox

It’s in the name, after all, no? And, truth be told, the title doesn’t lie, Universe Sandbox does give you cosmic power to manipulate celestial bodies however you please, withing physical reason.

You probably won’t make a flat Earth, but you can fling it at the Sun and see the game simulate in real time what that does to the unfortunate piece of rock.

You can also create brand new planetary systems, put comets on orbits, witness stars collapsing… it’s an incredible…well, it’s probably more of a software than a game, but it’s quite able to bring you hours of great fun, and on top of that: it might teach you something about astrophysics! It’s even VR compatible, if you really want to get into the POV of a playful demiurge.

Universe Sandbox

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Besiege

Have you ever built siege engines? It’s a lot of hard work powered by the ingenuity of our ancestors.

While now it’s hard to get good lumber cheaply, you can live your best engineer fantasies with Besiege, a sandbox game about building machines out of available parts. Technically, the core game is mission-based, but it’s entirely up to you how you want to clear the objective.

See, if the game tells you „kill 100 enemies”, it doesn’t care if you built something sensible, or a barely flying monstrosity, as long as 100 enemies die before your contraption is immobilized. There is, of course, a proper sandbox mode, as well as a level editor, and even multiplayer, so you can match your haphazard creations against those of your friends.

Besiege

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Valheim

A surprising hit of 2021, Valheim takes you on a trip to a Norse afterlife. Not the big one, a supplementary one, because Odin has some problems to take care of and you’re the solution. Valheim falls neatly into the survival game type of sandbox, with food that needs to be cooked, monsters that need to be kept away from your crops, and shelter that need being built.

While you do have bosses to kill and new areas to discover, the game isn’t really going to hold your hand. You absolutely can spend fifty hours building a cool house on a cliff or exploring your current area looking for trouble, experience, and resources. Eventually the ways you can interact with the environment turn out to be limited, but you aren’t forced into linear gameplay at any point.

Valheim

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Crusader Kings 3

Crusader Kings 3 isn’t the kind of game you’d think of when you hear the word “sandbox”, but consider this: the game just… lets you loose on the map of Europe, free to do whatever.

If you want to form a new religion, you can. Run a spy network? Sure. Get twenty children and marry them off to different kingdoms to set them up for claiming the throne? Nobody is ever going to stop you.

It might be an exaggeration, but only a minor one. Like its predecessors, CK3 is very complex, and doesn’t have much graphical flair, but the degree of simulation, the scope of the experience, and very few hard goals plant it firmly into the sandbox drawer of playstyles. On top of all the features that are already built in, Crusader Kings 3 is also quite mod-friendly, letting you add even more stuff!

Crusader Kings 3

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Red Dead Redemption 2

The sequel to 2013’s RDR, Red Dead Redemption 2 turned out to be one of the most detailed, immersive games of its generation and, possibly, ever.

RDR2 is set during the fading glory days of a notorious bandit gang led by Dutch van der Linde and puts you in the shoes of his right hand, Arthur Morgan. You get to play through great heists, and the fall, setting up the previous game’s story.

As usual in Rockstar Games’ releases, there is a solid, engaging storyline you are free to follow, but…you don’t really have to. There’s so much in the world to do without touching the story. There is wildlife to hunt and document, tons of sidequests to go on, including extended storylines, or you could just go exploring, looking for secrets or talking to NPCs using a smooth, intuitive system.

Red Dead Redemption 2

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The Sims 4

Having a list of sandbox games and NOT having a The Sims game would be a grave mistake, wouldn’t it?

So, here we are, bringing The Sims 4 to your attention, as it is the latest and still actively supported with patches, updates, and a bunch of DLCs. The premise is simple: create a few Sims, build their house, watch them live their simulated lives, and interfere for fun and profit!

The gam eis extremely open-ended, guided mostly by the aspirations of individual Sims rather than an over-arching storyline or gameplay imperatives. The Sims are mostly capable of existing on their own, but you can nudge them towards certain actions to see what happens. The Sims go to work, travel to different neighborhoods, pursue hobbies, die in hilarious ways… it’s all good fun.

