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.
Not sure what sort of length on play you’re looking for but wingspan and terraforming Mars are both really good board games that have good-to-quite-good mobile versions.
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.
Cell to Singularity is a great little mobile game that does have microtransactions but are easy to ignore/avoid. I played through it several times and may need to dust it off for another playthrough. Great music too.
Monument Valley and Gorogoa are both excellent and free of nonsense.
Both are available on mobile and Steam. Gorogoa also on GOG currently 70% off.
Meant to link monument valley 2: https://www.monumentvalleygame.com/mv2
Pixel dungeon, but it’s not really low stress.
Wuthering Waves is Hella good. Technically it’s an open world gacha game, but I played through all the storyline (the developers will be forever updating the story a la Genshin Impact), and I never spent a dime on it.
Also, I have spent money on Cooking Diary. However, I went about 3 months of daily play before I did, and it was more about me being impatient/telling myself “You got 3 months of daily play, you can drop the devs $4.99”. I’ve played that game just about daily since Memorial Day 2023, and I’ve dropped $5.00 quarterly. There are regularly moments of infinite lives that exceed an hour or two, that it genuinely isn’t necessary. I spend the money more as a “thanks for not making this ducking game contingent on microtransactions, making it good, and maintaining/update it.”
- Though im sure that one has ads. Probably depends on what you grab from the internet, as usual.
Mobile games suck.
Heh, it’s a numbered list.
Any of the PAID games from Kairosoft. Dungeon Village, Grand Prix Story, Game Dev Story. He has since re-released all his games as f2p microtransaction junk, but the full price versions are generally really good.
slay the spire has a mobile port
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.
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.
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
Some good games I recommend are Alto’s Adventure / Odyssey, any bejeweled game, Cell to Singularity, Idle Slayer, Monument Valley, Reigns, Sky Force Reloaded, and Stick Fight Shadow Warrior. Hopefully that’s enough!
Reigns is so stressful, do not want! What are you trying to do, I’m spiraling just being reminded!
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.