I have no idea how I’m not bored yet. They’re all just so damn satisfying to play. I went from mostly online FPS to these games after I got Prepare to Die Edition back in the day. Any given time I play a game now, there’s an 80% chance it’s one of these or something similar to them (like The Surge, Mortal Shell, Lies of P, etc).
What’s not to like? Super cool main character with telekinetic and space gun abilities. Explosions like crazy. Regular upgrades. Not too complicated. Lots of exploring. Plenty of storyline, but not too much. Intriguing characters. “Open world”, but with a mostly clear sense of direction.
Probably one of my fave games of all time. Even though I hated Alan Wake.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon is a roguelike, well suited to the touch interface and small screen. Offline. Constantly expanded. Free, open source, and on F-Droid.
Developer also appears to have a presence on the Threadiverse, think he came over when Reddit went to hell. Lemme find the community.
Unciv is a reimplementation of Civilization V for Android. Obviously, less-elaborate graphics, but same gameplay. Free, open-source, available on F-Droid.
Catacalysm: Dark Days Ahead is an open-world roguelike. The good news is that it is deep, has ridiculous amounts of functionality. Very free-form – you can build camps with NPCs, mutate your character, acquire bionic implants, construct buildings and vehicles, etc. Some extensive mods to do things like add fantasy content. The bad news is that it also has a very steep learning curve – think Dwarf Fortress, say. The UI was also designed for a PC, and while the Android port dev did a reasonable job of adapting it for a touchscreen, it’s still awkward compared to a keyboard – not like Shattered Pixel Dungeon. If you’re willing to carry a keyboard – you say that you’re okay with a controller, so I assume that you’re okay lugging some kind of gear bag – then it becomes a very good option. There are some folding keyboards aimed at phone use that can be pretty small, certainly smaller than a game controller, if you don’t want a more-traditional keyboard. CPU-intensive, though – in heavily-monster-infested areas, it can load down a PC, and it’s probably less-gentle on less-powerful Android devices. Offline. Free, open-source, but nobody has packaged it for F-Droid.
Download links for both the stable and experimental builds here:
There’s an essentially-inactive community on the Threadiverse at !cataclysmdda
There is a whole genre of older text-based interactive fiction games that are free and offline for simple virtual machines; the major ones here are glulx, TADS, and Inform/z5. Android has such virtual machine ports; it looks like https://f-droid.org/packages/io.davidar.fabularium/ in F-Droid can run them. These involve a lot of typing, as they were designed for the PC, and IMHO are not well-suited to a virtual keyboard, but if you’re willing to take a physical keyboard, they can be pretty good. You’ll need to learn the (English-like) syntax that the game engines understand. I personally enjoyed https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=z5xgyw0jbt9r3ah1 and https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=op0uw1gn1tjqmjt7. Two sites that have large collections of free games made by volunteers for download:
I’ll be honest, though – when I first got an Android device, I was pretty disappointed with the game situation. This is greatly-exacerbated by the fact that I’m not willing to get a Google account and let Google more-readily monitor me, which rules out most commercial games…but I wasn’t blown away by even commercial game availability in the Google Play Store, and the open-source situation is kind of sparse compared to Linux, what I’m normally on. Linux is IMHO generally a preferable gaming platform, unless one specifically wants to do touch-based games (which can be important).
I was also kind of disappointed by the lack of choose-your-own-adventure/gamebook-style games on Android. These would avoid the typing in interactive fiction by just having a few choices to select from, which I thought would be a good fit for a touchscreen. There’s the large collection of text-based mostly-commercial games at Choice of Games – you can get their client on itch.io; Android has an itch.io package manager on F-Droid in the form of Mitch that can download it. Heh, though that’s downloading a package manager with a package manager to get a package manager. If I had to recommend a few, I’d try Tin Star, maybe Choice of Robots, and the Heroes trilogy; those are commercial, though they have a few free games, and IIRC their client keeps a few normally-commercial games for temporary free play.
While I like the Choice of Games writing, I find that a lot of the gameplay in the games fall flat, more-or-less trying to optimize for playing one character “type” or another; I feel like they’re written by novel authors and could benefit a lot from more game elements, and that new authors kind of copied the existing style.
There’s a once-commercial series of gamebooks, Lone Wolf, which I can’t really call a fantastic example of a gamebook and doesn’t have the most-amazing artwork, but which was a real 1980s/1990s series whose author said “go ahead and freely distribute them”, so various open-source and commercial projects have gone and done up clients to play the books, do stuff like the dice-rolling and hit-point tracking and so forth. I haven’t used Android clients, but they exist. One such project.
