Elden Ring

Elden Ring is the best game on this list by almost any measure, and the co-op is still the weakest link. Summoning a friend means burning an item, respecting an arbitrary level range, and getting booted back to your own world the moment the boss dies, which makes it feel more like inviting someone over for one specific job than actually playing together. The build variety is unmatched, incantations, colossal weapons, pure sorcery runs, and the Lands Between rewards exploring all of it. I still love this game. I just wish From Software let two people stay in one world for longer than a single fight.

Elden Ring is older now, and it shows a little, but it's still one of the best RPGs ever made. The open world is the model every fantasy game since has been chasing, except here exploration is inseparable from the build system. Every weapon, every incantation, every stat point is a real decision, and the game trusts you to make it without a hand-holding quest marker. I bounced off Diablo IV a while back because the grind felt like busywork disguised as progression. Elden Ring's difficulty is different. It asks you to think, not to farm, and that's a distinction that matters to me. Combat is unforgiving, and that alone will turn some readers away. For everyone else, this is essential.

Elden Ring earns the top spot because it does something almost no other open-world game manages: it trusts you completely. There is no quest marker pointing you anywhere. You see a ruin on the horizon, you walk toward it, and three hours later you have forgotten what you were originally doing. I wander through this world more than I play it, honestly, and that is exactly the point for me these days. The Xbox Series X version holds up well, though spell-heavy fights can still dip frame rate on Series S. Small price. Nothing else on this list rewards curiosity quite like this does.

Elden Ring is the game on this list I almost skipped. Soulslike difficulty usually reads to me as punishment dressed up as challenge, and I've made peace with not being that player anymore. I was wrong here. The Lands Between rewards curiosity better than anything else on PS5: wander toward a distant tower and you'll often find a catacomb, a hidden boss, or a shortcut the game never told you existed. I lost an evening to one dungeon I found by accident. The combat will wall you at a boss for a session or two, which is the one real cost for anyone short on playtime. The freedom, the mystery, the sense the world is smarter than you: that's what earns the top spot.

Fantasy is the genre I keep coming back to across every medium I consume, and Elden Ring is the rare game that earns the word masterpiece without me rolling my eyes at it. The Lands Between rewards actual curiosity: wander off the marked path and you'll find a boss, a shortcut, or a story fragment that recontextualizes something from three hours ago. I died to the same bell-bearing hunter about a dozen times before I worked out I was approaching it wrong entirely. No easy mode. None. That's the one honest warning here. Everyone else, clear your evening and go.

Open-world staple. One of my favourites. What FromSoftware did here was take their deliberately opaque design philosophy and place it inside a world that genuinely rewards wandering. You stumble onto underground dungeons that have no business being this elaborate. You find bosses that feel like final bosses in their own right, tucked into optional side areas. The difficulty is real and the game explains almost nothing on purpose. That will lose some players early. Those who stay find a solo experience with more genuine discovery than anything else on this list. No map markers telling you where to go. Just a world to read.

PS5 is my go-to for open worlds and anything with visual ambition, and Elden Ring is the open world that has stayed with me longest from this generation. The sense of discovery is unlike anything else: cresting a ridge and finding a castle you had no idea existed, or falling through a floor into an entirely different underground region that dwarfs the surface. I spent a lot of hours on this one. The challenge curve will stop some players early and that is worth being honest about. But for anyone willing to meet it on its terms, this is one of the generation's signature games. The world alone is worth the admission.

I bounced off Elden Ring the first time. Put it down after the third boss, picked it back up three months later when someone told me to stop going north and just explore the west. That was the lesson. The game does not hold your hand through its world, and once I stopped expecting it to, something clicked. The sense of discovery when you stumble onto a hidden boss arena, a new weapon type, or a region nobody mentioned in conversation is unlike anything else on this console. Demanding from start to finish. Not for everyone. For the right player, though, there is nothing on PS5 with a higher ceiling.

I have played a lot of open-world games, and nothing has matched the specific feeling of cresting a hill in Elden Ring and realising the castle you thought was a background detail is somewhere you can actually go. No waypoints pushed you there. You just went. That sense of discovery is the whole design philosophy, and it holds up completely in 2026. The build variety runs deep enough that two people can put 80 hours in and barely overlap on playstyle. If you have never tried a FromSoftware game, the open world genuinely softens the difficulty curve compared to older titles in the series. It is not an easy game. But the freedom to go somewhere else when one area beats you down makes it far more forgiving than its reputation suggests.

I started Elden Ring meaning to explore for an hour. Three hours later I was still on foot, following a crumbling cliff road toward something I could not name, and I had completely forgotten there was a main quest. That is what separates this from every other open world on this list: the map gives you nothing. No waypoints nudging you forward. Just landforms on the horizon and the creeping sense that something interesting is always one more ridge away. The Shadow of the Erdtree expansion added another layer of that same quality. It is genuinely demanding and the opening hours are not gentle. If that is a dealbreaker, a few entries lower on this list are better places to start. But as a piece of open-world design? Nothing released this decade comes closer to perfect.

Nobody is going to argue Elden Ring does not belong on a PS5 RPG list. The open world is one of the best designed spaces in recent gaming, the build variety is enormous, and the boss encounters are the kind you still think about weeks later. But the co-op here asks something of you. Password summons, Furlcalling Finger Remedies, session resets after every boss kill. My experience is that it works best when both players are running their own files and dropping in for specific challenges rather than treating it as a shared campaign. On those terms it is genuinely great. Just go in with accurate expectations about what co-op here actually looks like.

Elden Ring at rank eight feels almost wrong, and I understand why. It is the best action RPG of its generation. The build variety alone could absorb weeks. But the Deck ranking reflects the honest reality: battery life is shorter than everything above it, the open world can be disorienting to re-enter after a two-day break, and grace points are not always close when you need to put the thing down. None of that stops it from being worth installing. Exploring the Lands Between in handheld mode, sitting on the couch with the sound through headphones, has its own particular satisfaction. It just asks a bit more of the hardware and a bit more of your attention than the cleaner portable picks.

Elden Ring is the best open world I have played in years, and I say that as someone who bounced off Dark Souls twice before giving the series a proper chance. The Lands Between is designed around the feeling that something interesting is always visible just over the next hill, and that instinct does not diminish on a smaller screen. It is heavier on the hardware than everything above it on this list, and sessions that end mid-boss can be frustrating. But the Sites of Grace serve as natural stopping points, the controller feel is excellent, and I found myself doing one dungeon before bed more often than I expected. Patience with the settings pays off here.