Initial scrolling of the Steam Summer Sale seems pretty lackluster, but digging through the comments sections in other threads, a few gems have stood out, and it doesn’t appear we have a thread dedicated to this yet, so post what you think are the best deals here!...
It’s a turn-based traditional roguelike + dungeon crawler, i.e. there are no in-game permanent upgrades to make the characters stronger, and only you the player get “stronger” as you become more knowledgeable. If you are into that kind of game, this is absolutely one of the best I’ve played!
The developer Evan has been continuously updating the game for the past decade, with a new, sixth playable hero scheduled to release later this year. The game is also free and open source, so you can even play the full game for free. I bought the Steam version (and has sunk 100+ hrs into it) because it’s so rare for me nowadays to find a game I don’t get tired of after a handful of hours. (Not saying short games are necessarily bad though, some of my faves are very short too.)
I know older titles are usually the topic in this community but a lot of the popular f2p games are getting pretty old now too, and if you’re like me you’ve been curious about some of them and even pleasantly surprised now and again....
If you mean free-to-play in the sense of a commercial game that one can play without payment, but where it is supported by data-mining or in-app-purchases or ads, I can only off-the-cuff recall playing a few games in that category:
World of Warships. I played one round against humans.
Defense of the Ancients 2. I played one round against human players and some time against the computer.
Fallout Shelter. I didn’t like it much, though I do like the mainline Fallout series.
I remember some gamebook game on Android that showed ads at the bottom.
I’m not playing any of those currently. Broadly-speaking, I don’t like the model. I’d rather just pay up front.
If you’re talking about free-to-play-with-the-aim-of-selling-you-on-a-larger-game, I’ve played plenty of those – in the 1990s, shareware and demos were a common way to promote a game. But they’ve kind of fallen out of favor in terms of DLC. I don’t think I’ve played any of those for a while.
If you’re talking about entirely free games, then I’ve played plenty of those. I think the two that I’m currently playing off-and-on, both open-source, would be:
Shattered Pixel Dungeon, an Android roguelike. !pixeldungeon
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, a (mostly PC; there’s an Android build and you can play it on a touchscreen, but it’s really better-suited to a keyboard) open-world roguelike. There’s a not-very-active Threadiverse community at !cataclysmdda; the subreddit is much more active.
I love the original patientgamers subreddit so I was stoked to find this community. And because lemmy seems to have a more knowledgeable crowd any topic I posted here had great engagement and discussions, despite the small community. I am too busy to be a mod but maybe I can help by sparking this discussion: what would be needed...
I was really disappointed by mobile games on Android when I jumped on that, though some of it is just that the things that I’d call at least halfway decent are also released on other platforms.
I would recommend looking at Shattered Pixel Dungeon, which a roguelike aimed at a touch interface that’s open-source, free, and on F-Droid. I’d call it the best open-source Android game that I’ve played.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon is a roguelike, well suited to the touch interface and small screen. Offline. Constantly expanded. Free, open source, and on F-Droid.
Developer also appears to have a presence on the Threadiverse, think he came over when Reddit went to hell. Lemme find the community.
Unciv is a reimplementation of Civilization V for Android. Obviously, less-elaborate graphics, but same gameplay. Free, open-source, available on F-Droid.
Catacalysm: Dark Days Ahead is an open-world roguelike. The good news is that it is deep, has ridiculous amounts of functionality. Very free-form – you can build camps with NPCs, mutate your character, acquire bionic implants, construct buildings and vehicles, etc. Some extensive mods to do things like add fantasy content. The bad news is that it also has a very steep learning curve – think Dwarf Fortress, say. The UI was also designed for a PC, and while the Android port dev did a reasonable job of adapting it for a touchscreen, it’s still awkward compared to a keyboard – not like Shattered Pixel Dungeon. If you’re willing to carry a keyboard – you say that you’re okay with a controller, so I assume that you’re okay lugging some kind of gear bag – then it becomes a very good option. There are some folding keyboards aimed at phone use that can be pretty small, certainly smaller than a game controller, if you don’t want a more-traditional keyboard. CPU-intensive, though – in heavily-monster-infested areas, it can load down a PC, and it’s probably less-gentle on less-powerful Android devices. Offline. Free, open-source, but nobody has packaged it for F-Droid.