I still don’t have an open-source solitaire implementation that I’m blown away by, which seems like another surprising limitation. My guess is that you can probably find something non-open-source – though probably spyware – on the Google Play Store. PySolFC is on F-Droid. It…works, and it gets me my Eight Off fix (a particular solitaire game that I like but isn’t as widely-played as Klondike or Freecell) but it was really designed for desktop computer, and the Android adaptation could be better, IMHO. Small cards and such.
There’s a choose-your-own-adventure engine called Twine; games written in various languages – the most sophisticated such language is SugarCube – can be converted to Web-based games. That seems like it’d be ideal for Android, and the games are playable on Android, but authors don’t always create games that work well on the small screens of many Android devices. I don’t know of a single Twine-oriented game archive in the sense that the Interactive Fiction archive and the Interactive Fiction Database serve for interactive fiction games. However, many people who have made Twine games seem to distribute them in packaged form on itch.io. There doesn’t seem to be much of an open-source culture around these, unfortunately, so I don’t see people doing a lot by creating patches and such. I rarely play these on Android, mostly use the PC. Here’s a list of Twine games on itch.io packaged for Android:
There’s also a pretty extensive number of adult games for this platform, if that’s your cup of tea.
There are emulators for various old game systems for Android. I’ve used Retroarch on Linux, and it looks like they also have an Android build on F-Droid. I’ve never spent time using these on Android, because I just always would prefer to play on a desktop platform, but I’d imagine that if what you have is an Android device and using that is a constraint, they’re probably fine. That might be the more action-oriented sort of game you’re looking for, given that you’re talking about a controller. Not much by way of legitimately-free stuff there, though obviously piracy of old console games is widespread, and some people – such as myself – will sometimes just buy the game on another platform and conscience assuaged, go pirate it on the platform that we want to play it on. I think my favorite emulated games were probably the most-popular 2D ones on the Super Nintendo, stuff like Super Metroid or and Legend of Zelda 3. Oh, and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night for the PS1. I imagine that a current Android device would have no trouble with any of those, if you’ve a controller.
Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup is a traditional roguelike that has a build for Android on F-Droid. This, again, is designed for a PC and is gonna be better-played with a keyboard. It’s not beautiful, nor as well-suited to the Android platform as the designed-for-the-platform Shattered Pixel Dungeon. But it has a game that is famous for being refined, with the developer constantly going back and cutting out cruft and grind/busywork, resulting in a very polished game from a gameplay sense. The author, Linley Henzel, has some famous quote about how any action that the player has to make in a game should be an interesting decision, and if it isn’t, it should be removed from the game.
If you really want a timesink and have a keyboard and you don’t mind online play except insofar as you don’t want some commercial company trying to data-mine your activity, there are a bunch of MUDs out there; these are run by volunteers who wanted to create and run their own worlds, and they’re always looking for more players. These are text-based, usually-but-not-always fantasy games. It looks like there are Android clients. I can’t specifically recommend any of the clients, as I haven’t tried them. Many combat-oriented MUDs allow one to configure a character to essentially fight on its own, so if your concern is being constrained to needing to be glued to a screen in a multi-user world, it does provide some ability to get up and leave.
I’m going to place the big caveat there that I haven’t played these in ages, and I don’t know if the gameplay has advanced much over the years – they tend to be grindy. But they are free, and there’s a lot of stuff out there, if you’re looking to spend time exploring. MUD clients tend to have features to help alleviate latency, like having a local buffer for editing the current line one is typing, but I don’t know how annoying a cell link with poor reception might be. They don’t send all that much data, but it is a real-time world, not turn-based. And they aren’t gonna impose ads on you, or have software that runs on your system, or data-mine you, or try to figure out how to sell you anything; they’re games where the people who make them just like playing them enough to set them up for their own enjoyment.
Battle for Wesnoth is a good turn-based hex wargame with a number of campaigns…think, oh, the kinds of games in the “Tactics” genre, if you’re familiar with those. However…it was designed for the PC. It’s definitely playable on Android, but the UI clearly wasn’t designed for Android; it benefits from some kind of pointing device. If you’re willing to haul a pointing device of some sort with you, I’d recommend it without reservation. Free, open-source, available on F-Droid.
