Seconded. Nice and chill, with just a touch of coming-of-age parents-aren’t-invincible melancholy.
Using A Short Hike as a jumping off point and following the growing-pains and melancholy threads while maintaining the explore-and-talk aspects, I’d like to recommend Night in the Woods.
A Hat in Time is a somewhat easy platformer IMO. It’s super cute and a low-stress game.
If the only reason that you’re avoiding action games is that she may not be good at the controls, you can consider action games that have good low difficulty modes. Deep Rock Galactic has good lower difficulty modes in my opinion, and it is fun to play with others.
IIRC Dusk has a really slow paced low difficulty mode as well. Projectile based attacks move super slow. I’m not sure what she’ll be into as far as genre goes, but action games may be approachable if you pick the right ones.
My partner wasn’t into video games, but I got her into them. One she was really into is stardew valley. It’s really chill and low stakes. Might be a good one to try.
I’m really surprised I haven’t seen them mentioned here (and apologies if someone did suggest it and I missed it!).
The Monkey Island games. Super simple controls, as most of it is point and click. Not expensive to get into, so no big loss if it ends up not being her thing. They are silly and clever, and reward the player for being silly and clever. They are puzzle games that require some attention to detail and curiosity to solve, but there isn’t any “fail” condition. You just don’t progress if you can’t solve the puzzle. It doesn’t assume any prior game knowledge or habits; a lot of games will expect the player to be familiar with certain controls or tropes commonly used in games, but Monkey Island is more similar to a “choose your own adventure” style story.
If it’s at an Internet cafe where everyone is in attendance, I seriously strongly suggest “The Ship”. In my experience, probably the ultimate LAN game. Screen peeking allowed but not encouraged.
The game is effectively a game of assassin—but you have to upkeep your player’s needs (food/water/shower/bathroom/sleep). Your character needing to take a shit is stressful—very often you begin the process only to have your murderer pop open the door with a fire axe.
It used to have a “viral” gift copy thing on Steam where 1 purchased copy generated 2 gift copies and those copies generated 1 copy each. So in theory, you could only require 3 copies for 15 of you if that’s still active.
Deep Rock Galactic. Lots of fun, easy to adjust difficulty, plays on lower-end machines. 1-4 person teams (the levels scale with team size).
I also hear 100% Orange Juice is really fun with friends and approachable for non-gamers, but I’ve only played single player, and the computer players cheat. I can’t say for certain if this is a good choice or not.
Deep rock galactic looks like a lot of fun but I’m hesitant about the small team sizes. With 4 player teams we would have to have 4 parallel games going at the same time.
With a set of mods natively supported by the game through mod.io, you can get as many as 8 people in a spacerig (lobby) without the game crashing, and in theory up to 16 if they join after the drop pod has landed. I’d recommend the following set of mods if you go that route:
Downside of this method is you have to log into mod.io through your Steam account, and I’d personally be too paranoid to do that at an internet cafe, but it would get y’all down to 1-2 parallel games. In addition, if you turn up swarm sizes, the game basically becomes Starship Troopers: Space Dwarf Edition.
My favorite is Metal Gear Solid (PS1 version). This game is just groundbreaking in so many ways, and the story is just so earnest and campy. There are some incredibly emotional moments and the final battle on top of the Metal Gear is absolutely insane.
House flipper, The Sims, Planet Zoo/Planet coaster, Two Point Hospital/Campus, or anything in the creative management genre. Stardew Valley is good, and in the same vein, Graveyard Keeper.
For puzzles, absolutely unpacking, also have seen similar friends put time into that remodel game that escapes me right now. House Fixer maybe?
It is more action, but I have had success during covid with family who was trapped at home by introducing them to Mass Effect (on story mode, the easiest setting). The story is so engrossing through the three games that they overlooked the action. If she likes big stories, I would suggest that. On keyboard and mouse it’s not the most confusing game either, pretty simple.
If you were thinking Factorio but want to do it together, check out Satisfactory. It’s a 1st person version of it that supports multiplayer, and you could set up a dedicated server. (I’m biased though, I have over 2000 hours in it and I am a mod of !satisfactory). Satisfactory is definitely less intimidating than factorio for newbies to the factory building environment, and there’s a creative factor in there too.
I’ve also had luck with people giving them portal. Portal is a great game to introduce them to not anction gameplay but helps them learn movement controls. Honestly out of the three I suggested maybe portal first and go from there. Would introduce movement, a weapon, and the second has a pretty strong story.
For anything else, what are her interests, what does she do for a living? Maybe we can put forward some more.
One of my buddies got metal gear for PlayStation when it was first released. I remember marvelling at the way that the enemies reacted to the footsteps and noises you made splashing through puddles. It was just something we had never experienced before. So much tension just trying to get through that first area to the elevator. And the cyborg ninja? Get outta here so fucking cool!
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