Games Like Balatro, Elden Ring, Hollow Knight and 6 More

The problem with recommendation lists is that they optimise for the wrong similarity. Someone finishes Balatro at 3am, wants more of that, searches for it, and gets handed a list of competent card games that share nothing with what actually kept them up.

What kept them up was the compounding. The run where three jokers interact in a way the designer probably did not fully anticipate and a hand scores forty times what it should. That is the thing to match.

So each entry below states the specific mechanic first.

Games like Balatro

What you actually liked: compounding synergies where a run breaks the maths. Not poker.

• Luck Be a Landlord — the purest version of the same idea. A slot machine where symbols interact, and the whole game is finding the combination that trivialises the rent. Cheap, brilliant, and the closest structural match.
• Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers — blackjack rebuilt as a deckbuilder with cards that break the rules. Funnier than it needs to be, and the escalation curve is genuinely Balatro-like.
• Slay the Spire — the ancestor of the entire form. Slower and more tactical, less about absurd numbers, but the deck-shaping loop is the origin of what Balatro refined.
• Peglin — pachinko plus deckbuilding. Sounds like a joke, plays like a proper roguelike, and the build-breaking moments arrive reliably.

Games like Elden Ring

What you actually liked: an open world that respects you enough not to mark everything on a map.

• Nioh 2 — if the combat was the draw rather than the exploration. Deeper, faster, more mechanically demanding, and the build variety is enormous.
• Lies of P — the best of the direct Souls-likes. Tight, beautifully made, and it does not overstay.
• Dragon's Dogma 2 — no waypoints, a world that reacts, and pawns who genuinely learn. Uneven in places but nothing else feels like it.
• Outward — much rougher, much less forgiving, and the closest anything has come to the feeling of being genuinely lost somewhere dangerous.

Worth noting: Elden Ring Nightreign exists and is a different proposition — a co-op, timed, roguelike take on the same world. It hit 313,593 concurrent players in its first hour, so plenty of people wanted it, but it is not more Elden Ring in the shape most people mean.

Games like Hollow Knight

What you actually liked: a world that unfolds, with combat that demands precision and a map you fill in yourself.

• Blasphemous 2 — grimmer, more deliberate, exceptional art direction. Combat is meatier and less floaty.
• Ori and the Will of the Wisps — the movement is the best in the genre. Far kinder than Hollow Knight, still challenging where it counts.
• Nine Sols — parry-focused, Sekiro-influenced, and the strongest recent entry in the form. If the boss fights were the draw, start here.
• Animal Well — sparse, strange, and the closest anything has come to Hollow Knight's sense of a world with secrets it will not explain.

Games like Stardew Valley

What you actually liked: progress without pressure. There is no way to lose.

• My Time at Portia / Sandrock — more structured, workshop-focused, with a stronger narrative spine. Sandrock is the better of the two.
• Fields of Mistria — the most direct spiritual successor, and unusually polished for something still in early access.
• Coral Island — Stardew's shape with a larger scope and an underwater restoration layer.
• Spiritfarer — not a farming game, but it captures the same gentle, unhurried competence loop, and it is one of the few games in this list that is genuinely about something.

Games like Terraria

What you actually liked: dig, build, fight, upgrade, repeat — in two dimensions with an absurd amount of content.

• Core Keeper — top-down rather than side-on, but the loop is identical and co-op works properly.
• Necesse — smaller and less polished, with a settlement layer Terraria lacks.
• Starbound — flawed and abandoned, but the exploration breadth still has no real equal.

Games like Hades

What you actually liked: a roguelike where failing advances the story.

• Hades II — obviously. Deeper systems, more to manage, and it respects your time with the first game.
• Dead Cells — faster, harsher, less narrative. The best pure action roguelike there is.
• Returnal — the same structure with a genuinely unsettling atmosphere and third-person shooting.
• Curse of the Dead Gods — much less known and mechanically excellent. The corruption system creates real tension.

Games like RimWorld

What you actually liked: stories that emerge from systems colliding, usually disastrously.

• Dwarf Fortress (Steam version) — the origin. Deeper than RimWorld by an enormous margin, and now approachable enough to actually start.
• Oxygen Not Included — same emergent chaos, applied to thermodynamics and gas physics. Punishing and fascinating.
• Songs of Syx — the same idea scaled from a colony to a city of thousands.

Games like Among Us

What you actually liked: social deduction with friends, where lying is the mechanic.

• Deceit 2 — first-person, more atmospheric, higher stakes.
• Goose Goose Duck — a great deal more content and roles than Among Us, free, and the community is still active.
• Town of Salem 2 — the pure text-based form, with far deeper role interaction and no busywork tasks.

Games like The Sims and games like Minecraft with better graphics

Two questions that get asked constantly, and both have honest answers that are slightly disappointing.

For The Sims: nothing has replaced it. Paralives and inZOI are the two credible challengers and both are worth watching, with inZOI substantially further along visually. For now, if life simulation with deep character systems is the requirement, the genuine alternatives are Crusader Kings III (people, ambitions, feuds, drama — with a medieval kingdom attached) and Two Point Museum for the building side.

For Minecraft with better graphics: the honest answer is Minecraft with shaders. Complementary Reimagined on a mid-range GPU transforms it completely for free. If you want a different game, Vintage Story is more atmospheric and considerably harsher, Enshrouded is the best-looking voxel survival game currently made, and Valheim captures the exploration and building loop with an art style that ages far better than raw fidelity would.