Re: The MUD situation, I know from personal experience that Iron Realms has still been cranking out a few of them in the last few years. I was a big fan of Starmourn but that one just got demoted to Legacy recently, I guess because of lack of players. Shame because it was really neat and polished. But they’ve got a triumvirate of Lusternia, Achaea (my personal favorite) and Aetolia as active MUD worlds.
Now granted Iron Realms is a whole ass company, not just some nerd hosting a game off his basement server rack strictly out of love for the game, and open source self-hosting enthusiasts may not be super jazzed about that. But as far as I can tell they’re about as harmless as a company can be and do seem to still be in business more as a labor of love than anything else. At least as far as I’ve ever been able to find out. They mostly exist on donations so far as I know, I’ve never had to buy anything from them or been served an ad. And I do really, really like their Nexus client, the interface is really slick and it adds a lot of features and conveniences that I found lacking in other older MUD clients (though, granted, the only non-Iron Realms MUD I ever put any significant amount of time into was Aardwolf and I think I had to use a third party client for that).
All that said, MUD is a dying genre and any influx of new users would help revitalize many of these worlds. If it sounds interesting to you don’t hesitate to go check it out. Veteran users have always been universally helpful in my experience, unless they have an actual lore appropriate reason to be hostile to you - then, watch out! Although even most of those guys won’t stomp on a brand new noob without warning. Players who enjoy social roleplay will find themselves at home in a MUD. Players who enjoy social roleplay and have, or gain, a little bit of scripting knowledge will find themselves especially at home in a MUD. Give one a shot, they’re free and fun and it’ll raise your typing speed a lot.
I have an unhealthy cycle of this with Hearts of Iron IV a WW2 grand strategy game. I'll realize the embarrassing number of hours that I've put into the game and then I'll stop playing for a while. But then one of the big mods for it will update and then I dive back in and lose a weekend and then the process repeats.
The other game I consistently come back to is Threads of Fate or Dewprism it's a PS1 action-RPG with dual protagonists where each one has their own campaign or story to play through. I guess it's nostalgia that keeps me coming back to it, but it really wasn't a favorite game growing up and I didn't beat it until years after I'd gotten it. But every few years I'll just remember it out of the blue and get the urge to play through it again.
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, Dwarf Fortress. Highly-replayable, open-world and they keep being developed, so when you come back, there’s new stuff.
Skyrim, Fallout 4. Same idea, but the modders have added a lot of content.
Some of the city-builders, like Tropico 5. I play for a while, get tired, uninstall, but tend to come back, because the game is replayable.
Chase the Sun and Nova Drift are action games that I have spent some time away from and then come back and played. Nova Drift has seen regular development.
Pinball sims. I think that one can only play so much pinball, but I find myself thinking “I’d like to play a pinball game” down the line and reinstall.
I think that most of the games have some common characteristics:
Didn’t live-or-die based on their technology or graphics, because they’re invariably obsolete by the time I’ve come back.
Need to be highly-replayable. I’ve played games with story, like Fallout: New Vegas but I don’t really go back to play them for the story (though I’ll concede that specifically Fallout: New Vegas does have multiple paths to explore). They can’t be appealing because of a surprising or tense plot or a plot twist.
Often see continued development or modding, so there’s some reason to go back and see what’s there (though pinball would be a notable exception…you don’t go back for new content).
Horizon Forbidden West, stunning graphics. I find the main character a bit off-putting as she can be a bit arrogant and rude and those are traits I don’t have a lot of patience for, but it really does look good.
How different is it from the predecessor in terms of gameplay? That one felt very derivative, a near carbon copy of the Ubisoft formula. I usually consider those games a guilty pleasure of mine, but HZD felt too repetitive and clunky. It’s a shame, because I really like the setting.
It’s still clunky and repetitive. I didn’t finish Zero Dawn and the more I play Forbidden West the more I feel it likely I won’t finish this either. I think you’re right to make a comparison to Ubisoft. Fine looking games with loads of potential but I suspect fear of bad sales result in bland, generic characters and storylines that are just not engaging.
Companies are deathly afraid of introducing a new main character in the same series, her story was finished in the first one, would have been good as a mentor for a new character. Maybe MGS2 scared the market
I really wish they had; I was playing again today and her character was just being so awful to people. It would be fine to have such a character if over the course of the story she realises she has attachment issues and gradually tries to deal with them throughout the game, but she doesn’t, she just keeps being mean. I have no idea why you would have someone like this as the main character, I have no sympathy for her and the game is not even attempting to get me to empathise or sympathise with her. She’s meeting some really lovely people and I’m getting embarrassed by her behaviour! 😅
bin.pol.social
Aktywne