It's easy to take for granted your place in the world. Not even in a deeply philosophical way or anything, just literally the scale of things. What's normal to use will be tiny to something like an ant, while a whale would view us like a teeny little fish. That perspective shift is something wild.
One of the incredible benefits of games is their power to let us witness scenarios we never could otherwise. Like, for example, making us a tiny little guy to view the world from another perspective, or really letting us see the scale of the world around us. It's pretty humbling.
9 Katamari
Oh, we all know about the Katamari games. They're weird and whimsical and completely nonsensical and all of that is meant as the height of praise.
Travelling the universe to collect things into a giant ball because your father, the King of All Cosmos simply has nothing better for you to do. It's the best way to live life.
What's so fun here is how it feels like you become increasingly small. The Prince rolls around their astral orb condensing the world into it all like a very sticky black hole.
The Prince never grows though, he remains a little guy the whole time. He just seems smaller and smaller as you turn the planet into a comedically large ball.
8 Pikmin
A lot of people don't really know what the Pikmin games are. Most people will tell you they know what a Pikmin is, but won't actually know what the games are about.
Fair enough, considering they've never really reached beyond their niche, but they're a premium experience in making the world around you feel gigantic.
Playing as some rather diminutive but large-headed astronauts, you need to use the little Pikmin to help you navigate these uncharted planets. Except these planets are usually exceedingly normal places, you and the Pikmin are just the size of an ant.
Seeing a dropped piece of food that looks like the ruins of an ancient civilization is definitely not an everyday occurrence.
7 No Man's Sky
No Man's Sky made a lot of promises, and it's fair to say it's well-exceeded those in years since its release. If anything, the game feels like something entirely different at this point, that lonely universe replaced with one teeming with life both real and artificial.
One thing the game has never lost though is the sheer size of the universe. Literal billions of planets and moons and stars to visit, all of them full to scale.
Though they can at times lack diversity, knowing that they are a planet you can actually fully run the circumference of is terrifying. Every star is a new adventure, and you can guarantee you'll never see them all.
6 Shadow of the Colossus
Games like Shadow of the Colossus are exceedingly hard to pull off nowadays. Not due to the lack of talent or ideas, but because a game without voice acting and a loosely told story is hard to get away with on the AAA scale.
Shadow of the Colossus is so confident in what it is, letting the imagination of the player determine how the world is viewed.
As the name implies, you exist in the shadow of the colossi you fight, a speck in their vision. Yet your minute nature doesn't mean you are helpless, with each colossus eventually falling to your glimmering blade.
Why, exactly, this is your quest is up to each player's imagination, though felling such gigantic beasts is, without a doubt, sorrowful.
5 Subnautica
The ocean is pretty terrifying, isn't it? Most of us will never witness the fear of seeing that inky black abyss without an exceedingly disposable income to traverse its depths. Good things games exist for the rest of us, which are significantly less life-threatening.
Anyone who's played Subnautica will rightfully know to be afraid of the ocean. We know so little about it, seen so little of it. Who's to say the freaky creatures shown in Subnautica aren't the reality?
You are just a glimmer in the vast sea, so deep that even light can't reach you anymore. Remember, the land of the earth is big enough, and that's only about 30% of it.
4 Monster Hunter
Monster Hunter is great because everything you need is in the title - you hunt monsters! It would be great to say it's deeper than that, but it really isn't. Monster Hunter is a game with an incredible combat system all about taking down fearsome monsters, wrapped in an endlessly enticing gameplay loop.
Monster Hunter tends to scale upwards. Some monsters are your size, typically the earliest you'll face.
Then they keep growing until you're fighting what is basically a mountain that can hold even more monsters on it. No matter how many times you defeat Gaismagorm, you'll never escape that their toenails are bigger than you.
3 Tears of the Kingdom
Breath of the Wild was The Legend of Zelda's first foray into a truly open world, with Wind Waker being the closest thing prior to it. Not only did it become a force for change in the games industry (for better and worse), it achieved something few other massive open-world games ever did - making you feel tiny in comparison to the world.
Hyrule is massive, and Tears of the Kingdom only expands it. Yes, Link has an exceedingly vast repertoire of tools to assist him in navigating it all, but diving from the sky to below the surface to the deepest sections of the world really lets you realize that Link is a short king.
Nothing compares to the sky of Hyrule, not even the great dragons that fly around it.
2 Xenoblade Chronicles
The Xenoblade Chronicles games are amazing, and that is a fully unbiased line. They are confident in everything they do and willing to change it all between entries and even expansions.
Different forms of writing, exploration, combat systems, and art styles. Everything can change, except for one core aspect - the size of the world.
The original Xenoblade Chronicles takes place across two titans that form the lands people live on, both of them visible no matter where you are. The sequel takes place in the sky upon flying beasts, and even X lets you pilot a mech to make sure the size of the world is never lost on you.
Couple this with hilariously large enemies and you have a world that actively makes only the people you play as feel tiny.
1 Everything
This is always a fun game to include because if you don't know about Everything, it sounds like a joke entry. Rather, Everything is a single video game about, well, everything.
Note the caps difference. Everything is fun not because it makes you tiny, but because it offers the potential to be literally the tiniest thing in existence.
There's not exactly a strict story to follow in Everything as it's more of a philosophical examination of everything. Except the examination is literal. You can be everything.
Do you want to be a cow? Sure, rotate on your axis. A whole planet? No problem. Think smaller though, to what you can't even see. Become the atom that forms all of life. You're not getting smaller than that.