The 10 Best Linear Adventure Games to Buy

Open worlds keep getting bigger, and a lot of that size is filler: question marks on a map, towers to climb, the same bandit camp cleared for the fortieth time. This list goes the other way.

Every pick is a linear adventure. A designer decided where you go next, and the story is tighter for it. No battle pass, no crafting menu you'll never open, no 100-hour commitment. We counted down from ten, and for each game we say what it does well, where it falls short, and who should skip it.

The list at a glance

#	Game	Studio	Pick it for
1	The Last of Us Part I	Naughty Dog	The best story here
2	Resident Evil 4	Capcom	Horror for people who don't play horror
3	UNCHARTED: Legacy of Thieves Collection	Naughty Dog	A blockbuster treasure hunt, twice
4	HITMAN World of Assassination	IO Interactive	Planning the perfect kill
5	Tomb Raider Definitive Survivor Trilogy	Crystal Dynamics, Eidos-Montréal	Three full games in one purchase
6	What Remains of Edith Finch	Giant Sparrow	One evening, one very strange family
7	Indiana Jones and the Great Circle	MachineGames	Playing through an Indy movie
8	Control Ultimate Edition	Remedy Entertainment	Throwing the furniture
9	A Plague Tale: Requiem	Asobo Studio	Stealth with 300,000 rats
10	007 First Light	IO Interactive	The newest game on the list

How we picked

Three rules. The game has to be linear or close to it, with a story that ends. It has to be on PC now. And it has to hold up in 2026, on its own merits. We've included the honest drawbacks, because a list where everything is perfect doesn't help you spend money.

10. 007 First Light

The newest game here, and the only one released in 2026. IO Interactive's Bond is 26, a Royal Navy air crewman pulled into MI6's revived Double-0 program, and he's played by Patrick Gibson. It's an origin story. You meet him before the tuxedo fits.

It isn't open world, and despite the studio, it isn't a Hitman sandbox either. Missions run on a mostly linear track with a few larger hub-style levels. Each one lets you go quiet or go loud: bluff past guards in a disguise, open doors with gadgets from Q Branch, or settle it with your fists. There's even a rule that only allows lethal force once enemies show lethal intent, which turns a piece of Bond lore into a mechanic.

Fast cars, beautiful people, ugly fights. That's the brief, and First Light delivers it. Critics singled out the writing and the close-quarters combat. They were cooler on the pacing across a roughly 20-hour campaign and on the driving sections, which feel bolted on.

Skip it if you need a flawless PC port. Performance was uneven at launch, and it took patch 1.0.5 to fix a DLSS bug.

9. A Plague Tale: Requiem

Remember Amicia and Hugo de Rune, the siblings running from the Inquisition and the plague in A Plague Tale: Innocence? Requiem picks up in 1349 and sends them south, mostly through Provence. They're chasing an island from Hugo's dreams that might cure the Macula, the curse in his blood.

The rats are the headline. Asobo Studio's engine can put up to 300,000 of them on screen, against about 5,000 in the first game, and they pour through streets like liquid. Rats fear light. So you spend the game either hiding from the swarm or using it: lighting a brazier with Ignifer, putting out a guard's torch with Extinguis, lobbing Odoris to pull the tide onto someone who deserves it. Later, Hugo learns to steer the swarm himself.

On paper it's a stealth game with a sling, a crossbow and a chemistry set. What stays with you is the brother and sister. Requiem is about what it costs to protect someone you love, and it doesn't soften the answer.

Skip it if dense crowds of rats make your skin crawl. They're in almost every chapter, and that's the whole design.

8. Control Ultimate Edition

Jesse Faden walks into the Federal Bureau of Control looking for her brother. By the end of her first day, she's the Director. The building is the Oldest House, a brutalist tower in New York that's bigger inside than out and rearranges its own corridors. Something called the Hiss has taken it over.

Remedy files the style under New Weird. Picture concrete offices, filing cabinets, and ordinary objects that bend reality. The real reason to play, though, is the combat. The Launch ability lets Jesse rip a desk or a chunk of wall loose and hurl it, and with the right upgrade she can catch an incoming rocket and send it back. Her Service Weapon shifts between five forms. Most fights end with the room in pieces, and that's the fun of it.

