There are plenty of open world games on the market, with enormous maps full of sprawling land, either crammed full of things to do or sparse and open for you to gallop from place to place.
But what about the games that trade all that open land for the allure of the open ocean? What about the gamer who yearns for the salt spray of the sea as they crest through the waves? Here are the best open-sea games, ranked.
10 Blackwake
Blackwake is a multiplayer cooperative game about teaming up with your best mates and working together to operate a pirate ship. If that sounds familiar to another popular game, then keep reading. But for its own merit, Blackwake is a very competitive co-op game with plenty of room for creativity in your approach and strategy.
At least it was when the multiplayer community was active. New players might find the waves a bit too calm for their liking, without a ton of other people playing, but it’s still got some lovely water to cut through.
9 Barotrauma
Barotrauma, which describes itself as a “2D co-op multiplayer drowning simulator,” thrusts you and your fellow players into the dark and briny deep as crew members of a large submarine cruising through an ocean on Jupiter’s moon Europa.
Together, you’ll perform tasks around the ship to keep your voyage going as you battle crushing underwater pressure, threatening deep-sea creatures, as well as traitors in your own crew — which can bring an Among Us-like level of paranoia to the already stressful voyage. The game is currently in early access.
8 Diluvion
Diluvion takes a lot of pages from Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, from its nearly-steampunk aesthetic to its focus on vast, sprawling undersea cities. As the captain of an exploring vessel, you can chart a course through this drastically-flooded world, encountering all sorts of other settlements and travelers in this new sunken society, both friendly and hostile.
The entire game is also a feast for the eyes, with every structure full of detail and sharp colors to show just how much thought has been put into this world under the sea.
7 Sunless Sea
In an alternate version of Victorian London, where the city has relocated under the water at the edge of a massive swath of water called the “Unterzee,” Sunless Sea casts you as a “Unterzee Captain.”
As captain, you’ll navigate these dark, slightly haunted waters and sail from island to island, doing business and building up your ship’s ability to take on even more dangerous jobs. The game was so successful it got a sequel, Sunless Skies, in 2019 that took its exploration to outer space.
6 Sea of Thieves
Another massively-multiplayer co-op pirate ship game, albeit with a bit more visibility than Blackwake, Sea of Thieves received a ton of press and gave many streamers plenty of hours of nautical nonsense. While some players found its core mechanics repetitive, plenty of people still had fun running around a pirate ship with their friends.
Sea of Thieves has adopted a seasonal games-as-a-service model, bringing new seasons with new mechanics and features, ensuring that the seas remain full of thieves for the foreseeable future.
5 Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag
Following the positive fan reaction to the ship battles in Assassin’s Creed 3, the next installment in Ubisoft’s history-adjacent stealth series gave ship combat and maritime exploration a much larger role. Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag puts you in the boots of pirate Edward Kenway and gives you an entire digital Caribbean to plunder to your heart’s content.
Black Flag’s waters are full of treasures, mysteries, naval battles, and real historical pirates like Blackbeard and Mary Read. Between the on-island stealth and combat and the robust shipbuilding, Black Flag keeps its franchise roots intact while digging up new treasure at the same time.
4 The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker shook up many aspects of Nintendo’s flagship action-adventure series, not the least of which was its setting: using his new ship, Link could sail the high seas of Hyrule, moving from island to island on another great adventure.
The Great Sea and its islands make exploration feel more intentional — when you see land, you know something has to be there. This brand new (for the franchise) style of exploration, coupled with the striking color design of everything on the ocean contrasting with the unbroken sheet of blue, gives The Wind Waker a tremendous sense of discovery with each new dot on the horizon.
3 Abzu
Abzu takes a much more intimate approach to sea-exploration than our previous entries. Giant Squid Studios’ undersea exploration game puts you in the flippers of an undersea diver, as you explore different parts of a vast and varied ocean.
As a diver, you get to have very up-close and personal encounters with all the marine life as you leisurely swim from one underwater biome to another. Abzu is very much a game about atmosphere. The simulated sea and its many mysteries within are the main priority.
2 Subnautica
Easily the most expansive undersea world on the list, Subnautica, along with its expansion Subnautica: Below Zero, offers players an unprecedented amount of submerged real estate to explore. As an explorer who’s crash-landed on an alien world, the player must scrape together enough materials from the strange ocean to survive — harvesting food, building better tools for exploration, and encountering all manner of undersea life, both friendly and less so.
The game has a variety of difficulty levels to toggle just how punishing the experience is. For players who aren’t interested in a hardcore survival challenge, lighter difficulty settings can make this much more of an open-ended exploration adventure.
1 Beyond Blue
Beyond Blue, an educational game developed by E-Line Media, is a vivid, lush look at all the marine life cruising through the deep blue sea. What really sets Beyond Blue apart from all the other deep dives on this list is its extreme fidelity to detail.
Taking inspiration from the BBC’s Blue Planet II nature documentary series, Beyond Blue gives players plenty of actual information about marine life and marine ecosystems to go with all the gameplay experiences of swimming alongside all manner of sea creatures. Its depth of research, detail, and room for exploration makes Beyond Blue the top experience for open-sea exploration games.
NEXT: 10 Open Worlds To Explore After BotW