Download links for both the stable and experimental builds here:
There’s an essentially-inactive community on the Threadiverse at !cataclysmdda
There is a whole genre of older text-based interactive fiction games that are free and offline for simple virtual machines; the major ones here are glulx, TADS, and Inform/z5. Android has such virtual machine ports; it looks like https://f-droid.org/packages/io.davidar.fabularium/ in F-Droid can run them. These involve a lot of typing, as they were designed for the PC, and IMHO are not well-suited to a virtual keyboard, but if you’re willing to take a physical keyboard, they can be pretty good. You’ll need to learn the (English-like) syntax that the game engines understand. I personally enjoyed https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=z5xgyw0jbt9r3ah1 and https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=op0uw1gn1tjqmjt7. Two sites that have large collections of free games made by volunteers for download:
I’ll be honest, though – when I first got an Android device, I was pretty disappointed with the game situation. This is greatly-exacerbated by the fact that I’m not willing to get a Google account and let Google more-readily monitor me, which rules out most commercial games…but I wasn’t blown away by even commercial game availability in the Google Play Store, and the open-source situation is kind of sparse compared to Linux, what I’m normally on. Linux is IMHO generally a preferable gaming platform, unless one specifically wants to do touch-based games (which can be important).
I was also kind of disappointed by the lack of choose-your-own-adventure/gamebook-style games on Android. These would avoid the typing in interactive fiction by just having a few choices to select from, which I thought would be a good fit for a touchscreen. There’s the large collection of text-based mostly-commercial games at Choice of Games – you can get their client on itch.io; Android has an itch.io package manager on F-Droid in the form of Mitch that can download it. Heh, though that’s downloading a package manager with a package manager to get a package manager. If I had to recommend a few, I’d try Tin Star, maybe Choice of Robots, and the Heroes trilogy; those are commercial, though they have a few free games, and IIRC their client keeps a few normally-commercial games for temporary free play.
While I like the Choice of Games writing, I find that a lot of the gameplay in the games fall flat, more-or-less trying to optimize for playing one character “type” or another; I feel like they’re written by novel authors and could benefit a lot from more game elements, and that new authors kind of copied the existing style.
There’s a once-commercial series of gamebooks, Lone Wolf, which I can’t really call a fantastic example of a gamebook and doesn’t have the most-amazing artwork, but which was a real 1980s/1990s series whose author said “go ahead and freely distribute them”, so various open-source and commercial projects have gone and done up clients to play the books, do stuff like the dice-rolling and hit-point tracking and so forth. I haven’t used Android clients, but they exist. One such project.
I still don’t have an open-source solitaire implementation that I’m blown away by, which seems like another surprising limitation. My guess is that you can probably find something non-open-source – though probably spyware – on the Google Play Store. PySolFC is on F-Droid. It…works, and it gets me my Eight Off fix (a particular solitaire game that I like but isn’t as widely-played as Klondike or Freecell) but it was really designed for desktop computer, and the Android adaptation could be better, IMHO. Small cards and such.
There’s a choose-your-own-adventure engine called Twine; games written in various languages – the most sophisticated such language is SugarCube – can be converted to Web-based games. That seems like it’d be ideal for Android, and the games are playable on Android, but authors don’t always create games that work well on the small screens of many Android devices. I don’t know of a single Twine-oriented game archive in the sense that the Interactive Fiction archive and the Interactive Fiction Database serve for interactive fiction games. However, many people who have made Twine games seem to distribute them in packaged form on itch.io. There doesn’t seem to be much of an open-source culture around these, unfortunately, so I don’t see people doing a lot by creating patches and such. I rarely play these on Android, mostly use the PC. Here’s a list of Twine games on itch.io packaged for Android:
There’s also a pretty extensive number of adult games for this platform, if that’s your cup of tea.
