Best Adventure Games for Ubuntu – Mysteries, Journeys & Story

Kratos and his son travel the nine realms as the end of the world closes in, and the places are what you remember afterwards.

Steam lists this as an adventure game as well as an action one, and on this page it earns the label. The fighting is very good and it is not the reason to be here. The reason is the realms: a frozen lake with something enormous underneath it, an orange forest that seems to go on forever, a workshop you keep coming back to. It is a long journey with a proper ending, the two of them talk the whole way, and it is the most complete thing on this page. Proton rates it Gold and it trends Platinum.

You carry cargo across a broken America on foot, planning every step of the route before you take it.

The first hour feels like a long walk with a strange delivery menu. Then the ground starts to matter. You learn to read a slope, pick a river crossing, and leave a ladder somewhere that helps a stranger you will never meet. It turns travel itself into the thing you get good at, and very little else plays like it. Proton runs it at Platinum, and it is one of the better looking games you can put on a Linux machine.

Play a thief in the Star Wars underworld, taking jobs from crime families who all want something different from you.

This is the Star Wars game that lets you be nobody important. No chosen one, no destiny, just a smuggler with a speeder and too many debts. The planets are small enough to learn properly, which suits it, and the way the crime families track your standing means the same job can end four different ways. It was rough at launch and has been patched a great deal since. Proton rates it Gold and it trends Platinum.

Land on a planet nobody has visited, see what lives there, then fly somewhere else.

Ten years of free updates later this is a completely different game from the one that launched, and one of the most generous things in gaming. You can treat it as a quiet exploration game, a building game or a trading game and it will let you. The main story is fine rather than great. The pull is the moment you drop through the clouds of a planet and have no idea what is down there. Proton runs it Gold and it trends Platinum.

A free open world with a ruined landscape to cross and fighting that is fast and physical.

This costs nothing and gives you a very large, very pretty world to walk around in. The fighting asks more of you than most free games do, with dodges and counters that need real timing. There is the usual free-to-play pull of daily jobs and character pulls, and you can ignore most of it and just explore. Proton rates it Gold and it trends Platinum, which is unusually good for a game of this kind. Nothing to pay to find out whether you like it.

A free open world where you solve problems by changing clothes, and looking at things is most of the point.

It sounds slight and it is not. Outfits are the tools: one lets you glide, one lets you fish, one lets you catch bugs, and the world is built to reward wandering off the path. It is gentle, unhurried and the most relaxing free game on this page.

Note: ProtonDB rates this Silver overall, so expect to spend a few minutes on setup. The newer reports are better than the older ones and currently trend Gold.

Explore a mansion where the rooms are dealt to you like cards, so the layout is different every single day.

Every morning you start at the front door with 45 steps, and every door you open makes you pick what lies behind it. That one idea carries an enormous amount. You are not really learning the house, you are learning what the house is hiding, and the notes you keep in your own head between runs are the real progress. The best new puzzle game in years, and it runs perfectly through Proton.

You have 22 minutes before the sun explodes, and the only thing you keep between loops is what you have worked out.

Nothing gets unlocked here. No new gear, no upgrades. You get better because you understand more, and that is a rare and lovely thing. The solar system is small and every part of it is doing something on a timer, so the same place is different depending on when you arrive. Play it without reading anything about it first. Proton runs it at Platinum.

Climb a tower where every floor speaks a different language, and work out what the words mean by watching how they get used.

You are given a notebook and a guess. Somebody points at a door and says a word, you write down what you think it means, and later the game quietly tells you whether you were right. Working out a language yourself turns out to be one of the most satisfying things a game can ask of you. It looks beautiful, it runs about ten hours, and it never once explains itself.

Board a ship that came back with nobody alive on it, and work out how all sixty of them died.

You get a pocket watch that freezes the moment of a person’s death, and a book to write your conclusions in. Everything else is you looking closely: a man’s boots, an accent, who is standing behind whom. It is drawn in two colours and it is one of the most confident games ever made. It has not been patched in years and does not need to be, because it was finished and it was right the first time.

Your car is the only shelter in a sealed off corner of the Pacific Northwest, and it breaks constantly.

You go out, grab what you can, and drive back before the storm closes in. In between, the car develops habits: the door pops open every time you brake, the radio kills the engine. You fix them one at a time in a garage that starts to feel like home. Very few games make a vehicle feel like a character. This one does, and it earns the ending it gives you.