The Ultimate Edition includes both expansions, The Foundation and AWE.

Two things before you buy. First, check your library. Epic Games Store gave away the standard edition twice, in June 2021 and again in December 2024, so you may already own the base game. Second, if you finish and want more, the sequel, CONTROL Resonant, came out in September 2026 with Jesse's brother Dylan in the lead.

Skip it if you want a story told plainly. Control leaves a lot of its lore in documents and recordings you find along the way.

7. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

It's 1937, somewhere between Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade. Troy Baker voices Indy in Harrison Ford's likeness, and the prologue replays the golden idol and the rolling boulder from Raiders. If that made you grin, you're the audience.

MachineGames built it in first person, which sounds wrong for Indiana Jones until you try it. The whip does most of the work. Swing across a gap, trip a lever, yank the pistol out of a guard's hand or lash his legs out from under him. Fights are scrappy: grab a bottle or a shovel, and save the revolver, because ammunition is scarce.

The route runs from Marshall College through Vatican City, Giza, the Himalayas, Siam and Iraq. One chapter drops Indy into Shanghai during a Japanese bombing run, on shelled streets, and it's one of the best staged stretches in the game. A lot of the runtime goes to long cutscenes and film-accurate set pieces, so it often feels like watching a new Indy movie.

Critics generally praised the puzzles. The usual complaints were simple stealth and enemies that aren't very bright.

Skip it if the films mean nothing to you. Much of the pleasure is recognition.

6. What Remains of Edith Finch

It gets compared to One Hundred Years of Solitude a lot, and the comparison is earned: Giant Sparrow has cited Gabriel García Márquez and magical realism as influences. Edith, 17, comes back to her family's strange, stacked house on Orcas Island, Washington. The Finches believe they're cursed. Very few of them died of old age.

You don't read about the deaths. You play each relative's last day, and every vignette changes the rules. Lewis guts fish at a salmon cannery while a daydream slowly takes over the screen. Calvin swings higher and higher over a cliff. Walter leaves the bunker he's hidden in for decades and walks toward a railway line. Some stories play like dark comedy, some like a picture book, and most turn at the end in a way you won't see coming.

It takes about two hours. It won Best Game at the 2018 BAFTA Games Awards, and Best Narrative at The Game Awards 2017.

Skip it if you need combat or challenge. There's no fighting here, only a house and its stories.

5. Tomb Raider Definitive Survivor Trilogy

Three games, one arc: Lara Croft goes from an archaeology graduate to the tomb raider.

Tomb Raider (2013) wrecks her ship, the Endurance, off the island of Yamatai in the Dragon's Triangle. Rise of the Tomb Raider takes her to Siberia after the Divine Source, a promise of immortality, and into open war with the shadowy order Trinity. Shadow of the Tomb Raider, led by Eidos-Montréal, starts in Cozumel and moves into the Peruvian jungle. Lara takes a dagger she shouldn't have, sets off a Mayan apocalypse, and spends the rest of the game trying to stop it.

Island, snow, jungle. Each game looks completely different, and each mixes the same three things: open exploration, optional puzzle tombs, and survival combat. The tombs are where the series' old roots show. Skip them and you skip the best part.

One note for PC buyers: on Steam, the bundle includes Tomb Raider Game of the Year Edition rather than the 2013 Definitive Edition, which never came to Steam.

Skip it if you've already played the reboot trilogy on console. Otherwise, three full campaigns for one purchase is hard to argue with.

4. HITMAN World of Assassination

Same studio as No. 10, a completely different idea. Since January 26, 2023, HITMAN 3 has been sold under this name, and it holds the locations from 2016's HITMAN, HITMAN 2 and HITMAN 3 in one game.

It's less an action game than an assassination simulator. Metal Gear asks you not to be seen. Hitman asks you to be seen as someone else. Steal a waiter's uniform and you can walk into the kitchen; steal a guard's and the kitchen staff stop looking at you. You're playing the rules of a place, not your reflexes, and the game rewards patience over aim.

The maps aren't big, but they're packed. HITMAN 3 opens on top of a Dubai skyscraper. Sapienza, from the 2016 game, is a whole Italian seaside town with routines you can learn and then break. You'll replay one level a dozen times to find a cleaner kill, and every run teaches you something about the place.

Freelancer, a roguelike mode added in 2023, gives you a reason to keep going once the campaign is done.

Skip it if you want to shoot your way through. You can, but you'll miss the game.

3. UNCHARTED: Legacy of Thieves Collection

Two games in one: Uncharted 4: A Thief's End and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy. In the first, Nathan Drake has retired to New Orleans with Elena when his brother Sam, long thought dead, turns up after years in prison. The bait is pirate Henry Avery's treasure, and the trail leads to Libertalia. The Lost Legacy hands the lead to Chloe Frazer and Nadine Ross, hunting the Tusk of Ganesh in India's Western Ghats.

Both this and Tomb Raider are about digging up the past, but they feel nothing alike. Lara's trilogy is about surviving and growing up. Uncharted is a Hollywood treasure hunt that wants you having a good time. Climbing is smooth, gunfights are loud, and the puzzles are gentle enough for someone who rarely plays games. Nolan North and Troy Baker's performance capture carries the cutscenes, and there are moments where you'll forget you're holding a controller.

Skip it if you hate climbing. Some critics called the traversal repetitive, and they had a point: much of the time you're either climbing or walking to the next thing to climb.

2. Resident Evil 4

If "survival horror" has kept you away from this series, start here. The remake plays more like an action game than a horror one. Leon hits hard, the guns keep coming, and the tension comes from crowds closing in.

It's 2004, six years after Raccoon City. Leon S. Kennedy, now a US government agent, is sent to rural Spain to bring back the President's daughter, Ashley Graham, from a cult called Los Illuminados. The villagers carry a parasite, Las Plagas. The route runs through a village, a castle and an island base, with the cult's leader, Osmund Saddler, waiting at the end and Ada Wong turning up with an agenda of her own.

The over-the-shoulder camera keeps you tight on Leon. You get a pistol, a shotgun, a rifle and a knife that can parry. It works: Capcom says the remake had sold 16 million units by June 30, 2026.

Which edition? The Gold Edition adds Separate Ways, the side story played as Ada Wong, along with the Extra DLC Pack. It's the one to get if you want the whole story. Both editions are in the card below.

1. The Last of Us Part I

The Last of Us came out on PS3 in 2013. Naughty Dog rebuilt it for PS5 in 2022, with new visuals, animation and combat, and it reached PC in March 2023. More than a decade on, it's still the high bar for story games built on a straight line.

A mutated Cordyceps fungus wrecks the world in a single night, and Joel loses his daughter, Sarah. Twenty years later he takes a job: get Ellie, a girl who's immune, across the United States to a resistance group called the Fireflies. The trip runs from summer through fall and winter into spring, and the two of them slowly go from wary strangers to something close to father and daughter.

Play it on a high difficulty and it turns into a resource game. Supplies run thin, Clickers can kill you in one grab, and human enemies flank. You'll think about every fight before it starts, and walking away is often the smarter call. Naughty Dog's faces do half the storytelling. You can read the next scene in Joel's expression before anyone speaks.

The PC version had a rough start: crashes, shader compilation that could take an hour, and Steam reviews that sank to Mostly Negative. A run of patches fixed most of it, and the game was Steam Deck Verified by June 2023. The Left Behind expansion is included.

Our one piece of advice: when the credits roll, let the ending sit for a while before you go anywhere near Part II. It works best left open.

Before you buy

• Compare stores. Steam isn't the only place to buy PC games. The cards above show the best current price we track in your country, across the stores we cover.
• Check the history. Each game page has a price history chart, so you can tell a real low from a routine discount.
• Check your library. Control has been free on the Epic Games Store twice. Older giveaways are easy to forget, and a quick search could save you buying something twice.