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
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.
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.
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
Haha
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.
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.
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
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
Mindustry is amazing, and free somehow
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.
Try searching on https://www.darkpattern.games It seems like a vast collection with reviews aimed at finding and naming healthy and unhealthy games
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
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.
Stardew Valley has been out on Android for a while now.
slay the spire has a mobile port
The original Peggle. There’s a free APK available on speedrun.com. Works flawlessly even on modern Android.
I got free of this addiction years ago.
I hate you.
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.
In my experience the relatively small selection of the F-droid store is full of these type of games.
Troll patrol
Sudoku
Unciv
Shattered Pixel Dungeon
Pirate Solitare
…just to name a few All full versions, no ads or premuim options. Love F-droid, its a shame the selection is quite small.
