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.
Slay the Spire has a decent mobile version. Not sure about the casual part, but at least it’s turn based
It can be played pretty casually. A run usually takes around an hour but you don’t have to play it in one go. And on the base difficulty it’s pretty approachable. You definitely don’t have to play 500 hours to enjoy it. But you can if you want to :)
Slay The Spire is an excellent recommendation. Although a lot of people find roguelites stressful because they get stressed about losing progress. You just have to play with the right mindset:
Stardew Valley and Terraria may both fit your list, although Terraria stresses me out a bit.
Stardew Valley is a good one, but I definately wouldn’t consider Terraria casual or low-stress.
Stardew Valley can be stress inducing if you are that type of player.
- “Let me do a bit of fishing on the beach OH FCK it’s already 1 AM. Intense cardio session towards my house before JoJo employees steal 1000G.”
- “I need to give Demetrius a gift by the end of the day. WHERE TF ARE YOU ROAMING ABOUT? Come take your gift!”
- “Let me visit the shop for some seeds. WHO THE HELL CLOSES SHOP on a Wednesday? Am I the only one working in this town?”
- “Marnie TF you closing shop at 3 PM! My chickens need hay and you are frolicking in the bar”
Lol this is me before mods
Simply do not consent to JoJo
Haha
Not to mention using touch controls for it is brutal. At least, for me it is. Might be decent if using a controller with your phone.
I’ve tried it even with the razor kishi. No dice. This game was born for mouse and keyboard.
Terarria can be played as casual or low stress. You choose when to advance the difficulty, and how elaborately you contruct your preparations for the next step. But for a largely stress-free casual playstyle, focus on being a summoner. Also, there isn’t much penalty for dying. So if you can wrap your mind around not being bothered by dying, then any playstyle can feel casual really. It’s certainly a tough mindset to achieve for some of us though, lol.
I agree. I only mentioned it because it was recommended to me as low stress, so I thought it was just me that didn’t get it lol
Note with Stardew Valley: it is not unplayable without a controller, but if you have clumsy sausage fingers like me, the poor touch controls really took me out of the game.
Stardew valley stressed me out so much I stopped playing before even reaching that first year party. It looks like a casual fun game, but there are so many characters to make friends (even if it’s optional, it’s stressful because of the implication/expectation). And you need to tend to your garden, and even if you don’t do anything, midnight rolls around and you feel like you didn’t do anything useful and it’s overall very stressful to me. May be it gets easier once you get sprinklers and whatnot, but early game was anything but casual and fun for me.
I completely understand. It was very overwhelming for me at first and sometimes can still be overwhelming depending on how my computer is working lol
If you ever decide you want to try it again I highly recommend modding it (and I would be happy to send you what I use). That said it’s not a bad thing to play other games if you like them better :) games should be fun not stressful imo
Edit: removed the extra “my”
Sure, please let me know what mods you use
I like “Traveler’s Rest” because the game doesn’t force you to keep regular hours at your tavern. If you want, you can spend the whole day crafting and restocking until you’re ready to deal with customers again.
Thanks for the game idea!!
Does terraria have a chill mode?
Not sure if you saw this comment above. Looks like there are ways to change the difficulty. I’m not sure that would help me though. The monsters move fast for me.
Oh I knew that at least. I usually turn that all the way up and play on PC. I was thinking more along the lines of Minecraft passive mode or whatever they call it these days. I suppose it wouldn’t make sense in the context of terraria though. Terraria is about the fights.
That’s true. Maybe I should try it on PC. I know a lot of people really like it so I would like to give it a fair shot.
Pixel Dungeon: Roguelike, infinitely replayable. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.watabou.pixeldungeon
Auralux: A simple real time strategy game. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wardrumstudios.auralux
2048: Simple to learn, difficult to master puzzle. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.androbros.puzzle2048eng
Or the well-maintained and developed derivative:
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.shatteredpixel.shatteredpixeldungeon/
The first link says not found :( maybe not available in Canada? Seems this one is a good replacement, will try it out? https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.shatteredpixel.shatteredpixeldungeon
Other ones say it was made for an old version of Android or incompatible, and can’t be downloaded (I have a pixel 5 with android 14)
Short answer: yes.
Shattered Pixel dungeon is based on pixel dungeon, adds a bunch of new stuff and is reasonably actively developed.
Install from computer:
adb install --bypass-low-target-sdk-block FILENAME.apkhttps://liliputing.com/how-to-install-old-apps-on-android-14/
I’ll second Pixel Dungeon. It’s the only one I’ve played, but it perfectly fits OP’s reqs.
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 use Privacy Friendly versions of Sudoku and Minesweeper on the F-Droid store. I also really enjoy Nonograms (aka Picross), and haven’t found a good foss app for it, but the app “nonograms.com” has been a good experience for me. I paid like $5 for the ad free version and that’s been it, nothing else.
I’m using Simon Tatham’s Puzzles for nonograms.
It’s basically this webpage in app form: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/js/pattern.html
It doesn’t result in a pixel art picture when you solve it, if you care for that, but the solutions do have contiguous regions.
This works for me! Thanks a bunch!
I also enjoy “1010! Klooni” on F-Droid.
Will check it out. Thanks for the suggestion!
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.
Alto’s Adventure and Alto’s Odyssey are excellent
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
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 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.
@PlzGivHugs Unciv, neat open-source turn-based 4X, obliviously inspired by the Civilization series
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
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.
The website https://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.
