8 Must-Play Open-World RPGs for People With Real-Life Schedules

Raise your hand if this has ever happened to you: A friend texts you a screenshot of a map with 400 icons on it and the message “you’re going to love this game.” You’re excited — the map is detailed, the game looks great, and you do love it…for about 10 seconds. Until you check your calendar and remember that you’ve got a dentist appointment, three work deadlines, and a birthday dinner to prepare for, so that map is going to have to stay unexplored for a minute. (My hand is raised.) If you’re looking for open-world RPGs you can actually play with a busy schedule, start here. These eight games range from true open-world adventures you can finish in a few weekends to RPG giants like Mass Effect that can be made manageable if you play them one mission at a time. Remember this: Keep it to just one quest tonight. The rest of the map will still be there when you get back. 8 Cat Quest 2 Image: The Gentlebros Time to beat: 7.5 hours Two kings walk into a war. One has whiskers. One has a wagging tail. Neither wants to be there. Cat Quest 2 is a 2D open-world action RPG set in a fantasy realm of cats and dogs where those kings are brought together against their will during a war between the cats of Felingard and the advancing dogs of the Lupus Empire, and both of them want their thrones back. The humor — as you might expect — leans on delightfully pun-heavy wordplay. You can play solo by swapping between the canine and feline heroes whenever you like, or play in local co-op, where each player takes one animal. Fast travel keeps the map from eating your entire night, so you can chain a few quests and stop when dinner is ready. Grab nearby quests before you enter a dungeon, since many dungeons have quests attached and nobody wants to make the trip twice. 7 Dredge Image: Black Salt Games/Team17 Time to beat: 9.5 hours Let’s say you have half an hour, a fishing boat, and you’ve just noticed there’s something odd in the water. Dredge is a sinister fishing adventure that casts you as a down-on-their-luck fisherman exploring an eerie archipelago. After your boat wrecks near the island town of Greater Marrow, you get a replacement vessel…and a debt to pay off. Days are for fishing and selling, but at night, strange things start to happen on the water. The day-night cycle gives you a built-in stopping point: Head back to port when the light fades, sleep, sell your catch, and spend the money on upgrades to your vessel, skills, and knowledge. Think of this as an open-world game that’s made mostly of ocean: There’s always an island in the distance hiding a secret, and you get to pick which one to sail to next. 6 Biomutant Image: Experiment 101/THQ Nordic Time to beat: 13 hours A calm British narrator tells you the whole story of Biomutant. This can be deceptive, since Biomutant is not a calm story. It is an open-world, post-apocalyptic Kung-Fu RPG where you create a gene-spliced hero in a world with a Tree of Life at its center. Four World Eaters are killing that all-important tree. There’s also a war brewing among the tribes dotting this world, and they disagree about what to do with the dying tree. The Myriad want to unite the tribes and save it, while the Jagni want to crush their rivals and bring it down. Your task: Pick a faction, and then do something about those World Eaters. New Game+ unlocks after the credits and lets you ally with any of the six tribes from the start, which makes a second run a good excuse to try the path you skipped. 5 Cassette Beasts Image: Bytten Studio Time to beat: 20 hours You awake on a beach on an island called New Wirral. You’ve been transported from Earth, and all you’ve got on you is a cassette player that grants you the ability to turn into various monsters. Cassette Beasts is a monster-fusing open-world RPG with turn-based battles. Your goal is to get back home with help from the other stranded people on the island. Good luck! That cassette player will be extremely helpful: In addition to becoming a monster yourself, when that feels appropriate, you can fuse monsters in combat to create whatever the moment needs. (There are over 14,000 possible fusions!) After a short tutorial, you’re free to wander in any direction, choose your fights, and skirt around any that you’d rather skip. Pro tip: Campfires let you rest and serve as a return point after you save, so make one before you quit for the night. 