EVE Online

When you jump into EVE Online, you must know that there is no such thing as a shallow end of this pool. It begins at “deep” and then it gets deeper.

But this complexity makes EVE unique and fuels its player-driven… everything. Most interactions you’ll experience in EVE are going to be with other players. In a way, it’s a simulated universe more than a game, really.

EVE has player-driven economy, ruled over by player-driven corporations issuing player-driven jobs to smaller agents, who are also, you guessed it, players. You can do almost anything you want, from trying to make a name for yourself as a miner, to being a space pirate. Nothing is going to be straightforward, but a lot is possible, especially if you get the funding from a corporation.

EVE Online

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The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Despite being explicitly about killing dragons and taking part in the civil war, two aspects of the game we’re introduced to almost immediately, Skyrim is a really good sandbox RPG as well.

There ARE these two storylines… but you don’t have to care about any of that. You can go to unrelated cities and complete quests, pursue a career in one of the guilds, or commit to a life of craft… or crime.

When you’re not in combat you can look for ore deposits to mine resources for your blacksmithing hobby, or chase butterflies and collect flowers for alchemy. You could sneak around and be a thief, or spend some time building and decorating a house. It’s a huge world, with internal physics and logic which can lead to creative solutions, like the famous case of blinding a shopkeeper with a bucket.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

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Divinity: Original Sin 2

A sandbox-oriented gameplay is one of the most important features of Divinity: Original Sin 2.

Usually you’re presented with a goal to accomplish…and that’s it. What you do to accomplish your goals is limited only by your creativity and by the, rather permissive, logic of the game. You can move objects around to change the environment in your favour, and exploit interactions between abilities.

Every skill line features abiltiies which can drastically change how you’re going to approach any given challenge. Teleportation, creating elemental surfaces, stealth… You can get creative, or be as straightforward as it gets, your choice. Each act also features a large map full of unique locations you’re free to explore in any order. No wonder DOS2 is considered one of the best cRPGs of recent years.

Divinity: Original Sin 2

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Hitman World of Assassination trilogy

The Hitman games have always been good about dumping you on the map and letting you figure out a way to cap your target, but the World of Assassination trilogy running between 2016 and 2021 really ran with the idea. So much so, that the series has been actually dubbed an assassination sandbox, and it’s easy to see why: the maps are large and full of interesting opportunities.

Discovering all the ways of causing extremely bad accidents is a big part of the fun on this Hitman trilogy, but you can always find a screwdriver and ram it into your target’s temple while you’re dressed up as a clown. Or just use a weapon like a normal hitman, sheesh. The point is, that how you complete a mission is up to you, especially if you leave no trace of your existence.

HITMAN - Game of The Year Edition

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HITMAN 2 Standard Edition

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HITMAN 3

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Arma 3

The third incarnation of possibly the most complex military simulator out there is undoubtedly detailed, expansive, and flexible enough to allow a lot of freedom to its players.

This time everything takes place in the near future of 2030s, around the Aegean Sea and South Pacific. It is your playground, and while Arma 3 is demanding and complex, it also doesn’t limit you too much.

It doesn’t really place any specific boundaries on player activity. It has a huge amount of various military equipment ranging from weapons to vehicles, offers plenty of possible mission types, and has an editor for the creative minds to enjoy. If you enjoy military fiction, roaming the islands of Arma 3 is likely to give you the thrill you seek.

Arma 3

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No Man’s Sky

Lacklustre release notwithstanding, No Man’s Sky became more feature-complete with every major update, to the point where it is now.

Almost all promises that put the game on the radar have been fulfilled, chief among them the long awaited multiplayer. You have an entire galaxy to explore, and when you’re somehow done doing that, the game is happy to throw another one your way.

New unique lifeforms top spot and name, new geography, and challenges. Build a base with your friends, invest in a better spaceship, keep every meter in the green, and map the galaxy. Learn an alien language and reach the centre of the galaxy again. No Man’s Sky has truly become the game everyone was hoping for.

No Man’s Sky

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Elite Dangerous

If the somewhat abstract, pastel-coloured vibe of No Man’s Sky isn’t to your liking, but you still want to explore space, Elite Dangerous might be the game for you.