You crash on an ocean planet with a life pod and a knife, and everything you need is somewhere under the water.

It gets the fear right. The first reef is bright and friendly, then you swim past the edge of it, the floor drops away and you decide to go back. Going deeper is the whole story, and every piece of gear you build is really permission to be frightened somewhere new. Nine years old, still the best game of its kind, and Proton runs it without a thought.

Fish a small string of islands by day, and try very hard to be back in port before dark.

It looks like a gentle fishing game and it is, right up until the light goes. Then it changes its mind about what is in the water. The fishing itself is quick and satisfying, the boat upgrades actually matter, and the whole thing runs about twelve hours. A good one to keep for a week when you do not want anything demanding.

A first person Indiana Jones adventure that would rather you sneak, look around and swing a frying pan than shoot.

This got the character right, which nobody expected. The impression of Harrison Ford stops being distracting after ten minutes, and the game leans on the whip and the camera rather than a gun. The levels are wide areas full of things to poke at rather than corridors. It also asks a lot of a graphics card, which makes it one of the better cases here for streaming instead. Proton rates it Gold and it trends Platinum.

Two children cross a plague-struck France, hiding from soldiers and from a great many rats.

It is a tighter, prettier and sadder game than the first one, and it does not pretend to be anything other than a story you walk through. The rats are the reason it looks the way it does. Thousands of them move as one thing and they are still unsettling four years on. It is heavy going in places. It is also one of the best looking games here, which is why it is worth streaming if your machine is older.

You are a detective with no memory and a great many opinions, and you solve a murder mostly by talking.

There is no combat. Everything is a conversation, including the ones with yourself, and the parts of your own head argue with each other on the page. It is very funny and quietly devastating, and the writing is the best there is. Fully voiced in this version. Give it four or five hours before you decide, because it takes that long to see what it is doing.

Four friends in 1995, a camcorder, and something that happened that summer which nobody has talked about since.

This is from the people who made the first Life is Strange, and it is better paced than anything they have done since. The camcorder is the good idea: you film things because you want to, and whatever you chose to point it at becomes the record of that summer. The 1995 half is warm and specific enough to work even if you were not there. Both parts are out, so you can play the whole thing.

Two writers get trapped inside their own stories, so one of you is in a fantasy world and the other is in a science fiction one.

It is two player only and it comes with a free pass, so only one of you has to buy it. What makes it work is that the two halves of the screen are almost never playing the same game, so you spend the whole time describing your side to the other person. The ideas arrive at a ridiculous rate and almost none of them get reused. Easily the best co-op game in years.

A couple heading for a divorce get turned into dolls, and have to work together to get home.

The story is sentimental and you will forgive it, because the design is extraordinary. Every twenty minutes it throws away everything you have learned and hands you two new abilities that only work in combination. The pattern never gets old across the whole ten hours. Also two player only, and also with a free pass for the second person.

A summer alone in a Wyoming forest lookout, with a voice on the radio for company.

You walk, you look at things, and you talk to Delilah on the radio, and how much you tell her is up to you. It runs about four hours and the ending divides people, which is usually a sign that a game meant something. There is a proper Linux build, so it installs and runs with nothing to configure. Still one of the best looking games on this list nine years later.

Take things out of boxes and put them where they belong, and work out somebody’s whole life from what is in them.

There is no way to fail and no timer. You pull an object out, you find it a home, and the game only stops you if you have put something somewhere it truly does not belong. Across eight moves you learn who this person is without a word of dialogue, and one of those moves will get you. Native Linux, tiny download, runs on anything.

You are told to go into a cabin and kill a princess. Everything after that depends on whether you do.

It is drawn by hand in pencil and it is almost entirely voices and choices. What makes it work is that it takes your decisions seriously and rebuilds itself around them, so two people describing this game will not be describing the same one. A couple of hours a run, and you will want more than one. Native Linux build, so there is nothing to set up.

A fifteen minute game about being the person backstage in somebody else’s heist, and it costs nothing.

It is free, it takes a quarter of an hour, and it is very funny. You are handed the job of running the machinery for a heist that is happening somewhere else, and it goes about as well as you would expect. It comes from one of the writers of The Stanley Parable and it has exactly that sense of humour. Nothing else here asks so little of you and gives back so much.