Finding games like Life Is Strange is a unique challenge, thanks to how fluid the concept at the heart of Don’t Nod’s series is. Adventure games have made a comeback in the last decade or so by building on what Life Is Strange started, shaping it in different forms, improving it, and experimenting with just how creative you can get by making a game about people’s relationships.

Anyway, the point is, there are a lot of games like Life Is Strange out there, even if the similarities aren’t immediately evident–brilliant games, thought-provoking games, heartbreaking games, and some that are all of that and more. We’ve rounded up 16 of them, including some like Oxenfree, that share Life Is Strange’s knack for deep and intimate character relationships, and others, including The Walking Dead, that make your choices and how they affect others the main focus. Others do both and put their own unique spin on the genre, like Closer the Distance and the cozy animal horror game Beacon Pines.

If you’re after something completely different after getting through these, check out the best Game Pass games and the best PC games to play in 2025.

• Developer: Campo Santo
• Release Date: February 9, 2016
• Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, Nintendo Switch
• Genre: Adventure
• Multiplayer: No

As games like Life is Strange go, Firewatch is one of the more inventive takes on the formula. It’s ostensibly about a park ranger investigating a strange occurrence in the forest, but Firewatch’s mysteries are as much about the inner workings of Henry, Firewatch’s protagonist, as they are the world around him. Unlike Life Is Strange, where Max’s friends are always around, Firewatch focuses on the relationship building between Henry and someone he only ever talks to over a walkie-talkie. There’s just one official ending, though the choices you make in these conversations determine how much you learn about Henry, the people around him, and what’s really happening in the woods.

Read our Firewatch review.

• Developer: Osmotic Studios
• Release Date: August 2, 2024
• Platforms: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PC
• Genre: Life Simulation
• Multiplayer: No

Closer the Distance is like what you’d get if you crossed Life is Strange with The Sims. It’s the story of a small-town tragedy and how the results of simple actions spread outward, often with unforeseen consequences. Angela, the protagonist, receives guidance from the spirit of a family member about how to potentially help her friends and neighbors navigate their grief and other, deeper problems the event unearthed. That supernatural omniscience lets you see everyone’s current location, mood, schedule, and other details important for making decisions about who to speak with next, and a fast-forward function makes it easy to skip past times where people are moving around or busy. Angela’s choices might not have the cataclysmic outcomes that Max’s do for Arcadia Bay, but her hometown and the people in it won’t be the same when all’s said and done.

• Developer: Digixart
• Release Date: August 16, 2021
• Platforms: PlayStation 4, PS55, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PC, Nintendo Switch
• Genre: Adventure
• Multiplayer: No

Road 96 is an ambitious spin on the choose-your-own-adventure formula, expansive in scope, and occasionally unwieldy, but so unlike most adventure games that it’s easy to overlook a few shallow minigames. The idea is deceptively simple. You’re trying to flee your authoritarian home country of Petria in 1996 and hit the road in a mad dash for the border before it’s too late. The actual journey isn’t that long, but whether you escape or fail doesn’t matter. You’ll start another attempt again as another citizen bent on freedom, and each randomized run gradually gives you new abilities and more information about the people you meet along the way. That new knowledge shapes your interactions with them and creates drastically different outcomes, but even more interesting is that relationships are less important than ideas in Road 96. Who you bond with matters less than what political philosophy you develop on the road and how those ideals guide you to something that’s hopefully better than what you’re leaving behind.

Read our Road 96 review.

• Developer: Don’t Nod
• Release Date: August 27, 2020
• Platforms: Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PC
• Genre: Adventure
• Multiplayer: No

Tell Me Why is a Life Is Strange game under a different name, and not just because it comes from the same development team. It’s a story-driven game about two twins, Tyler and Alyson, who are reunited after a long separation and use their supernatural powers to change the world, though Tell Me Why is more concerned with the inner world and has a focus even more intimate and intense than Life Is Strange 2’s. Tyler and Alyson delve into the emotionally complicated past and unravel their childhoods in a bid to understand why their lives turned out the way they did. The past may be inalterable, but your choices in the present determine how the twins move forward into the future, including the shape their relationship takes. Tell Me Why won the GLAAD Media Award for outstanding video game, The Game Award for games for impact, and the Pegasus Award for best narrative design.

Read our Tell Me Why review.