It has a definitely more realistic look, and follows in the footsteps of a classic franchise. If frequent long-distance, in-character runs exploring edges of known space are anything to go by, it’s pretty engaging.

Set in the fourth millennium, it benefits from all the technology we might be able to create by that time. It also features space pirates, space bounty hunters, space miners and many other space jobs that the players are free to take up any time they wish. Or, if no job seems appealing, they can just go exploring, as long as they have the necessary supplies for the trip.

Elite Dangerous

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Just Cause 3

The Just Cause series is notorious for giving the players a large open world, and a free reign about how they go about liberating it from the forces of some dictator or another unwelcome ruler.

In Just Cause 3 Rico Rodriguez has to free his own homeland, a Mediterranean island of Medici.

JC3, much like predecessors, is a generator of explosive chaos, capable of escalating to a very satisfying degree. Rico is a true demolition man, and with the help of the game’s physics a creative player can cause a really entertaining mayhem. You can easily use the physics of the game to perform crazy stunts and make enemies look like fools.

Just Cause 3

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ARK: Survival Evolved

ARK is certainly among the most well-known survival games, and as the genre frequently joins forces with a sandbox approach to gameplay, its appearance on this list was a foregone conclusion.

“It’s the one with dinosaurs and dragons” is probably the fastest way to identify ARK: Survival Evolved. Indeed, there are animals, including dinosaurs, to tame and train, there are places to explore, bases to build…

In general the player has a lot of freedom as to how to interact with the world. Just be mindful of your hunger or thirst. It IS a survival game after all. You’re not given many specific tasks, so you’re on your own, buty if you need some direction, here’s one option: create a dino-zoo. Or collect lore scraps. Explore the boundaries of the system and thrive within them.

ARK: Survival Evolved

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Surviving Mars

Surviving Mars allows you to check if you would be any good at establishing a colony on the Red Planet.

You have an army of friendly-looking drones to prep the basic infrastructure, various types of domes for you eventual colonists to live and work in, and a bit of science-fiction mystery to deal with every now and then.

Surving Mars is a very fun game, and once you get to the landing pad doesn’t really care that much about how you establish the colony. As long as it works, it’s fine. Nobody’s stopping you from making a really aesthetically pleasing colony, if you can manage to keep everyone fed and happy at the same time. As long as it works, you do you.

Surviving Mars

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Oxygen Not Included

Where Surviving Mars is all about setting up a colony on the surface of the planet, Oxygen Not Included is more interested in creating life-sustaining conditions within an asteroid.

You have some blueprints for helpful devices, but it’s up to you to figure out how to use them. What you need to understand, however, is that you’re pretty much working with a closed system.

You need to make arrangements to collect waste, to let harmful gases flow elsewhere, and to manage temperature. ONI is quite good at simulating basic fluid dynamics, and soon you’ll find a way to create a healthy and beneficial cycle using just your wits and the tools the game offers. Even if it takes five stages and twenty repairs along the way.

Oxygen Not Included

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Metro Exodus

This is the third game in the video series adapting the novels of Dmitry Glukhovsky.

This time the persistent protagonist Artyom takes his family and friends out of the tunnels and out into the post-apocalyptic surface.

Exodus features both discrete levels, as well as larger, open areas where Artyom can do as he pleases, which includes scavenging for resources and crafting tools for survival. The story even includes some choices to make, which will influence the ultimate outcome.

Metro Exodus

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Astroneer

Astroneer is a very friendly-looking game with a few cool ideas worth noting.

All of it takes place of procedurally generated planets, all of which have an open-world structure. Your player character is the eponymous Astroneer, and one of the coolest tools in their disposal is the deform tool.

That tool is useful not only for collecting crafting resource, but is also capable of terraforming, letting you reshape the planets you visit. It could be used to build bridge, or create more elaborate structures, if you feel like it. For a creative and industrious player it can be a ton of fun.

Astroneer

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Grand Theft Auto 5

The Grand Theft Auto series has a legacy of making its cities feel like places full of things to do, but GTA V is by far the most comprehensive among them.

The fictional city of Los Santos as well as the surrounding area is fully open to players, who can follow the story… or play golf, tennis, try themselves at a stock market, or go to a cinema.

