Skyrim Meets Minecraft In This Gorgeous New Sandbox RPG

1 week ago 10

Facing an enemy atop a tower wall in Lay of the Land

Published Mar 26, 2026, 7:00 PM EDT

Ben Brosofsky has been writing for Screen Rant since 2022 and editing since 2024. He graduated from Vanderbilt University with a Bachelor's in Cinema & Media Arts. Writing serves as a much-needed distraction from tackling a backlog of Steam games that will never be surmounted.

Minecraft has always featured touches of the fantastical, but the vanilla experience doesn't fully dive into the high fantasy of games like The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim. While texture packs and mods can push it further in that direction, it's still no substitute for something designed ground-up as a fantasy experience. Next month, a new game could fill that role perfectly.

Lay Of The Land Is A New Minecraft-Esque RPG

Voxels As Far As The Eye Can See

A building seen through trees in Lay of the Land

Lay of the Land's voxel aesthetic goes a good bit deeper than Minecraft's, skipping past the system of oversized blocks to allow for more granular control. A wizard tower needs to be round, after all, and that's a lot easier to pull off here. The Steam page also promises that "fires spread and burn, sand collapses, water flows, and pockets of gas suffocate," suggesting that the sandbox has a lot more physics and simulation aspects involved.

Where this really gets interesting is the crafting. Instead of hopping into a menu, Lay of the Land has you do the job manually, physically placing the necessary items before assembling them. The process isn't really any more complex, but it's a nice way to rethink familiar systems.

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Fantasy Galore

The fantasy flavor of Lay of the Land carries a lot of Skyrim's familiar sensibilities, from mushroom-laden forests to parapets among snow-capped peaks. It also features an extensive focus on first-person combat, with both martial weapons and magic systems on the table. One clip on the Steam page shows the player extracting a hunk of stone from a wall with a spell and then firing it at an enemy, which suggests some exciting opportunities to make use of the destructible environments.

This won't be the solution to those seeking a complex narrative on the level of The Elder Scrolls. If you're looking for the simpler pleasures of wandering around a fantasy realm like Skyrim and making your mark therein, though, Lay of the Land could be the perfect solution. I've seen more Minecraft-inspired games than I can count over the years, but this upcoming option has some of the best ingredients of any.