Can Open-World Games Help You Choose a Villa Region?

A client once told me she had chosen Crete over the Amalfi Coast because she had "already been to the Greek islands" in Assassin's Creed Odyssey and liked how they felt. She was half joking. She also booked a hillside villa forty minutes from the nearest beach because, in the game, everything looked close. It was not.

I do not think she was foolish. Open-world games are now detailed enough that people genuinely use them to get a feel for a region before a trip, and some of them are useful for exactly that. The problem is knowing which parts of the game you can trust and which parts the designers bent for fun. After a few years of hearing these stories at the booking stage, I have a fairly clear sense of where the line sits.

What a game gets right about a place

The things open-world games capture well are the things an artist can see and a level designer has no reason to change: light, colour, vegetation, building materials, and the overall mood of a landscape.

Forza Horizon 4 is a good example. Its version of Great Britain gets the dry stone walls of the Cotswolds, the grey slate of the Lake District, and the way the light goes flat and silvery in autumn. If you played it and found yourself drawn to the stone cottages and wet green hills, you have learned something real about your taste, and a cottage or farmhouse rental in that part of England is likely to suit you.

Forza Horizon 5 does the same for Mexico, with the colourful hillside streets of its Guanajuato and the jungle edges near the coast. Ghost of Tsushima models a real island between Japan and Korea, with its pampas grass fields and maple valleys, and players have travelled there specifically because of the game, usually by jetfoil from Fukuoka, a trip of a little over two hours.

So if a game made you want a certain kind of light, a certain kind of village, or a certain kind of coastline, take that seriously. It is useful information about you.

Where games quietly mislead you

The trouble is distance and effort. Games compress geography so that you never spend twenty minutes driving through nothing, and they make slopes, heat and access disappear.

The Sapienza row is the one I bring up most often with clients who want an Amalfi Coast villa. In the game, you walk from a clifftop villa down to the harbour in under a minute. On the real coast, a villa with a view like that often means a long staircase, no road access for the last stretch, and porters for the luggage. That is a fine choice for a fit couple and a hard one for a group with grandparents. I go into the trade-off at length in beach villa or hillside villa.

The game that is actually useful for checking a villa

If you want a game for scouting, the honest answer is not an adventure game at all. It is Microsoft Flight Simulator. The 2020 and 2024 editions build their world from aerial imagery and elevation data, so you can fly low and slow over the actual valley your shortlisted villa sits in. The houses are generated and often wrong in detail, but terrain, road layout and the distance to the coast are close to real.

I have used it twice to talk clients out of properties. One villa near Ronda, listed as "close to town," turned out to sit across a gorge with a single winding road; the flyover made that obvious in about ninety seconds. The other, in the hills behind a Croatian beach town, showed a steep climb that the listing photos, all taken from the pool terrace, never revealed. Neither listing lied, exactly. They just never showed the approach.

A free alternative is the 3D view in Google Earth, which does much the same with less fun. Either way you are checking the thing games are worst at: what it takes to get from the door to everything else.

A common bit of advice I would push back on

You will see travel threads saying that playing a game set somewhere "ruins the surprise" and that you should go in fresh. I understand the instinct, and for a city break it may be right. For a villa week with a group, I disagree. The cost of a mismatch is too high. A villa is usually booked months ahead with a deposit that is hard to recover, as anyone who has read what a villa contract should say knows. Anything that helps you notice early that you want flat ground, a walkable village or a view over water is worth having, even if it comes from a racing game.

What I would warn against is letting a game decide the specific property. Use it for the region and the feel. Use maps, real drive times and the listing for the house.

Something to try before you book

Take your shortlist of two or three villas and, for each one, find it on a map and check three distances: the drive from the nearest airport, the walk or drive to the nearest grocery shop, and the walk to the water if that matters to your group. Then, if you have a flight simulator or Google Earth, look at the approach road from the air. It takes about fifteen minutes per property, and it is the step most people skip because the photos already made up their mind. Our guide to choosing a villa by how far you drive has the time limits I use for different group types.