10 Great RPGs That Reward Curiosity More Than Skill

Published Jul 24, 2026, 9:30 AM EDT Ryan Thompson-Bamsey has been an Editor at TheGamer since 2021. He has specialized in RPGs, grand strategy games, and visual novels, reviewing major releases in franchises from Square Enix, Larian Studios, and Paradox Interactive. Ryan has served multiple times on the jury for the Indie Cup awards, and has mentored many emerging writers in the games industry. He has covered some of the biggest releases of recent years, including leading the site's coverage of Baldur's Gate 3, Dragon's Dogma 2, and plenty of other massive RPGs. Levelling up is the least interesting thing an RPG can offer. It works, but it asks nothing of you beyond patience and a respawning camp of bandits. The genre's better games know this and hide their real rewards elsewhere: in the conversation you were never prompted to have, or the cave with no quest marker hovering over it. What follows are fantastic RPGs that reward the player who pokes at things over the player who puts in hours. Some cap your levels outright; one makes the world harder every time you pick an unnecessary fight. The rest just put their best material somewhere the XP farmers won't bother looking. 10 Outward Outward has no experience points at all. Power comes from skill trainers scattered across towns you have to locate yourself, paid for in silver and permanently written into your build, so exploration is the progression system by default. The rest is survival literacy. Knowing which route through Chersonese skirts the hyena den matters more than any stat, as does knowing where the nearest bed is when your lantern gives out. Losing a fight rarely kills you, just relocates you, often somewhere you'd never have gone deliberately. That turns defeat into reconnaissance and makes wandering into a fight you can't win a reasonable use of an afternoon. 9 Baldur's Gate 3 Baldur's Gate 3 caps you at level twelve and hands out a finite supply of experience, because nothing respawns. Farming isn't an option, so the gap between a competent party and a monstrous one comes down to what you found. Speak With Dead turns most corpses into a witness. Shoving a hill giant off a ledge does more damage than any spell you have at level four. Half the best equipment in the first act sits behind an obvious question nobody asks, like what happens if you keep going down. The game's answer to almost everything is yes, which rewards players who treat the world as a thing to test instead of a list to complete. 8 Romancing SaGa 2 There is no traditional experience system in Romancing SaGa 2, but there is a hidden counter tracking every fight you pick, and the world scales up to meet it. Farming a field of weak enemies raises the difficulty of everything else while giving you almost nothing back. Stats climb through use, and new techniques arrive as glimmers, which strike mid-combat when you're using a weapon you haven't mastered against something stronger than you. The result punishes repetition and pays for experimentation. Swapping to a spear you barely understand, or recruiting a class you found in a corner of the map, does more for your generational empire than a hundred cleared encounters. 7 Kingdom Come: Deliverance Henry begins the game illiterate, and literacy is a skill you have to pay a scribe to teach you. Everything else follows that logic. Alchemy requires standing at the bench and physically grinding the ingredients in the right order, so the recipe lives in your head and nowhere else. The Master Strike, which trivialises most swordplay in the game, is taught by a man in Rattay you might never speak to. Skill numbers do rise through use, but they cannot substitute for knowing which noble's chest holds the good armour or which guard patrol you can slip past at night. Competence here belongs to the player rather than some character stat spread. 6 Undertale Undertale hands out 'experience' for killing things, then spends its running time making you feel peculiar about having accrued any. Choosing mercy locks you out of levelling entirely, which turns every encounter into a puzzle about what the creature in front of you actually wants. Some want to be flattered. Others want you to sit still and listen to a very long story. Working out the answer requires reading the room, not the damage numbers, and a player who fights everything on sight will finish stronger and with roughly a third of the game unseen. The stat screen has a joke buried in it for anyone who looks. 5 Divinity: Original Sin 2 Nothing respawns in Rivellon, so the pool of available experience is fixed from the start and the only real variable is what you're carrying when a fight begins. Most of the answers are environmental. A puddle of blood conducts lightning across half the battlefield, and a pair of teleport gloves will drop an enemy archer into a lake before initiative has even been rolled. Killing people that you'd otherwise leave unharmed for the experience is certainly one way to get measurably stronger, but playing cleverly is a far quicker (and far more satisfying) way to go about things. Morrowind gives directions the way a stranger in a pub would, telling you to head north past the shrine and ask for a man called Hasphat. There is no marker to follow, and nothing stops a first-level character walking into Tel Fyr and leaving with Daedric armour, provided they survive the trip. Skills do rise through repetition — at a pace that would test a saint. The efficient route is to find the Boots of Blinding Speed and then work out what alchemy does when you stack it, at which point the levelling system becomes an afterthought. Vvardenfell gates its treasures on nerve rather than experience, and it never once tells you which door is the interesting one. 3 Dragon's Dogma 2 Levels accrue in Dragon's Dogma 2, and they matter far less than the things only available to people who ask around. Several of the strongest vocations are gated behind specific individuals, not numbers, sitting in villages the main quest gives you no reason to enter. Combat rewards the same instinct. Climbing a griffin and injuring its wing mid-flight beats any amount of chipping at its ankles, and knowing that ogres are distracted by female party members changes a grim fight into a short one. Pawns accumulate this knowledge across other players' worlds and will drag you towards a secret they learned elsewhere. Following them is more productive than farming the same bandit camp twice. 2 Fallout: New Vegas You can reach the Strip within twenty minutes of leaving Goodsprings if you know which stretch of road the Cazadores don't patrol, because the game gates almost nothing behind your level. What it does gate things behind is skill points and information. A Speech check ends the Boulder City standoff without a shot fired. Knowing where the Ratslayer or the YCS/186 sits turns a mid-game slog into a formality, and neither is guarded by anything as dull as a level requirement. Even the implants at the New Vegas Medical Clinic are permanent upgrades that reward hoarding caps over kills. Levelling is a slow way of buying what the Mojave already has lying around. 1 Disco Elysium Revachol has nothing to grind. Nothing dies, and experience arrives almost entirely through conversation, with the clock moving whether you learn anything or not. The Thought Cabinet makes curiosity into a mechanic outright: pursue an idea far enough and you can install it in your head, where it rewires your stats and occasionally ruins your week. Most checks are one-shot, so failure is permanent and frequently more interesting than success would have been. A detective who asks the corpse follow-up questions ends the case with a better picture than one who optimised his character sheet. The build matters, but what you bothered to ask about matters more.