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Are there any good casual/low-stress mobile games that aren't filled with microtransactions?

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.

CheeseBread ,

This isn’t exactly what you asked, but I highly recommend emulation. I have had ePSXe downloaded on every phone I’ve had for the past ten years to play PS1 games. There are so many good titles, all of them free, playable offline. You might like Intelligent Qube Mr. Driller Devil Dice for puzzles. I love playing final fantasy, legend of dragoon, suikoden, Spyro, crash bandicoot. I don’t care about graphics, but I am a sucker for playing through a story.

whotookkarl ,
@whotookkarl@lemmy.world avatar

ScummVM is my emulator of choice, like ePSXe it runs on phones and opens it up to a bunch of classics

DudeDudenson ,

Gba games on my phone were the shit in my late teens

BigBananaDealer ,
@BigBananaDealer@lemm.ee avatar

royal match has no ads at all, its pretty fun just gotta ignore the microtransactions which is pretty easy to do at least compared to other games

Cringe2793 ,

I tried playing this but I just suck at it. At higher levels I just get stuck at the same stage for a super long time.

Tarquinn2049 , (edited )

Grim Quest and Grim Tides. Two games by the same person. I haven’t played Grim tides yet, but it’s also free. Grim Quest is not a particularly large game, but I’ve still managed to play it over many years. I did a full run of each difficulty one by one. There is a bit to learn before it feels easy and casual, but it does get there. To be fair, I try to play it without dying. If I let myself die, it would be alot more casual even from the start. Dying is not heavily penalized on default settings, but you can alternately choose to play hardcore. Otherwise dying usually just means you gained less money for that run, and didn’t make the game any harder. The game only gets harder when you successfully clear a dungeon. You can also just exit the unfinished dungeon without dying and keep most of what you have acquired so far on that run, minus a small fee for quitting the dungeon.

There are preset difficulty options, but you can also craft your own custom difficulty. There are things you could spend money on, I think it may have started out with ads. But I consider games with ads that you can pay to get rid of as basically a free demo, and getting rid of ads is the purchase price if you like the game. So they don’t deter me if they don’t basically break the game to add ads to it, or affect the flow of the game whether the ads are there or not.

Protoknuckles ,

It doesn’t quite fit, but there are a lot of boardgame phone adaptions, and they rarely have microtransactions. Cat lady, carcassonne, ghanz schoan clever, doppelt so clever, hex roller, rail road ink and roll player are some of my favorites

Tarquinn2049 ,

Exiled Kingdoms, its an older isometric 2D adventure RPG. Kinda feels like it would have been made 30 years ago for pc, but it was made relatively recently for phones. I don’t think there was any micro transactions. It may have had an initial purchase price, not sure. That’s usually what I look for in a phone game. The traditional model of buying a game and then just playing a game. No gross mobile game stuff.

Tarquinn2049 , (edited )

Andor’s Trail, it’s barely recogniseable as a “phone” game, other than that it does indeed run on phones. I don’t remember if it had ads or anything, been taking it from phone to phone for over 10 years now. I don’t think it had ads or anything. It’s open source, but has a pretty consistent feel despite having like 50+ contributors so far.

It’s an adventure RPG. The low level experience might be best with a bit of grinding, but… casual grinding… lol. I kind of just wander around collecting “meat” until I feel strong enough to leave the areas near town and set out on the rest of the adventure. But there has been alot more work around town since the last time I started a new character. So it might feel more natural now.

surewhynotlem ,

Friends and dragons. It’s a bit like easy chess with d&d style classes and species. It has transactions, but you can easily do well for free. I’ve been free playing for years (though I did throw them $10 around year 2 because of how much entertainment I got from it)

pruwybn , (edited )
@pruwybn@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

A couple that I like:

  • 80 Days - it’s not free but I think it’s worth it. It’s a sort of steampunk version of Around the World in 80 Days where you have to plan your routes, and buy and sell things in different cities to make money. The main gameplay is sort of choose-your-own-adventure events that happen during travel and in different cities.
  • Card Thief - I just started playing this recently. It does technically have a microtransaction but it’s more like, they let you play for free if you don’t mind waiting for chests to unlock, or you can buy the game to bypass this. The main gameplay is sneaking through dungeons represented by a 3x3 grid of cards randomly drawn from the deck; collecting treasures and avoiding getting caught.
MysticKetchup ,

Card Crawl/Card Thief/Miracle Merchant are good puzzle-like games

AllNewTypeFace ,
@AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space avatar

Cosmic Combo, an iOS port of Johan Peitz’ PICO-8 game Cosmic Collapse, is good.

mossy_ ,

Neko Atsume: Kitty Collector. You put down furniture. Cats sleep on the furniture. You get gold to buy more funiture, and the cycle repeats.

AllNewTypeFace ,
@AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space avatar

Isn’t that lousy with video ads now?

mossy_ ,

Admittedly I haven’t played it in, like, five years but when I did it only had banner ads in the pause menu

aramis87 ,

I'm seconding Simon Tatham's puzzle collection, Nonograms Katana, and Stardew Valley, all of which are in regular rotation and fill different niches in my soul.

milicent_bystandr ,

Came here to say Simon Tatham’s puzzles.

I also like, from f-droid, Tower Jumper, and from Play, hillclimb racing.

  • seen much praise of mindustry here on Lemmy, but not got into it myself
  • rabbit escape is like lemmings/pingus
  • I like go, but play casual. CrazyStone on Play works well for me. It’s doing something with the internet on startup, probably benign model updates, but I block its internet access.
  • I also remember Doom and Destiny being very fun and fairly casual. The free version is not too bad on ads. The second one I never got far in - felt like it was constant ads interrupting gameplay
emb , (edited )

The website nobsgames.stavros.io helps surface these, and let’s you filter out based on different things.

One that I like in particular is Gauguin. It’s a Sudoku-like with different math-y rules.

Anuto TD is a tower defense game that is also really good, but not so low stress.

Lichess, if you’re into Chess. It’s a great, no compromise, high quality app. Stressful if you get too worked up about competitive, but puzzles are at least relaxing.

silverchase ,
@silverchase@sh.itjust.works avatar

Games I know of on Android:

  • Ganz Schön Clever — Digital adaptation of a board game. It’s like bingo except you roll dice and there’s actual skill involved.
  • Knotwords — Crosswords but instead of word clues, each region of the board indicates what letters appear there.
  • Threes — 2048 was a ripoff of 1024, and 1024 was a ripoff of Threes. Threes is the OG.
  • Sagrada — Digital adaptation of a board game. Build a stained glass window by rolling dice and placing them on your board in the right pattern.
  • Simon Tatham’s Puzzles — Big compilation of various puzzle types.
  • Handshakes (by Pet Pumpkin) — “Solo co-op” sokoban puzzle where you try to get two guys to shake hands.
  • inbento — Assemble lunch boxes by sliding tiles around to match the reference picture.
xavier666 ,

Alto’s Adventure and Alto’s Odyssey are excellent

MajorHavoc ,

Mini Motor Racing might be a good match. It has some DLC available (additional cars), but none of it is necessary to enjoy the game.

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