4 Immortals Fenyx Rising Image: Ubisoft Time to beat: 25.5 hours The gods of Olympus are in prison. The hero sent to free them — you, but no pressure — is a winged mortal named Fenyx. Immortals Fenyx Rising sets you loose on the Golden Isle, a vast open world of puzzles, cliffs to glide from, and monsters to fight. It’s got a flexible gear system with enough complexity to tweak your playstyle without overwhelming you, plus new skill tree paths to unlock. It borrows a lot of its free-feeling vibe from games like Breath of the Wild; there is a lot of climbing in this game. Zelda fans will also appreciate the Vaults of Tartaros, puzzle chambers scattered across the island. Navigating one (or more) gives you a clean goal for a single gaming session. Fair warning: Every upgrade you get does feed into an “I’ll play for just a bit longer” loop, so determine your goals and decide when you’re going to stop before you start. Free sign-up Get Polygon’s Wishlister newsletter A weekly cheat sheet to what you’ll eventually love to play. No buying, no commitment — just saving for later. Sign up free Free. Unsubscribe anytime. 3 Sea of Stars Time to beat: 28 hours Sea of Stars has a world that feels simultaneously pocket-sized and expansive — and it’s packed with small delights to discover, even if it doesn't start out wide open. You play Valere and Zale, two Children of the Solstice fated to become Solstice Warriors, who fuse solar and lunar powers into Eclipse Magic to stop an evil alchemist called the Fleshmancer. The game takes inspiration from Chrono Trigger and even features music by the same composer, Yasunori Mitsuda. Early on, the overworld does parcel out exploration in set routes, but as your characters grow and gain powers, you’ll get a boat, faster ways to travel, and more freedom to roam the world. That’s a good thing, because there’s so much to poke at: a card game called Wheels, fishing, cooking, a crypt honoring the game’s backers, and hidden chests. The story is a heartfelt tale of friendship, which keeps the mood approachable even when the world is in danger. Dungeon puzzles rarely ask you to stop and think for more than a few seconds, side quests are sparse, and a friendly character usually tells you where to go next, so you can return after a week away and still know your next move. 2 The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Zelda holding her Sheikah Slate in a memory with Link from Breath of the Wild game. In all the quieter memories, it feels a bit awkward to have Link remain silent as people talk at him.Image: Nintendo Time to beat: 50.5 hours There are 120 shrines nestled into the rolling green hills and treacherous fire pits of Hyrule. Each usually takes between ten minutes and an hour (if you’re dealing with a trickier puzzle). They’re all self-contained, with a little reward at the end. This is the trick to playing Breath of the Wild, an admittedly gigantic and overwhelming game, on a schedule: Pick a shrine, clear it, do one or two things nearby that seem fun, and call it a day. In this game, Link wakes up after 100 years with no memories, and a spirit tells him that Princess Zelda has been holding back Calamity Ganon the whole time. On paper it’s an open-world action-adventure, but its systems have a lot in common with an RPG. Each shrine you clear earns a Spirit Orb, and you can trade four orbs for an extra heart or a boost to your stamina, so every shrine works like a small level-up. You cook meals and elixirs that grant bonuses such as extra strength or weather resistance, and your weapons and shields wear out, which keeps your loadout changing as you go. Try not to get distracted as you get stronger and do more things, though. One shrine, one quick sidequest, that’s it — Hyrule will be there waiting for you next time. 1 Mass Effect: Andromeda BioWare/Electronic Arts Time to beat: 64.5 hours Think of Mass Effect as a TV series with a great cast: Every mission is an episode, every crewmate gets a loyalty mission of their own, and the story stays easy to leave and come back to at the end of any one of them. Mass Effect: Andromeda is the series’ open-world chapter. After a 600-year journey to the Heleus Cluster, you play Ryder, who inherits the role of Pathfinder. Each explorable planet is open-world, with its own hazards such as radiation, heat, and cold. If you’re looking for a galaxy to roam at your own pace, this one does reward patience. Stay the course on your first planet, Eos, since radiation will kill you if you wander off it, and skip the repetitive “tasks,” like mineral scanning, until you’re in the mood. If you’d rather have tighter, mission-by-mission storytelling, start with the first three Mass Effect games instead. The original trilogy isn’t open-world in the strictest sense, but its missions are episodic, and the first game even lets you explore planets in the Mako when you have time and skip them when you don’t. Play one mission per night. Or two. Whatever you have time for. The Normandy will wait.