There are emulators for various old game systems for Android. I’ve used Retroarch on Linux, and it looks like they also have an Android build on F-Droid. I’ve never spent time using these on Android, because I just always would prefer to play on a desktop platform, but I’d imagine that if what you have is an Android device and using that is a constraint, they’re probably fine. That might be the more action-oriented sort of game you’re looking for, given that you’re talking about a controller. Not much by way of legitimately-free stuff there, though obviously piracy of old console games is widespread, and some people – such as myself – will sometimes just buy the game on another platform and conscience assuaged, go pirate it on the platform that we want to play it on. I think my favorite emulated games were probably the most-popular 2D ones on the Super Nintendo, stuff like Super Metroid or and Legend of Zelda 3. Oh, and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night for the PS1. I imagine that a current Android device would have no trouble with any of those, if you’ve a controller.
Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup is a traditional roguelike that has a build for Android on F-Droid. This, again, is designed for a PC and is gonna be better-played with a keyboard. It’s not beautiful, nor as well-suited to the Android platform as the designed-for-the-platform Shattered Pixel Dungeon. But it has a game that is famous for being refined, with the developer constantly going back and cutting out cruft and grind/busywork, resulting in a very polished game from a gameplay sense. The author, Linley Henzel, has some famous quote about how any action that the player has to make in a game should be an interesting decision, and if it isn’t, it should be removed from the game.
It’s a bit of a long shot, but you might enjoy traditional roguelikes. At least, I kind of felt similar and then found them to be what I was looking for. How they fare for your individual points, roughly sorted from pro to not-necessarily-pro:
I don’t like the feeling of being OP, I want to struggle through the end
I hate grinding
Traditional roguelikes have brutal difficulty and grinding is effectively not a thing you can do.
using items feels like cheating, so I tend to just use character abilities (I will heal if needed); I’d rather “git gud” than buy and use items
I don’t like loot
The brutal difficulty forces you to use items. It won’t feel like cheating, but rather the only way to progress.
And there’s no way to sell loot, so basically whatever you find, either it’s new equipment or you just leave it there.
This also means money is extremely tight. You won’t be able to buy a hundred cheese wheels to counter-heal through encounters.
turn based combat (tactics) is generally boring, but I do like puzzles, so that can make it acceptable
Very much turn-based, although not JRPG-style (which I dislike, too) and the games do generally feel like large, somewhat less strict puzzles.
I don’t care about leveling up/character builds, it feels like a chore; abilities also don’t interest me
Well, this one’s a bit tricky. Traditional roguelikes are kind of all about that, moreso than RPGs. Because a death (or a win) resets your game progress, they can rapid-fire progress at you.
On the plus side, this is all part of the larger puzzle. It is not just a chore, but rather key to beating the difficulty.
I guess, I should also point out that by “traditional roguelikes”, I mean games that are actually like the 1980 game Rogue. So, don’t expect hyperrealistic 3D graphics. 🙃
Here’s two games that are relatively popular + beginner-friendly:
Emulators sound like a good idea but I imagine it’d be probably battery draining too. I went for Shattered Pixel Dungeon (it even has a community here: !pixeldungeon) 😁
What is the best low MB mobile game that you ever played ?
Steam Summer Sale - Top Deals
Initial scrolling of the Steam Summer Sale seems pretty lackluster, but digging through the comments sections in other threads, a few gems have stood out, and it doesn’t appear we have a thread dedicated to this yet, so post what you think are the best deals here!...
What free2play game are you currently hooked on?
I know older titles are usually the topic in this community but a lot of the popular f2p games are getting pretty old now too, and if you’re like me you’ve been curious about some of them and even pleasantly surprised now and again....
How to revitalize this sub?
I love the original patientgamers subreddit so I was stoked to find this community. And because lemmy seems to have a more knowledgeable crowd any topic I posted here had great engagement and discussions, despite the small community. I am too busy to be a mod but maybe I can help by sparking this discussion: what would be needed...
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A list of casual communities on Lemmy (that aren't just tech news or politics)
Searching Lemmyverse is good for finding communities. !trendingcommunities is also a nice tool for finding new places....