What are the most immersive FPS games you can play right now? You’re about to find out!
When it comes to video game immersion, it’s about the player being one with the game world. The games may be lines of codes and generated textures, but being immersed in an engaging virtual world is one of the purest joys a gamer can experience.
In my honest opinion, a first-person perspective is much more intimate with the player than a third-person perspective. You’re seeing through the eyes of your character, and your eyes and your character’s eyes are one.
What makes a game immersive?
For a game to be pleasantly immersive, the video-game-y aspects need to minimize themselves. For example, when you don’t see the HUD or floating objective markers, the game world and scenario you see becomes much more believable.
This article includes some games that implemented the aforementioned conventional aspects of a video game. However, they did it in a way that felt right.
Also, many people confuse realism with immersion. Realism is when a gameplay element feels real (for example, take Kingdom Come: Deliverance) or when the visuals of the game look real. They’re not the same.
Immersion is when the game draws you into its world, be it mythological or supernatural; almost every element and aspect of the game matches with the overall theme. It feels real not because it’s realistic by the standards of our real world but because it’s realistic and appealing by the standards of the game’s world.
When a game successfully creates an immersive experience for you, you will be in the game’s reality, at least for the short time you play it. So let’s look at some of the most immersive FPS games.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
Back in the 2000s, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. more or less defined immersion in video games. Despite the retail version of Shadow of Chernobyl (the first game of 2007) not being the concept that the developers had in mind, it turned out to be an extraordinary game. The sense of freedom the game offered the player was seen only in a handful of games of the time.
Shadow of Chernobyl’s atmosphere and its audio effects added to the grim and quaint feel of the game in major degrees. While the visuals are certainly lackluster by today’s standards, it was outstanding back then.
Still, many players prefer to experience the vanilla game rather than modding it. The sequels took place in the Zone, as did the first game. And each game’s immersion is top-tier.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 will be released next year. I suggest you play the originals now to be ready.
Metro
There are three Metro games: Metro: 2033, Metro: Last Light, and Metro: Exodus. Each of these games is top-tier and all of them are equally great FPS games. But some players consider Exodus to be the best in the franchise.
These games are based on novels of the same name by Dmitri Glukhovsky. While many players see similarities to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. in Metro, this franchise is more story-focused.
The gameplay is difficult but satisfying. Many sections of the games, especially in 2033 and Last Light, are set in dark and gloomy, atmospheric areas. You have the ability to turn off the crosshair in the game, making it even more immersive. And the HUD is already minimal.
The guns of these games feel quite satisfying to use, and they can be upgraded. There are also elements like mist building up on your goggles, requiring you to wipe them. While it doesn’t have many realistic elements, it’s still incredibly immersive.
Exodus is more open-ended than the earlier games. Its open world is very intriguing and while it doesn’t require you to explore, doing so enables you to discover secrets and learn more about the world. It even introduced driving, and like many elements of the games, that too is unusual, but well-made.
BioShock
While the gameplay of BioShock is not as immersive as the entries above, its atmospheric world is. It’s very quaint and extraordinary. The sections of the world look and feel hand-crafted, and you can understand the world in a strange way just by paying attention to the surroundings.
Something that’s even more immersive in an unconventional way in video games is the narrative. It directly talks to the player and raises questions that you’ll contemplate for a long, long time after finishing the game.
And its story will not be forgotten for a very long time. BioShock makes the player a part of its story. The philosophies of the characters of the game make you compare the game world to the real world.
There are only a handful of games that are as masterful as BioShock. It’s a work of art.
Fallout: New Vegas
Fallout New Vegas’s gameplay and visuals are quite dated, and they aren’t what’s really immersive in this game. Like BioShock, the narrative connects the player to the world. Your choices have serious impacts and consequences. But these choices aren’t like “choose this option and this character may die”, but they’re choices that define you as a character, and these choices make you think as if you were a part of the game world.
There are moral and ethical questions that will make you ponder about decisions that were made by you and other people in the real world. While I could’ve included any other RPG to this list, the complexity of the characters and the choices you get to make in New Vegas makes it the perfect entry for the list.
Dishonored
Dishonored is a game with an unusually beautiful yet unrealistic art style. Its gameplay elements are supernatural and fantastical. The gameplay directly affects the whole world. Its promotional artworks and trailers said so boldly that “Revenge Solves Everything”.
Is that really the case? Or is it not so simple, and that being a mindless killer who becomes the very person that everyone made him out to be, only gives birth to more problems, not solutions?
Thinking twice is the key to being a rational human being in the real world, and that’s exactly the case in the game world as well. It’s not a game about you and your enemies; it’s a game about you, your enemies, and thousands of other people who you won’t even see in the game. And the DLCs answer more questions in-game and raise questions that you’ll think about in real life.
