There are so many great co-op games coming out nowadays, making it much easier to find something relaxing that players can take part in together. However, sometimes relaxation isn’t all a player is looking for. Sometimes, we just want to fully disconnect and get immersed in a game, just not necessarily alone.
Gaming has become a wild and free thing, with so many games getting made that explore diverse play styles. Some of these are games that I’ve found and been able to play alongside others, while just exploring freely, finding all kinds of strange secrets, or just letting my mind float completely free as I experience a fully realised world of some sort.
10
Revenge Of The Savage Planet
Explore & Remember: Everything Matters
The second game in this series, which prefers a good laugh and scanning things rather than fighting enemies. Revenge of the Savage Planet gives players a co-op opportunity (locally supports two players as well as online) as they adventure around four planets, each with its own flora, fauna, and dangers. Players are tasked by a corporation who seem rather shady with collecting information, which means exploring, scanning, and even capturing creatures to study them (less cruel than it sounds).
Revenge of the Savage Planet is a hugely fun adventure that lacks the pressure of many other, similar games, which would probably include more survival elements. I thought it was the perfect game to relax with after a long day, since it doesn’t take itself too seriously and doesn’t force players into almost anything. Story progression will come, but first, you can explore at will across colourful, exhilarating planets.
9
Satisfactory
Corporate Co-Op Relaxation
A game about constantly building larger factories to send resources up a space elevator doesn’t sound relaxing. However, Satisfactory is everything it wants to be and more. Players have many factories to build and automate; there are an awful lot of things to do, but there is also simple joy and relaxation to be had.
The exploration might not be the main point of Satisfactory, but it is one of the parts I found extremely enjoyable. Any alien planet, especially one you can so grandly transform throughout the game, can create something memorably relaxing to take part in. Satisfactory is engaging, to an almost terrifying degree, but it is also excessively fun and can leave you feeling refreshed, even if you can’t quite stop yourself from playing more until 3 am.
8
Aloft
Take To The Skies With Gentle Survival
A really wholesome and fun sandbox game released in 2025, Aloft brings a calmer tone to the often hectic or terrifying survival genre. Players take to the skies in their own skyship, which floats between various floating islands, any of which the player can turn into a village or a different skyship. Players explore, have to fight through hurricanes, and attempt to cure a fungal infection sweeping across the lands.
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The relaxing atmosphere made this a personal favourite game for me to show off to somebody else in co-op. Aloft is a survival game, but of the style that isn’t a constant pressure, making it a fantastic option for players who just want to disappear into a wondrous world. Sandbox games like this are often chosen for the width and breadth of options the world provides players.
7
Dinkum
The Latest In Relaxed Survival
One of the newest games in the survival genre, Dinkum came out in 2025 and features a dream many similarly relaxed games share. That of getting an opportunity to move from a big city life to a quiet, remote town to live a simple yet extraordinary existence. The brightly coloured world of the randomly generated islands this player moves to is perfect for fishing, mining, farming, and just wandering in a beautiful region to see what you can find.
This is a hugely replayable experience that has some similarities to other beloved games that players reading an article such as this should be familiar with. However, the big twist is that players in Dinkum are trying to build a whole town through their activities. This was not only hugely satisfying to me, but it felt like it made this a relaxed survival game with a very obvious and exciting point to it.
6
Astroneer
A Whole Solar System To Lose Yourself In
There’s a whole sub-genre of open-world exploration and survival games that utilise space now. Astroneer is perhaps my personal favourite of this new wave. It features a player character tasked with activating the cores of seven different planets, which involves exploration and collecting resources to craft the materials needed for this task.
The progression in Astroneer feels very self-driven, which means there is never any pressure on the players to move ahead. The style is sandbox, the planets are large, open-world maps. In short, there was nothing stopping me from just getting lost for a while and jumping into my ship to go to another planet when I tired of one. That made it easy to slip a few (hundred) hours into this game.
5
Sea Of Thieves
Smooth Sailing Across Beautiful Oceans
The great thing about Sea of Thieves is perhaps the lack of story. It means players can take on pirate roles, or simple adventuring ones, or they can choose to simply sail across the oceans filled with bright blue sky. This world is populated with all sorts of events, and players can often choose whether or not to interact with them. However, some will drag you in (literally) at times, which can make the experience less relaxing.
Still, this is the best way to play a game where you simply get to stare at a beautiful, oceanic horizon for a lot of the gameplay. I don’t think I’ve ever used a map in Sea of Thieves, preferring to simply float around, enjoying the process of letting adventure find me.
4
Stardew Valley
There Is No Right Answer
Some games simply have so many options that there’s never one correct way to play. Stardew Valley is a great example of how players can come together and build a beautiful, thriving farm. Alternatively, romance options, mine exploration, and simply running about, day-to-day fishing and finding resources, random items, and getting lost in the magic of this truly wide-open game.
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Although Stardew Valley doesn’t have an enormous open world to explore or the same ability to get lost as some other games on this list, the energy of everything you’re doing after your character leaves the city makes it feel like you are truly fleeing life in order to live. It has been my go-to comfort game for nearly a decade, and it’s just as much happy, simple fun as I remember, every time.
3
Minecraft
There’s No Larger World To Lose Yourself In
You never know what will be around the corner, or across the next mountain, in Minecraft. It goes without saying that this is the biggest sandbox game of all time, possibly the biggest open-world game of all time, and one of the most beloved games ever. It’s a personal favourite for me and millions. I’ve been building grand structures and attempting hardcore worlds in this game since the Beta, and I am always a short while from my next adventure in this world of blocks.
Minecraft is played co-operatively in many different ways, none of them wrong. And players often go out on journeys, not really knowing what they’re even looking for. There’s no way to play Minecraft wrong, and plenty of ways to play it with simple, gentle joy, adventuring, and searching for nothing more than a relaxing time.
2
No Man’s Sky
A Truly Infinite Universe
It is challenging to find a game where players can get more lost than in an infinite universe. No Man’s Sky features procedurally generated planets, approximately 18 quintillion of them. It is a grand game that allows up to four players in a party to join and build bases, complete missions, and share resources.
No Man’s Sky is an ingenious form of the exploration-focused survival game. It is a pinnacle of the genre, a game that truly can never be completed, in which players really can’t get to the point where they’ve definitively seen everything the game has to show. The thing about No Man’s Sky is that for a long while I found it almost intimidatingly large, but to accept you can’t see everything in the game, much like in the real world, is a peaceful experience. Now, it’s a huge favourite for me, and another game I’ve perhaps played far too much of to consider it a relaxing hobby.
1
Journey
The Ultimate Open-World Experience
Talk about it being about the journey, not the destination. That is very much the case with this open-world game. Journey can be played cooperatively, as the player spots other players on their own quest and can interact with them in a limited fashion. And it is the perfect pinnacle of a game to get lost within. I was shaken in a way I’ve never been before (or since) by the quality and the beauty of an indie game when I first played this one.
Having since been named Game of the Year, Journey proved that no game is too small to win big. It also proved that games don’t need the flashy modern things we often seek in order to be deeply moving and gratifying. The point of Journey was to find yourself by getting lost, and players continue to do so to this day.
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