The story follows a trio of criminals, Michael, Trevor, and Franklin, who are strong-armed into completing a number of robberies. There are some choices to make, there is much conflict due to the dynamics between the three, it’s all good crime story stuff. The player isn’t forced into a single character, but can freely switch between them, often catching them in the middle of some unrelated activity.

Grand Theft Auto 5

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The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

The most recent entry in the history of the Legend of Zelda franchise has a pretty decent amount of sandbox to it.

Most importantly, it uses the sandbox to give the world as such a lot of believability. Everything works just as you’d think it would, boulders, fire etc. and the game encourages you to take advantage of it through your exploration. Even better: Link has a number of magical abilities acquired via runes, and nothing really stops him from using them at will everywhere.

In Breath of the Wild’s case all of this serves to create a world which feels coherent, even if to some extent arbitrary. And it succeeds at doing so with flying colors, we must add. If you happen to have Nintendo Switch Breath of the Wild is a must have for many reasons, and it does make sandbox gameplay feel useful and a worthwhile world-building exercise instead of a gimmick.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

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Dishonored (franchise)

Arkane Studios struck gold with Dishonored. They started the search in Arx Fatalis and kept it up in the Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, but Dishonored, oh boy.

We’ve written about it before, and have called it a goal-oriented playground. Dishonored (1, 2, and Death of the Outsider) lands the spot here, because it does little beyond giving the player a goal to achieve and some fun tools you can use at will anywhere.

Essentially DH is a simulation of an arcane assassin. All powers work dynamically within the physics engine rather than being scripted and being given canned animations. You can teleport to any structure in range wide enough to support you, possess NPCs from rats to guards, stop time to interact with bullets and crossbow bolts shot by enemies or yourself…. There are plenty of other videos showing off just how sandboxy the game can feel and how creative you can get. And it’s only open-world within the levels themselves, the game progresses linearly otherwise.

Dishonored - Definitive Edition

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Dishonored 2

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Mount & Blade: Warband

Mount&Blade is a simulator of a person trying to make a living in a more or less medieval-like setting. This doesn’t sound particularly interesting, but bear with me for a moment.

The character creation makes M&B look like a relatively complex RPG, with some background details for you to define, a huge number of face-customizing sliders, a bunch of stats etc. and none of this prepares you for what comes after. When you leave the chargen you’re given a rudimentary combat tutorial and are let loose on the world. You’re free. Do what you want.

Get a small band of warriors to protect you and become a trader or support craftsmen. Get a larger band of warriors and pledge allegiance to a king, get a rundown castle and a a half-dead village. Or fight for yourself, capture a keep or a city, become a new power in Calradia. Be just a roving mercenary or just a guy who makes a living by fighting in tournaments. M&B: Warband is an extremely open-ended game, with many possible outcomes and little overarching plot or goal other than an occasional quest from a lord or another distressed NPC. Otherwise, you are free to do whatever.

Mount & Blade: Warband

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Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord

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Factorio

Have you ever dreamt of having a massive factory? Factorio allows you to. What is Factorio?

Essentially a game about creating the most optimised (or the most convoluted, if that’s your thing) way to produce expected results. Your Factory expands almost as fast as it grows in complexity. Factorio allows for the creation of pretty weird constructions. One player managed to create a Factory playing the music video to Darude’s Sandstorm, of all things. No kidding.

A further YouTube trip reveals self-replicating factories, and even a rendition of Portal’s ‘Still Alive’ and a couple other songs. If you can imagine something work thanks to a sequence of programmable units, there is good chance it can be done in Factorio and the game won’t mind one bit. The problem is setups like these require some extreme planning and probably engineering skills, and thus have a high skill threshold. Nothing that can’t be overcome, of course.

Factorio

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Dwarf Fortress

This is a game that might be largely unknown to many of you. Not surprising, too.

It’s not particularly pretty, being fully text-based (although the Steam version will have ‘proper’ graphics), it’s very weird, and gets weirder with every patch, and its skill threshold is through the roof if you want to play for any extended period of time. It is however quite possibly one of the most complex city simulators out there, complete with robust procedural generation of pretty much everything. It also has some of the silliest accidental occurrences anywhere.

