When you were a kid, “sandbox” meant “little plastic box, usually full of sand and ants, that allows you to pretend you’re at the beach even though you’re in a daycare center down the road from your parents’ workplace” . As an adult, “sandbox” means either “a game that lets you choose most of your goals” or “a nightmare full of ants that will make your kid totally creepy,” depending on whether you have kids or not.
Do not worry. Today we focus on sandbox-as-in-video game, a genre of entertainment in which the most fun is gained from setting your own goals. Sandboxes range from the end of the spectrum with no direction, like Garry’s Mod (a PC-only toy box), through the one-way games like Minecraft and Astroneer, all the way to games that hold your hand or guide you much more toward targets, like Stardew Valley and Animal. crossing.
But essentially these games all let you roam free at some points, doing whatever you want with the world (or your little piece of it, anyway). Planting bananas in someone else’s garden? Go for it. Interested in digging a tunnel down to the bedrock? Secure. Do you want to eschew all social norms and build a gigantic fortress in the middle of the city? Hey, this is your power fantasy.
Here’s a selection of our favorite sandbox games (and games with sandboxy bits in them) for anyone looking for an off-the-rails experience!
Publisher: SEGA / Developer: Two Point Studios
Two Point Campus is the sequel to Two Point Hospital, but instead of solving the sick population, you are going to educate them.
The biggest challenge in Two Point Campus is perfecting and really excelling rather than simply getting one, two or three stars. If that still isn’t enough to satisfy your masochistic tendencies, the ‘Challenge’ option of the Sandbox mode will have you crying yourself to sleep. Still not enough? The ‘Custom’ option allows you to customize every detail of your crazy idea of fun. Want to earn only a tenth of what you normally would and start out with barely enough to build a lecture hall? Just try.
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Publisher: 505 games / Developer: Re-Logic
There’s no story (at least not overtly) in Terraria – you’re just a person dropped into a new, strange world and tasked with surviving in it as best you can. After booting up and progressing through the impressively in-depth character creation screen, you’ll be transported into a randomly generated world filled with monsters, dungeons, caves, jungles and all manner of fascinating life that coalesce into an impressive ecosystem. What you do in this ecosystem is entirely at your discretion, but what is certain is that when night falls and the zombies come for you, you shall die if you are not prepared.
Publisher: mojang / Developer: mojang
It’s hard to describe the appeal of a game like Minecraft. While there is technically an ‘end’ to it, the whole experience isn’t really over something. You can explore caves. You can build houses. You can fight mobs at night. You can grow crops and animals. At first glance, Minecraft seems like a simple game that you quickly get bored of, but the free-form gameplay structure makes it an extremely immersive experience that is hard to put down.
Publisher: System Age Softworks / Developer: System Age Softworks
The story of Astroneer is simple: you are a very cute little astronaut who has landed on an Earth-like planet called Sylva. While there are no real goals – you can actually do whatever you want – a Mission Log will gently guide you into the wider story of the game, which involves activating mysterious purple structures around the planet and eventually taking you to the other planets in your area. small solar system ventures. system. Or you can just build a giant statue of yourself.
Publisher: raw anger / Developer: Oskar Stålberg
With sandbox house builder Townscaper, Oskar Stålberg has created a charming and immersive toy for imaginative play. Anyone willing to project themselves into their worlds and tell stories to themselves as they build will have a great time. Townscaper takes the most throwaway inputs and interprets it as clever instruction to set up a delightful little townscape like a waiter congratulating you on your choice of menu as if the gastronomic talent is with you and not the chef cook.
Publisher: Tomorrow Corporation / Developer: Tomorrow Corporation
What do you call a sandbox where all the sand is on fire? At least that’s what Little Inferno is. Little Inferno puts you in front of a fireplace with only one goal: to burn whatever you want. Every time you burn something you are rewarded with money, that money can then be used to buy items to burn things further. It’s very simple, but we found it – in a way – almost relaxing.
Publisher: Square Enix / Developer: Square Enix
While the Minecraft formula has been repeated to hell and back, Square Enix managed to provide an interesting take on the sandbox classic with dragon quest builders, a blocky, open-ended crafting RPG. Then Square decided to take another look at the idea with Dragon Quest Builders 2. As many sequels should aspire to, this release proved to be a more refined experience than its predecessor, fixing many of its flaws, adding a wealth of quality-of-life improvements, and generally providing a stronger case for its own brand. sandbox style game.
Publisher: Clay Entertainment / Developer: Clay Entertainment
The gameplay in Don’t Starve is very similar to Minecraft’s survival mode, with some notable changes. Your character spawns in the middle of a huge procedurally generated world and the goal is simply to survive as long as possible. You have health, hunger and health gauges to keep filled, with serious consequences if you drop any of them too low. Through clever manipulation of materials you find, you must build tools, hunt and forage and figure out how to survive events such as the arrival of winter or a Deerclops attack. It’s brutal and brutal, but there’s something hugely satisfying about beating such sky-high odds.
Publisher: Butterscotch Shenanigans / Developer: Butterscotch Shenanigans
If you’ve played Minecraft, Dragon Quest Builders, or Don’t Starve, you’ll be immediately familiar with the crafting mechanics at the heart of Crashlands. In terms of its top-down aesthetic and the barren landscape of its opening hours, Crashlands seems to have a lot in common with Klei Entertainment’s survival hit, but instead of forcing you to fight hunger and thirst, you spend most of your your time in a much more relaxed clip, exploring the map, collecting resources and crafting new armor while you’re at it. It’s more suited to short game bursts, but we still love it.
Publisher: Unknown Worlds Entertainment / Developer: Unknown Worlds Entertainment
Subnautics is truly one of the great early access indie success stories: a game that has been honed to near perfection over a long gestation period on PC, with plenty of input from avid fans helping shape the core experience as it exists today. As a result, here we have a confident and constantly exciting marriage of addictive gameplay loops, with hugely satisfying crafting and basic building elements, well-implemented survival mechanics, and a world and story that exudes absolute wonder, mystery and complete existential dread in equal measure.
Publisher: Worried Monkey / Developer: Worried Monkey
While Stardew Valley is full of goals (running a successful farm, appeasing your dead grandpa, making sure Shane doesn’t throw herself into the sea), it’s up to you how you achieve those goals. The game may look like a farming simulator at first glance, but there’s so much more to it than meets the eye. Your activities go far beyond farming, thanks to a great sense of community that is at the heart of the adventure. In fact, there seems to be no end to the amount of things available to see and do.
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