There's a location in the game atop a mountain, with the iconic Snowpoint Temple from the "Diamond/Pearl" games realized in a 3D environment. In front of it is a yawning lake with an island sitting at its center. Off in the distance in another direction looms Mount Coronet, this universe's stand-in for Japan's famous Mount Fuji. None of this sounds flat, does it? The issue is that none of these locations are framed with player location in mind.

If you've had your eye on an open world game like Marvel's Spider-Man, The Witcher 3 or Red Dead Redemption 2, but didn't think you'd ever have the time to play it, now might be your chance. Whether you like to explore every corner of a world, complete every side quest to score 100 per cent, or prefer to stick to the main quest, open world games pretty much let you do whatever you feel like, all at your own pace. Here we share a selection of the most absorbing open world games to explore and get lost in right now. With over 100 hours of core and side-quest gameplay, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is sure to keep boredom at bay. The dark fantasy game sees you play as Geralt of Rivia, mercenary Monster Slayer.

The PlayStation 4 has dominated the video game market since its release six years ago. Sure, Microsoft's Xbox One is more powerful than the PlayStation 4, but Sony's console spent this generation producing incredible games. Putting software above hardware has been a winning strategy for Sony and it's sold more than 100 million consoles since the PlayStation 4's release in 2013. With more than 2,300 games for the system, it can be hard to pick which game to play. But TIME has you covered.

Reinvention doesn't always have to be dramatic. Whether it's a long-running movie series, the seventh season of a TV show or the fifth entry in a popular video game franchise, subtle changes can be made to feel radical. In Far Cry 5, Ubisoft managed to reinvent its massively popular open world first-person shooter without losing much, if any, of what made the franchise such a hit in the first place simply by tearing down the artifice and placing an emphasis on player freedom. Ubisoft trusts players to find the fun this time around, and it pays off in a big way. On its most basic level, Far Cry 5 is about the takeover of the fictional Hope County, Montana by a doomsday cult that calls itself The Project at Eden's Gate.

Going frame-by-frame in our naive start was obviously the wrong move. And going with "kill bandit" obviously made the level of abstraction too high, no matter whether the fight was described in text or represented through a minigame. Let's descend just a little bit from "kill bandit" into a tactics-based approach.

At this point, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has become a video game phenomenon. Much has been said about how it's a new take on the dusty old Zelda formula, or on how it represents a fresh direction for Nintendo in general, by buoying its new Switch console. But Breath of the Wild deserves just as much credit for how it subverts and reaffirms the power of the open world. There are two key hallmarks of the open world genre: There is a big map to freely traverse, and there's a lot of stuff to do on that map. It's a formula that's been refined over the past few iterations of Grand Theft Auto, Assassin's Creed, Elder Scrolls and Far Cry, among others of that ilk.

I have been writing about video games full time for nearly seven years now, and I don't know if I've ever experienced a month like this past one before. Not to complain about playing and reviewing games for a living, but wow this has been intense. I started with 30 hours of Horizon Zero Dawn in a week in order to write that review. Then, my Switch arrived, and I sunk about 80 hours in Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which I wasn't reviewing, but wanted to play and write about constantly all the same since it's arguably one of the best games ever made. And I only put that game down when my review copy of Mass Effect: Andromeda showed up, and to hit that embargo, I put in 60 hours in six days.

The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild is a surprising video game. Surprising because it builds off of modern game design sensibilities while at the same time subverting those sensibilities, turning them on their proverbial heads. Now we have no choice. We're forced to look at open-world video games differently now, through a new lens. Game designers should study the game carefully as well.

"WHY CAN'T YOU JUST LIKE THINGS?" one of my Twitter followers yelled at me yesterday as I tweeted about how the Switch seemed a bit too big to be as portable as many would like. It's true that I am on the glass half empty side of analysis more often than not, and as such, I was expecting that I may not be quite as over the moon about The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild as most reviewers, handing the game so many perfect 10s it's now one of the best-reviewed games ever made. But even cynicism has its limits, and so far, after a manageable learning curve, Zelda has broken me. I don't want to give a full review right now of how all the mechanics work and this and that, I want to explain how and why it made me a convert, after I felt a bit weird about the game initially. In short, playing Breath of the Wild feels like I'm being cured of an addiction I didn't know I had.

I hate open world games, as a general rule. As someone with not a lot of free time, I like my games to be direct and challenging, taking me from level to level in an orderly fashion. Which is one reason why I find myself playing games like Dishonored or the Wolfenstein series time and again. I can go start to finish in a direct route, and the game rarely asks me to deviate course or worse - find a bunch of random materials and craft them. So I should hate The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It's a sprawling, open world game with little direction except knowing you have to fight Ganon at the end.