The game doesn’t give you any goals other than keeping the settlement alive and, preferably, growing. What you do beyond that is entirely up to you. Notably, Dwarf Fortress was cited to be an inspiration for Minecraft, and was picked to be featured in the Museum of Modern Art. If you have time and patience, you should check it out, it’s freeware.

Saints Row 4

Saints Row 4 get the spot at the expense of GTA V for the sheer insanity of everything that happens in there. It’s also probably the best superhero game to date, and the least angst-driven, to boot. What is SR4?

A simulator of a superpowered unapologetic and oddly cheerful criminal. The playable character over the course of the game gains access to multiple abilities, all of them considered… unnatural. If you’ve played Prototype before you almost know what to expect, but Prototype didn’t have mad doctors with cat heads running amok, ragdoll-based side activities, and the kind of rampage GTA with its more realistic style can’t really provide.

Most importantly, The Boss has an outstanding and incredibly entertaining traversal powers, letting you run fast, jump high, and glide far. Then you add several different flavours of blasts, including one turning everything to gold, a couple flavours of telekinesis and a couple more. All of them allow you to have a smashing good fun and ignore the insane narrative whatsoever.

Saints Row 4

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Kerbal Space Program

This is a very smart and very cute game, with a very good physics model. Importantly, unlike most other games on this list, this one can actually teach you something.

The idea is that you’re helping a humanoid race known as Kerbals launch their space program. That’s pretty much it, but when coupled with a very complex physics engine we get a game that even NASA and Elon Musk are interested in. Where does the sandbox part comes in, though? In building the various rockets and other interplanetary exploration gear, of course.

KSP boasts a very detailed physics engine, which allows all objects to be reasonably accurately simulated with Newtonian dynamics. Watching your meticulously constructed monster rocket fall apart in a realistic way is extremely satisfying. Although efficiency is strongly favoured, nothing stops you from going wild. You can experiment with a large list of components to create some fairly outlandish machines, of this is your jam. As long as you meet the win condition, you’re good.

Kerbal Space Program

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Conan Exiles

This list would be severely incomplete without some representative of the inexplicably popular more-or-less online survival game genre.

Conan Exiles gets the honor due to it being probably the freshest in the early accessed survival genre, and doing its best to capture the atmosphere of Robert E. Howard’s and succeeding to a reasonable degree. What can you do in Conan Exiles? You can survive. That’s pretty much the central idea.

What you do to survive is another thing. You can devote yourself to hunting animals for resources, mastering the various crafts, becoming a warrior. If you want you can even summon humongous avatars of your chosen god (Mithra, Seth, Yog) to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and wreck their carefully build settlements.

Conan Exiles

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Terraria

Easily one of the finest examples of open-world crafting-centered sandboxes in recent memory.

If you are hungry for crafting, dungeon crawling, and some basic survival mechanisms (monsters mostly come out at night, mostly) but don’t want to manage a three-dimensional space, then Terraria is just the game for you. It’s done in a 16-bit style reminiscent of games of old, but boosted by some basic physics engine, making dungeon crawling more dangerous (as it should), because you never know when you can get flooded by lava.

The players are encouraged to create their elaborate home bases, which can grow to actually impressive sizes and house a number of loyal subjects, provided you tend to their needs. It’s an all-round good fun worth checking out, but, sadly, it can’t quite compare to the king of all sandboxes.

Terraria

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Minecraft

Here we go. The MVP of sandboxes. The one that despite being now 6 years old remains relevant. The one that pretty much formed a subculture around it.

The one that created ample opportunities for people to recreate some of the most incredible feats of human architecture. Minecraft took the world by storm. And it isn’t really hard to see why. It is by far the best at capturing in digital form the joy of putting together crazy Lego builds.

If you so choose you can flat out ignore the survival game that inhibits unbridled creation, too. The things which were unthinkable to achieve until somebody came along and did it, over usually weeks of work. If sandboxes are about having fun with the game’s systems, then there’s probably no game that can beat Minecraft.

Minecraft Java Edition

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Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition

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