• Developer: Don’t Nod
• Release Date: February 18, 2025
• Platforms: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC
• Genre: Adventure
• Multiplayer: No

The only thing more Life Is Strange than Tell Me Why is Lost Records: Bloom and Rage. Also from Don’t Nod, Lost Records follows a group of young women in the ’90s during the height of their friendship and how the fallout from a mysterious tragedy shapes them in the present. It’s got the usual things you’d expect from a Don’t Nod game–character drama, small-town vibes, and so on–but what keeps Lost Records from being just another iteration on Life Is Strange is how natural it all feels. Lost Records builds on the kind of dialogue system Oxenfree uses, where choices and reactions change depending on not just what you say, but when you say it–if you ever do. It even uses ’90s nostalgia, encapsulated in the practice of recording your teenage years with a camcorder, as a storytelling device, a rarity in an era when media often weaponizes nostalgia as a cheap emotional hook. Lost Records isn’t just one of the best games like Life Is Strange out there, it’s one of 2025’s must-plays.

Read our Lost Records: Bloom and Rage review.

• Developer: Telltale Games
• Release Date: April 24, 2012
• Platforms: Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, PS4, PC, Nintendo Switch, Android, iOS
• Genre: Adventure
• Multiplayer: No

A zombie apocalypse where failing to pass a quick-time event results in a character getting their throat ripped out by a dog isn’t quite on the same emotional plane as Life Is Strange. However, if you want a game where every choice matters and has dramatic consequences, few do it better than Telltale’s The Walking Dead. Telltale’s work turning the popular comic series into a multi-season adventure game expertly captures the source material’s drama and makes it even more intense by letting you shape it. The series is split between visual novel-like segments, where you watch the action unfold in scenes designed like a graphic novel, and moments where you make key decisions–who to side with in a conflict, which characters to betray or leave behind, how best to move forward. Publisher Skybound Games released a definitive version with a handful of additional features, such as a graphic black mode like the comics that lends The Walking Dead even more gravitas, and combines all seasons and chapters into one package.

Read our The Walking Dead: A Telltale Series review.

• Developer: Night School Studio
• Release Date: January 14, 2016
• Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, iOS, Android
• Genre: Adventure
• Multiplayer: No

Critics widely praised Oxenfree as the dawn of a new era for adventure games, and for good reason. This slow-burn horror story about a group of teenagers investigating a deadly mystery–rooted in actual history–was noteworthy in its own right, but what really stood out was how Night School Studio combined the idea of branching paths with dialogue options. They’re meant to mimic the cadence of real-life conversations, with choices such as interrupting a sentence or changing the subject, and these normal, everyday behaviors end up having large-scale consequences on how Oxenfree’s story unfolds. If you’re keen for more after finishing Oxenfree, you might want to check out its sequel, Oxenfree 2. While critics were less lavish in their praise, most, including GameSpot’s Jordan Ramée in his Oxenfree 2 review, appreciated its more adult themes.

Read our Oxenfree review.

• Developer: Interior/Night
• Release Date: July 19, 2022
• Platforms: Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PS5, PC
• Genre: Adventure
• Multiplayer: Yes

As Dusk Falls puts a gritty, crime story twist on the intimate, choice-driven adventure game formula. It follows two families as their collective and individual lives crash together during a robbery in 1998, and while the choices you make during this violent incident are important, they’re just the start. As Dusk Falls traces the robbery’s fallout across decades and chronicles how your choices then influence the families in the present. It’s a moving exploration of how trauma shapes generations and how people can–or don’t–move on from the mistakes of their predecessors. As Dusk Falls also includes a multiplayer component, where up to eight players can weigh in on decisions and vote to decide on what happens next.

Read our As Dusk Falls review.

• Developer: Gamious
• Release Date: September 1, 2021
• Platforms: PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PC, Nintendo Switch
• Genre: Adventure
• Multiplayer: No

Lake is much less intense than Oxenfree and As Dusk Falls on the surface, trading supernatural hijinks and life-or-death decisions for the prospect of going home. Protagonist Meredith Weiss is returning to her small hometown to deliver mail after forging a successful career in the city. The small-town vibes seem like a welcome break from Meredith’s bustling city life, and they are–until she has to contend with the reasons she left home to begin with. Meredith’s deliveries give her insight into how the town and her former neighbors have changed since she left, and what she does with that knowledge–whether she rekindles old friendships or just coasts for two weeks and goes home–is up to you. If you enjoy the base game, developer Gamious also made a winter-themed prequel expansion called Seasons that stars Meredith’s father.

We called Lake one of 2021’s best games that you probably missed.

• Developer: Fullbright
• Release Date: August 15, 2013
• Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC
• Genre: Mystery, Walking Simulator
• Multiplayer: No

Gone Home is unique among games like Life Is Strange in that the action has already happened. Your goal is figuring out what actually occurred. You play as Kaitlin, a college student who returns home after a year abroad expecting her family to be roughly the same as when she left them. But when she arrives, no one is home, and there are no obvious signs pointing to why. You wander from room to room, examining everything and trying to piece together what might have happened to Kaitlin’s family, though the real draw is the collection of discoveries you make about Kaitlin’s parents and sister, their struggles and dreams that Kaitlin never understood until now. The ending is a brilliant subversion of the kind of drama one expects from narrative games with heavy themes, and while it might not have the same level of interactivity as other adventure games, it’s one of the best examinations of the struggles of daily life in the medium.

