Kingdom Come: Deliverance II

Ghost of Tsushima taught me that a historical setting makes walking around feel like it means something. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II takes that further than I expected. Bohemia here is a place where being filthy gets you treated differently, guards remember what you did, and a single errand can turn into an hour because someone offered you a better one on the road. I went in braced for a survival chore. It never felt like one. The swordplay does take real practice, and hunger and sleep will nag you early on. It's the one on this list I'd install first.

History is the reason Ghost of Tsushima worked for me, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance II scratches the same itch from a muddier angle. You play Henry in medieval Bohemia, and the game treats the setting as a place with rules rather than a fantasy backdrop. Sword fighting is deliberate, you need to eat and sleep, and the countryside rewards wandering. That density is also the warning. This is a slow, long RPG, and I know exactly how hard it is to find the evenings for it. If you have them, it is one of the richest worlds on the service.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is the most stubbornly realistic RPG on this list, and that's exactly why it earns its spot. No magic, no dragons, just a young blacksmith's son navigating fifteenth-century Bohemia with skills that improve through actual practice rather than a menu you click through. History is one of the reasons I keep coming back to games like Ghost of Tsushima and the Assassin's Creed series, and this one goes further into how a period actually worked, down to how bread goes stale. Combat is rough at first and stays demanding, which will frustrate players expecting Elden Ring's polish. Give it ten hours before deciding. The world underneath is worth it.

History is one of the reasons I keep coming back to games at all, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance II leans into that harder than anything else on this list. This is 15th-century Bohemia rendered with an obsessive amount of care: armour rusts, horses get tired, villagers remember if you stole from them last week. I did not expect a medieval RPG to make me care about how much sleep my character got, but here I am checking a stat bar before picking a lock. It asks a lot of patience before it clicks, closer to a part-time job than a relaxing evening. Worth it if you have the hours.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is the history nerd's pick here, and the one I'll admit I haven't finished, because realism means earning your skills instead of being handed them. You can fail lockpicking for hours before it clicks. That's either exactly what you want from a medieval RPG or the reason you'll put it down after a weekend. I kept coming back anyway, because Bohemia is rendered with the kind of historical grounding I loved in Ghost of Tsushima, actual period detail instead of generic fantasy dressing. It's a first-person, simulation-leaning world that asks more patience than anything else ranked here. If you've got the time and want a world that respects history over convenience, this is the deepest cut on the list.

My interest in history is part of why the Assassin's Creed series held me for years, and why Ghost of Tsushima landed the way it did. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II operates on a completely different level of historical grounding. You are not an assassin in a fictional veneer of medieval Bohemia. You are a blacksmith's son navigating a genuinely researched 15th-century world where your reputation in a village actually changes what people say to you. Speech checks fail. Quests have multiple solutions that the game does not announce. I started this expecting to put ten hours in and see what the fuss was about, and three weeks later I was still there. The first-person perspective takes some getting used to after playing third-person RPGs, but once it clicks, the immersion is hard to match.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is the most grounded open world on this list. No magic, no robots, no supernatural plot scaffolding. Just Bohemia in 1403, rendered with an almost uncomfortable level of historical care. Henry's story picks up immediately from the first game, and the world simulation goes deep enough that your reputation in one town actually follows you. I enjoy history in games for the same reason I enjoy Ghost of Tsushima: the setting does work that pure fantasy has to invent from scratch. The onboarding is slower than anything else here and the combat requires patience to learn. But if you want an open world that feels genuinely different from the rest of this list, this is the one.