Goddess of Victory NIKKE fits what you are asking.
It is a high quality Free-to-Play mobile game played in portrait mode and completely playable with one hand (depending on how wide your device is). As long as your don’t care about leaderboards, it also isn’t Pay-to-Win. It is playable on PC as well, which is how I play these days. As a Day 1 Player, you don’t need to spend any money to play, enjoy, or progress in the game.
In terms of negatives:
Some people may not like the anime art style (game is playable in various language dubs, including Korean, Japanese, English, and depending on region, Chinese, which are optional downloads to reduce filesize) or the character designs, which have huge… personalities
If you don’t care about time limited events or being at the top of leaderboards, its not hostile to your playtime and mental health. Go at your own pace.
It is a gacha game for characters and skins, but the game gives players a lot of options, so unless you’re trying to be #1 on the leaderboards in your server, having every character max level isn’t that important.
They recently added a “Story Mode” for the campaign, which significantly reduces the difficulty of all the missions in the 40+ campaign chapters so that players can enjoy the story without needing to have as powerful characters. I think you get reduced rewards as well, but its a nice addition. You can also get photo film rolls to unlock past time limited events (not licensed or collab ones though) so you can enjoy the stories of those as well. You don’t get the rewards for them as they were running, but still can experience the stories and minigames. You get plenty of free currency for free character rolls, no money is needed. Unless you really want a skin or really like a licensed collab and want to buy an IP specific bundle or something.
Basically, for a free player, there is A LOT of story content available to keep your busy for a while. Play at your own pace, and don’t worry about leaderboards and you’ll be mostly fine. The biggest advice is to try to get 5 characters 4 times each. If you are playing the regular difficulty story, there is a point where it is required to progress, and is often referred to as the only “wall of progression” in the game.
I either use the default names, or give them “standard English older bloke names”. The grander the adventure, the more un-grand a name they get.
Things like “Ian Williams”, “Neville Smith”, “Terry Phillips”, “Frank Jones” etc. The sort of names that would work for the City Council’s Road Maintenance Department.
‘Antiyoy’ is a simple strategy game, fit well for shortish sessions. Free and with minimal permissions. Iirc ‘Antiyoy Classic’ is offline-only, while the regular one has multiplayer.
‘Diplicity’ is a multiplayer-only (afaik) strategy like ‘Risk’, but with zero element of chance, only diplomacy. However the games can be rather slow, from what I’ve heard.
‘Fabularium’ is an app for running text-adventure games — one of many such apps, but I like it because it supports modern game formats. You’ll need to download the games themselves elsewhere, mainly from ifdb.org — there are a lot of games, some of them with quite novel mechanics.
‘Hocus’ is a geometrical puzzle with impossible shapes. Iirc additional levels are paid.
I’ve heard that ‘Mindustry’ is a good open-source clone of ‘Factorio’, but idk how it plays on a phone screen.
I love playing PZ with my friend. We are newbies, but we just moved to Riverside and found a house near the lake so we can settle in there, close to the woods but not too far from the city (by car) to grab what we need.
It’s close to the lake, 2 smaller houses no gates, but we started building some fences. We went out to get more nails since we were out, we stumbled upon some abandoned factory and houses. Then some alarm flipped on in an ABANDONED house with For Sale sign… 80+ zombies circled us and I died… so yeah, maybe not the best place to settle after all
Things like this are why I seriously think the next steam deck may include an ARM based version. Possibly a smaller, lighter, more switch like device alongside something more like a z1e equivalent device.
Steam Frame may do a lot for VR but also for ARM gaming.
My secret hope though is risc-v also somehow gets on the map.
Once Upon a Galaxy has been my default game since I first played it.
It’s an asynchronous alternating activation autobattler (like Arcane Rush, or Storybook Brawl/Hearthstone Battlegrounds but you play against ghosts). Games take about 10-15 minutes.
It’s largely public domain fantasy themed, but has been expanding into the “legally distinct” cultural references as they add content, basically every captain/unit/treasure is a reference.
The shop mechanic is simplified, there’s no currency, you just get a set of choices, and can pick 1. You get two shops per round by default, lots of ways to get extra.
Asynchronous play means that you face challenging opponents that naturally evolve with the meta game but you can also take time to make thoughtful decisions.
The draft pool for the shop has a large base pool that you add to by selecting a custom sebset from a second large pool as your captain’s deck. The progression is through unlocking cards for each captain’s secondary pool, and unlocking new captains. You can naturally earn all cards through play, most captains are free, new captains are paywalled for a limited time.
Monetization is through 3 paths: cosmetics, acceleration of card unlocks, access to paywalled captains. I haven’t found it to be particularly exploitative or negative feeling.
My only gripe is minor, that it doesn’t have mid-run save/resume, but that is on their road map.
There is essentially no story, if that matters to you.
If it’s not obvious, I’m really enthusiastic about this game. I’m not affiliated/sponsored in any way. Happy to answer any questions.
That’s interesting. I might look into it cause the playstore one requires playstore. I don’t have google apps and downloaded the apk. Weird cause most games work fine I have microg too.
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