Read our Gone Home review.

• Developer: Giant Sparrow
• Release Date: April 25, 2017
• Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC, iOS
• Genre: Adventure
• Multiplayer: No

What Remains of Edith Finch also follows a single heroine as she explores the mysteries of her family’s past and their fractious relationships, though Giant Sparrow leaned heavily into the supernatural and macabre. For one thing, Edith’s family is all dead, and their mysteries unfold as she explores the Finch family’s massive manor, where each room houses the memory of a Finch on the day they died. It’s a surreal exploration of life and loss that still retains its charm nearly a decade later.

Read our What Remains of Edith Finch review.

• Developer: Toge Productions
• Release Date: January 29, 2020
• Platforms: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, PC
• Genre: Visual Novel
• Multiplayer: No

Coffee Talk puts relationships and personal drama front and center, but handles these issues differently than most games. You’re the protagonist, sure, but it’s not your job to fix anyone’s issues or be a hero. You’re just there to do what you can–serve some coffee, lend an ear, and every once in a while, say the right thing at the right time. The point is to learn from the stories you hear–from the space alien who wants to understand humans better and the family dramas of woodland elves–not to be a hero or save anyone. Even when topics get a little heavy, Coffee Talk keeps the vibes light and easy with its relaxed pixel art and supremely chill jazz soundtrack.

• Developer: Supermassive Games
• Release Date: June 10, 2022
• Platforms: PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PC
• Genre: Horror, Adventure
• Multiplayer: Yes

Initially, The Quarry seems like Supermassive just taking another shot at the formula it popularized with Until Dawn, but the former makes some big, welcome changes, namely in how it handles character development. The Quarry follows a group of camp counselors on the last night of their stay in the woods, free from adult supervision and the responsibilities of their younger charges. What should be a celebration turns into a gruesome fight for survival, as the locals are, apparently, bloodthirsty monsters after night falls. It’s a shlocky setup in the way a lot of horror stories are, but The Quarry does one better by giving its characters deep, interesting personalities instead of making them typical slasher tropes. It’s easier to feel invested in The Quarry’s cast, which makes your choices and their frequently-terrible outcomes feel even weightier and more important than usual with this kind of game.

Read our The Quarry review.

• Developer: Goodbye World Games
• Release Date: April 8, 2021
• Platforms: PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation VR 2, iOS, Android
• Genre: Adventure
• Multiplayer: No

Before Your Eyes gives you no choices to make or dark cosmic mysteries to uncover. There’s no supernatural power giving you unusual influence over the world. There’s only you and your memories, as you gradually delve further into the repressed corners of your mind and dig up painful, crucial truths. Saying much more about those memories would spoil Before Your Eyes’ most important feature, but just as innovative as the story is how you move it forward. Before Your Eyes uses your webcam or VR headset to track eye blinks, and each blink moves the scene forward as your life literally flashes before your eyes.

Read our Before Your Eyes review.

• Developer: Infinite Fall
• Release Date: February 21, 2017
• Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S
• Genre: Mystery, Adventure
• Multiplayer: No

You might think Night in the Woods is Life Is Strange for furries, and you’d almost be right. Everything from the small-town setting to the supernatural mysteries enveloping local teenagers is present and correct, though a crucial difference that sets Night in the Woods apart is that it’s less about how your choices affect the town. It’s more concerned with how living in a small, dying town influences everyone who lives there–not just the youth, though they certainly play an important role. It expertly balances young adult drama and relationships with these broader themes, and it even won the BAFTA for best narrative in 2018.

Read our Night In The Woods review.

• Developer: Hiding Spot Games
• Release Date: September 22, 2022
• Platforms: Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, PC
• Genre: Adventure, Horror
• Multiplayer: No

Beacon Pines takes the branching paths of other games like Life Is Strange and applies them to a horror game that, despite the cuteness of its anthropomorphic heroes, gets pretty dark. Luka, an orphan who lives with his rather negligent grandmother, ends up uncovering a murder and even darker secrets afoot in his hometown, with a megacorp seemingly behind it all. Choices matter in Beacon Pines, and your decisions will regularly lead Luka to a grisly end–before the narrator, an actual book, puts you onto another branch of Beacon Pines’ story tree, an actual tree, to see how new decisions will influence events. What it lacks in high, permanent stakes, it makes up for with excellent character writing and the unique perspective of an all-encompassing view that takes into account just how many consequences your decisions could have had.

Beacon Pines was one of the best Switch games of 2022, according to Metacritic.