Spellsiphon changes the gameplay massively. Its what I found when I had the same question as you a few months back and it was exactly what I was looking for.
Friends and dragons. It’s a bit like easy chess with d&d style classes and species. It has transactions, but you can easily do well for free. I’ve been free playing for years (though I did throw them $10 around year 2 because of how much entertainment I got from it)
80 Days - it’s not free but I think it’s worth it. It’s a sort of steampunk version of Around the World in 80 Days where you have to plan your routes, and buy and sell things in different cities to make money. The main gameplay is sort of choose-your-own-adventure events that happen during travel and in different cities.
Card Thief - I just started playing this recently. It does technically have a microtransaction but it’s more like, they let you play for free if you don’t mind waiting for chests to unlock, or you can buy the game to bypass this. The main gameplay is sneaking through dungeons represented by a 3x3 grid of cards randomly drawn from the deck; collecting treasures and avoiding getting caught.
Got some stuff in my cart, but need to play some demos first before I hit the “buy” button. Surprisingly quite a few games I’m interested in have one available, which is nice.
In the meantime, I’ve started Case of the Golden Idol because I loved Return of the Obra Dinn and I know it’s highly recommended for fans of that.
Don’t know if I’m really feeling this as much, though. I’ll carry on, of course, because I still enjoy the detective puzzle aspect. But it isn’t drawing me in the way Obra Dinn did for some reason.
I've been working my way through the Baldur's Gate series after putting about ninety hours in BG3. BG1 was fun even if the story was a bit predictable and generic, although it did feel like playing through a DnD campaign. Really enjoyed Shadows of Amn, but Throne of Bhaal just turned into a slog at the end. I think the most interesting part of playing through the trilogy was watching Bioware's style develop over the course of the three games. As someone who was introduced to Bioware through Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire I've always thought Bioware's character writing stood out, especially in the old days, so it was a bit jarring to play through BG1 where the companions feel more like hirelings you pick up for their class rather than full-fledged characters. BG2 felt more like a classic Bioware game with banter, romance, and companion quests, although the Real Time advancement system kept glitching out on me. I was hoping to move on to Planescape: Torment after TOB, but I'm feeling burnt out on Infinity Engine games. So right now I'm trying to find something in the Summer Sale to serve as a palate cleanser.
Wildermyth is a lovely combination of storytelling and xcom-style combat, with a genealogy system and chances for your heroes (and their descendants) to reappear in future games.
The website 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.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne