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.
Pixel dungeon, but it’s not really low stress.
- Though im sure that one has ads. Probably depends on what you grab from the internet, as usual.
Mobile games suck.
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
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.
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!
I really like Usagi Shima. There is not much gameplay, but it’s a nice game to just relax for a few minutes. Also “Really Bad Chess” is a nice twist on chess. :D
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.
Word Cookies. I absolutely love it. You can pay for things, but it is absolutely not necessary and is basically only if you feel the need to use boosts that allow you to cheat your way past the level. I think it costs $2 to go ad-free.
It does give you regular popups asking if you want to buy coins, which I admit is annoying, but they are unnecessary to enjoy the game. There’s also endless opportunities to get coins and other boosts for free. I have something like 80,000 coins and dozens of boosts and other than the $2 to go ad-free, I’ve never given them any money.
You do have to have certain word skills to enjoy it as much as I do. If you’re the sort who can crush it at Boggle, it’s the game for you.
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
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
Solitaire, straight out of classic Windows (pre-advertising death throes):
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.potatojam.classic.solitaire.klondike
Hoplite, classic turn based dungeon/puzzle:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.magmafortress.hoplite
Assuming that you have Netflix, open it, scroll to games and open the section. There are tons of great games without any microtransactions or ads. They’re overwhelmingly commercial games licensed by Netflix.
Polytropia
I have clocked a lot of hours in Slice & Dice both on mobile and on PC well worth the 8 bucks even though I’ve paid it three times now I think. Honorable mention to Suika(Watermelon game) about 3 bucks on the Play store.
