Top 5 adventure games on Apple Arcade

By Shaun Walton

| Mar 24, 2023

Apple Arcade + iOS

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Adventure games are some of the purest experiences you can find. The story is a set piece that trundles along at its own pace without much opportunity to deviate, and there isn’t that much exploration to be had, allowing players to sit back and enjoy the experience as the developers intended. They are much like a movie in that regard, but a lot more interactive.

That is not to say that they are boring. You can certainly get as much fun out of an adventure game as say an RPG, perhaps even more so. The pitfalls of an RPG are that you get out into the world, and immediately go off exploring. Link would have gone off, saved Hyrule, and been back at the Kokori Forest before Cloud had finished playing around at the Gold Saucer.

You get the purest essence of video games out of the adventure genre; you strike out on the quest, have a lot of fun with the gameplay, and experience a fantastic story along the way. Rinse and repeat. They are incredibly good fun and Apple Arcade offers quite a few to play with, and here are just five of the best.

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Gibbon: Beyond the Tree

Gibbon starts you off with a sad tale of a family of simians that have managed to get lost in dangerous territory and must find their way home. Using dynamic movement based on the real way gibbons move, you will control the apes and experience exhilarating leaps through the air as you swing from the trees, pulling off amazing acrobatic flips and marveling at the wonderful colorful surroundings.

Gibbon has picked up a huge array of rewards, including the Apple Design 2022, a testament to how well-made it really is. As you play, you will unlock an encyclopedia of ape facts, gaining some new knowledge whilst you enjoy swinging around like a master.

Wonderbox: The Adventure Maker

Wonderbox is a fantastic way to spend many wondrous hours playing through a multitude of games. Set in beautiful dioramas, called boxes, each world is different and unique with its own biomes to explore and challenges to conquer. You might be in a maze one minute and then thrust into battle another.

The best part of Wonderbox is its customizability. Everyone’s hero can be customized with a huge array of components to make them truly you. If you want to get even more creative, the Creator Mode gives you everything you need to make your very own world. Each character even has its own pre-made behaviors so your box will have a life of its own right away.

The Oregon Trail

We could not make this list without including this modern take on a classic. The Oregon Trail is a game designed to destroy its characters in many horrid ways, and it will. Designed to reflect the dangers pioneers faced taking on the titular Oregon Trail, you will lead a wagon of settlers down the trail, succumbing to snakebites and blizzards.

The Apple Arcade version gives the game a makeover whilst keeping the main tenants intact, giving you a selection of classes to make your caravan from, and then setting you loose across history to try and survive the journey. It's a very fun game that even manages to throw in a history lesson or two, in case you needed another excuse.

Creaks

Step into a story of anticipation and suspense. When the ground starts to shake and the light bulbs break, our resident protagonist makes the somewhat foolhardy choice to explore the underground to solve these strange happenings, landing in a world inhabited by bird folk and deadly monsters.

The eerie sounds and hand-painted visuals do an excellent job of making the world of Creaks feel like you definitely do not belong where you have entered. You will need to sneak around to avoid the deadly monsters, using beams of light to change them into harmless furniture and use them to solve the game's tricky puzzles.

Oceanhorn: Chronos Dungeon

Oceanhorn: Chronos Dungeon is a dungeon crawler with graphics that are a nostalgic call back to 16-bit classics. Delivering into the Chronos Dungeon, our band of four merry adventurers is determined to reach the bottom floor to collect the fabled Paradigm Hourglass, an object said to hold the power to alter history.

Thanks to the randomized modifiers, every run is completely unique. Even the starting character stats are somewhat randomized to allow you to try out different playstyles. There are four characters to choose from and a four-player co-op option available, with the unselected heroes available to swap at any time.

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