There is something uniquely, specifically British about a bank holiday. It is not a holiday in any meaningful sense. It is a shared national experience of mild suffering, conducted cheerfully, in a car park or a field, usually whilst holding a paper plate that has gone soggy from the drizzle. If you have ever driven the A303 in May and genuinely considered abandoning the car and walking to Stonehenge, you already understand the vibe. The remarkable thing, though, is that certain open world games have accidentally, completely without intending to, simulated this experience with almost forensic accuracy. These are those games.
Why open world games are basically bank holiday simulators
The best open world games UK bank holiday comparisons exist because both involve the same core mechanics: a huge map, a vague sense that you should be doing something enjoyable, a series of completely avoidable disasters, and a persistent feeling that absolutely everyone else got there first. You set off with ambition. You end up queuing. The roads are weird. Half the things you wanted to do are shut. Someone, somewhere, is barbecuing despite conditions that would make a meteorologist weep.
I have spent a frankly embarrassing number of hours in open world games over the years, and I have also spent a frankly embarrassing number of bank holidays stuck behind a caravan on the A30. The crossover is real. Let me rank the contenders.
Red Dead Redemption 2, the most accurate traffic simulator
RDR2 scores extraordinarily high on bank holiday accuracy for one very specific reason: the roads. Try galloping anywhere on horseback and you will immediately encounter a slow-moving wagon, a man with a cart of chickens going precisely the speed that makes overtaking feel dangerous, and at least two other travellers doing something inexplicable in the middle of the track. You can see your destination. You cannot reach it at speed. The horse is getting stressed. You should have left earlier.
The weather system is also deeply British in its behaviour. Clear skies for the first twenty minutes. Then, just as you have ridden a significant distance from shelter and are now fully committed to the plan, it absolutely hammers it down. No warning. Arthur Morgan stands there looking damp and quietly furious, which is the correct emotional response. This game understands bank holiday energy on a cellular level.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the festival field energy
Breath of the Wild captures the specific chaos of a British summer festival on a bank holiday in a way that Nintendo probably did not intend. The map is vast and optimistic. The weather changes every six minutes. You set off from camp, sorry, the shrine, with a cheerful plan, and within twenty minutes you are soaking wet on a hillside, your sandwiches have gone (a Bokoblin got them), and you are genuinely unsure what direction you came from.
The cooking mechanic is the barbecue mechanic. You collect ingredients with enormous enthusiasm. You try to combine them in a way that makes sense. The result is edible but somehow not quite right. Everyone around the fire nods politely. Classic bank holiday barbecue. I would also point you to our piece on open world games with the most suspiciously accurate British weather systems because BotW could easily have topped that list too.
Grand Theft Auto V, everything shutting at 4pm and car park warfare
Los Santos is not Britain. And yet. The specific horror of arriving somewhere perfectly reasonable at 4:15pm and discovering everything has shut, including the thing that should logically be open on a bank holiday, is absolutely present in GTA V’s mission structure. The window for doing the thing you want to do is always narrower than it appeared on the map. Trevor’s rage at this situation is, honestly, proportionate.
The car park scenes in GTA V also capture something real. Multi-storey car parks on bank holidays are a form of light psychological warfare, and the game nails the energy of sixteen vehicles all attempting to claim a space that technically fits two. The honking. The slow crawl. The person who takes up one and a half spaces and shows no remorse whatsoever. Five stars. No survivors.
Skyrim, the inexplicable nationwide urge to barbecue in questionable weather
Skyrim is a game in which people stand around open fires eating meat in temperatures that should make that deeply unpleasant, and nobody questions this. That is a bank holiday in the UK. The Nords of Skyrim have the same relationship with the weather that British people have: it is not an obstacle, it is simply the backdrop against which normal life continues. Rain? We are still doing the barbecue. Snow? Still doing the barbecue. We have coals now and we are committed.
I also want to note that Skyrim’s fast travel system, where you can teleport to any previously discovered location, represents the single greatest divergence from bank holiday reality. In real life, there is no fast travel from Exeter to the Cotswolds on a Sunday of a long weekend. The A303 is a parking lot and you will listen to the same three songs on Radio 2 for two and a half hours.
Cyberpunk 2077, the everything-is-technically-open-but-somehow-broken experience
Night City is a place where technically everything is available to you at any moment, and yet somehow nothing works properly when you actually try to use it. Half the map markers lead to places that are either inaccessible, glitched, or occupied by something you did not expect. This is the bank holiday experience of arriving at a tourist attraction that is listed as open on the website, finding that the website has not been updated since 2023, and discovering that the car park is being used for a different event entirely.
The sheer volume of side content in Night City also mirrors the bank holiday phenomenon of having so many options that you end up doing nothing productive and going home slightly sunburnt and vaguely dissatisfied. V stands in the middle of Watson district with forty unstarted quests, unable to decide. I have stood in exactly that posture in a Dorset market town on a bank holiday Monday.
Which game actually wins?
Honestly? Red Dead Redemption 2 takes the crown for best open world games UK bank holiday accuracy purely on the strength of its traffic, its weather timing, and the ambient NPC behaviour that perfectly captures people who are doing bank holiday things with absolute conviction despite everything suggesting they should have stayed home. The honour is dubious. Rockstar should not be proud. They absolutely should be proud.
If you enjoy this kind of crossover between gaming and very British real-world misery, I strongly recommend our look at video game cities that would fail a UK fire safety inspection, and if you want to know more about which in-game experiences map uncomfortably well to actual British bureaucracy, the video game sidequests that feel exactly like dealing with a UK council complaints process will ruin your afternoon in the best possible way.
The Met Office’s long-running data on bank holiday weather patterns confirms what every British person already knows in their bones: the forecast will be optimistic on the Thursday, ambiguous on the Friday, and deeply committed to rain by Sunday lunchtime. Open world games, at their chaotic best, capture this perfectly. None of them meant to. All of them did.
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