Are there any good casual/low-stress mobile games that aren’t filled with microtransactions? For example: easy puzzle games, match-3 games, low-difficulty adventure games, or clicker-style games.
So far, the only good examples I’ve found are Monument Valley, Suika Game, and (sort of) Vampire Survivors.
I’m personally looking for games that have more progression or variety, but any suggestions are welcome.
Try searching on https://www.darkpattern.games It seems like a vast collection with reviews aimed at finding and naming healthy and unhealthy games
Thanks for this!
That is an excellent site. Thanks for sharing!
My recommendation l is going back to the basics: chess, especially lichess.org
You can choose a mode however you want, and it may or may not be stressful. Multiplayer with friends or random online people, choose a time between 30 seconds for a game and infinity to move.
If you don’t want to play right now, you can solve tactical exercises.
Mindustry is amazing, and free somehow
Definitely not casual or low stress, especially as you progress through the planet, but a great game nonetheless
Whoops, yeah I skimmed over that part
I liked egg inc for a while, if you’re looking for clicker type games.
Other than that I can recommend
- Stardew Valley
- Peglin
- Sudoku
- Nanograms
- Dungeon Village 1 & 2
Multiple of these are paid, but I’m 100% on board with paying a small amount for an app rather than paying a multiple of that for in-game Battlepasses and whatevers.
It annoys me a lot to say this, but Netflix has some excellent games in their roster. So if you have a Netflix subscription, check those out. I personally very much enjoyed
- Storyteller
- Into the Breach
But they also have ports of some very good PC games like Spiritfarer, Terra Nil or World of Goo.
Peglin is available for Mobile?? Adios
Any little casual simulators by Kairosoft, the pay to play “full versions” are pretty cheap. Manage a lil apartment building, manage a tiny sushi restaurant, manage a little Japanese village. 8 bit style, very soothing. The free versions are quite limited in scope and cut you off from further progression after a few levels, but no microtransaction reminders, either. The mention of “Dungeon Village” reminded me, is that Kairosoft?
It is indeed
slay the spire has a mobile port
Mini metro Mini motorways
I may or may not have opted to ignore the stress part.
YES I really need the sixth circle station in Manhattan thank you
One time purchase:
- Peglin ✨
- Luck be a landlord ✨
- Forager
- Dicey dungeons
- Dead Cells (optional DLC)
- Bloons Tower Defense 6 (out of the way IAP) ✨
- Terraria
- 20 minutes till dawn (has a non premium option with some micro transactions)
Free:
- Antimatter dimensions (long idle-ish game) ✨
- Legends of Runeterra (just play the story modes) ✨
- Team fight tactics (cosmetics only)
- Plague inc (and probably rebel inc, but I haven’t played that yet) ✨
- Super Auto Pets (cosmetics and extra optional sets) ✨
Star on the ones I’d specifically recommend for casual play
You need to make a bulleted list because your lists came out as jumbled paragraphs. At a minimum you need to put two spaces at the end of each line to preserve line breaks.
I’ll fix it since you put in all the effort to write that up.
One time purchase:
- Peglin ✨
- Luck be a landlord ✨
- Forager
- Dicey dungeons
- Dead Cells (optional DLC)
- Bloons Tower Defense 6 (out of the way IAP) ✨
- Terraria
- 20 minutes till dawn (has a non premium option with some micro transactions)
Free:
- Antimatter dimensions (long idle-ish game) ✨
- Legends of Runeterra (just play the story modes) ✨
- Team fight tactics (cosmetics only)
- Plague inc (and probably rebel inc, but I haven’t played that yet) ✨
- Super Auto Pets (cosmetics and extra optional sets) ✨
Star on the ones I’d specifically recommend for casual play
^^ A real Bro!
Bro, kind and generous.
Had no idea, thanks
I reached Challenger on Teamfight Tactics in a couple seasons and I’ve gotta say it honestly gets a bit tiresome how often they change the game. Mortdog and Co do a great job on balance but you just can’t swap from set to set that often and expect things not to break. Plus they like to nerf the things I like the most, and that’s inexcusable.
I also didn’t really care for it as mobile game because you can’t hop in and out, you start a match you need to finish the match and they’re not short. Even the “quick” mode is like fifteen minutes long.
In other words? Great desktop game for people that don’t mind the meta changing entirely every six months. Great “mobile” game if you want to kill no less than thirty minutes.
I didn’t star it for a reason lmao, it’s a good game but not great casually
I had nearly given up looking for good mobile games when I remembered that emulators exist. Nintendo DS games map pretty well to a smart phone, there are some games that use entirely touch controls. I’m using the MelonDS emulator and I’ve mostly been playing advanced wars: days of ruin and puzzle quest 2. Puzzle quest is pretty excellent and chill by the way.
On android, lemuroid is pretty good for this sort of thing and you can change the arrangement of your nds/3ds screens.
If you like the older Pokemon games and can get the ROMs on your phone, PokeMMO is really cool. It’s an emulator that turns the first 5 generations of games into an MMO where you can take the same character across each region.
There’s a handful of changes to the base game, but most are small: Berry farming is changed, there’s an Exp Share for EVs now, Sweet Scent is used to summon a 1v5 against wild Pokemon… There’s character customization… There’s some QoL stuff like shiny encounters having a sound effect and adding a confirmation box so you don’t accidentally flee, and the stats page for your Pokemon is way more detailed.
You can check out whatever is available on F-Droid. I personally enjoy playing Freebloks once in a while, it’s a mobile version of the Blokus boardgame
An alternative is checking out itch.io, searching with the proper tags, like puzzle, might yield decent results for your tastes.
You can also get Cookie Clicker or play the web version
To add to that try puzzles, lots of nice games in there. I particularly like flow
Was gonna suggest the same thing! I like Net.
Old school RuneScape, it has free “demo” version which you can easily put a 100+ hours in. And if you really love there is a subscription model that’s kinda expensive if you bill monthly, but no other micro transactions.
There are a lot of great suggestions here already, so I will just share Mini Review with you as a discovery tool. I like to use them because they have a lot of filters to help you find a mobile game. For example, here’s their list for free, single-player, offline games with no ads or in app purchases, sorted by highest user score. They also have an app for both Android and iOS with the same info and filtering as the site.
Oh this is great. Thanks.
@PlzGivHugs Unciv, neat open-source turn-based 4X, obliviously inspired by the Civilization series
Solitaire, straight out of classic Windows (pre-advertising death throes):
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.potatojam.classic.solitaire.klondike
Hoplite, classic turn based dungeon/puzzle:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.magmafortress.hoplite
Blooms TD 6 - fun tower defense game with solid progression and everything can be earned by playing what I think is a reasonable amount.
BTD5 too. This is a very good recommendation.
