I’ve been ruminating on why I don’t get the same sense of exploration from these games, and I think I’ve finally figured it out: it’s not just exploration that’s required, but also the sense of discovery that makes these games magical. As an exercise, here’s my personal (i.e. subjective) discovery/branching ratings on games which people have said are “exploration” games that I’ve played to completion. Nothing about this chart is about the quality of the game - for example, Journey is one of my favorite games of all time, but it hardly ranks high at all as an exploration game.