I’ve been playing The Saboteur for a week now.
Stellaris, CK2, and probably some other paradox games. Lategame Stellaris starts to get pretty slow on largest world tho
Zomboid
Sid Meier’s Pirates
Seconding ones that appear to have been already been mentioned:
Slay the Spire
Balatro
Terraria
Stardew Valley
MTGA
FTL
OG fallout games
FTL has got me addicted recently, it’s also on sale on steam (or was 2 days ago at least)
Carrion is probably only like ten hours worth of gameplay, but it’s absolutely spectacular and if it had been significantly longer I think it might have started to get stale rather than being truly memorable. You play as an amorphous monster and start the game by escaping from your containment tank at a research facility. The core mechanics are barely explained to the player, if at all, so each new game mechanic is introduced alongside a puzzle that more or less amounts to understanding how to apply it in-game. I’m aware there are console versions of this game too, but the fluid feel of how your creature moves is such a huge part of enjoying the game that I have a lot of trouble imagining a gamepad could get that down anywhere near as well as using the mouse+keyboard. I love the touch that you grow with higher hp and movement becomes much more cumbersome, but you can get back to the more fluid movement by shedding hp. Also the map design is great, it’s highly nonlinear and very easy to get lost. The only actual complaint I have is I didn’t like hearing all the terrified screams from the researchers, but it’s hard for me to picture a way around that without breaking the immersion.
Eastward is pixel graphics but when I tried it with wine I had some minor framerate issues, it can handle integrated graphics but how well will depend on how good your pc is. I played it on switch originally. I think the gameplay is enjoyable and done well, but it’s not the reason you play the game and is not a game for someone who skips past dialogue whenever possible. I am not that someone though, and Eastward is one of my absolute favorite games I’ve ever played. The pixel art is gorgeous, characters and npcs have personalities you get attached to, soundtrack is both great music and matches the atmosphere, it’s something special. The writing and dialogue are just wonderful, and combined with the pixel art there’s so much emotion packed into it. At times it is uplifting and heartwarming, at other times unsettling and creepy. The change in tone when stumbling upon the factory in Greenberg caught me completely off-guard, just amazing. Only complaint was I spent most of the game excited to find out how they would tie all the loose-ends together and that never happened, there was a lot more left up to interpretation than I was expecting, which made the ending a massive disappointment for me.
Fallow is another short game that I personally really liked even though I didn’t really understand it. There’s not even a lot of gameplay in it, it creates a beautifully creepy atmosphere and the game is more or less that you sit in that and absorb it. It was an experience of observing a different world and trying to comprehend how that world works. I can’t even tell if it was intentional that I didn’t get it or if I’m just bad at media interpretation, but there’s emotion in it either way.
Monster Sanctuary is a monster-taming game with a wholly uninspired story and mediocre pixel art, and both those issues made me give up on it after just a couple hours initially, but when I eventually gave it a second chance the gameplay itself is really engaging and well-designed. It’s something I’ve come back to a few times since then just because of that. There’s a lot of depth to it and it’s fun to experiment with.
kentucky route zero
here’s the master list: https://pastebin.com/MTCXZxCN
You should look up exactly what integrated graphics you have. Sometimes this can be difficult, because they’ll list it as something vague like “AMD graphics”
But if you can find it that would help. Integrated graphics have come a long way in the last 5 or so years. Could be a big difference.
Yeah, I came here to post this, if it’s an Intel APU from like 10 years ago you can forget about running most 3D games, but if it’s a relatively recent AMD APU it could be on par with a midrange graphics card from 10-15 years ago. The Steam Deck is essentially a laptop, after all.
Of course, you can still play Balatro
Yeah I got a little 400 dollar mini-PC to do some work a couple years ago, and it runs the original Oblivion on high settings at 60fps. I think I got a respectable 24-30fps on a 4k screen. The integrated graphics chip is called a AMD Radeon 680M.
That one launched in early 2022 and there are much better ones that came out since. I’ve seen videos of someone playing Cyberpunk 2077 on low settings and getting 30-50fps @1080p on the latest integrated graphics chips.
DOOM wads! Super easy to run GZDoom and some full-ass games made by people. Also, Caves of Qud! And I love Morrowind, Fallout, etc.
Thatcher’s Techbase
There are a LOT of absolutely incredible level packs out there. I recommend checking out Doomworld’s Cacowards Archive (running annually since 2004) for a sampling of the absolute cream of the crop.
Great suggestion!
I wonder how much Noita you could get away with.
Otherwise, the roguelite genre has a lot of games to choose from. Spelunky, Gungeon, Hades, Balatro, FTL, One Step From Eden, etc. If you have a particularly old computer then more old school roguelikes like Caves of Qud, Crawl, Cogmind (very hard to get into).
Noita uses the GPU way less than I would have guessed given it’s so heavy on the particle simulation, but it’s hard enough on the CPU that that might be an issue
Trying to run this on integrated graphics and a laptop CPU
god it’s so good though that it’s worth a try lmao
least unpleasant fungus cave trip
how does one even reach this level of noita
It all started when I watched his stream, actually. But the sweatlord inside me took over and I started learning a lot from FuryForged and DunkOrSlam. Ended up going through a lot of wand building guides to learn how to abuse the crap out of Greek letter spells to make a wand that casts as many copies of Chaos Larpa modifiers attached to omega sawblade. Hilarity ensues.
amazing, that explains the apocalyptic flood of sawblades lmao
SIGH boots up Noita
Great suggestions, but FTL is Goated
Deltarune
Dwarf Fortress, CataclysmDDA, FTL, Convoy are all in my top games list and all run on a potato
Stardew valley will run on a toaster
What chip do you have?
Monster Train was a good time on my celeron chromebook running linux
Morrowind on OpenMW ran decently
I was able to emulate most things less demanding than Gamecube as well
Slay the Princess
The Saboteur is a super fun game, I feel like i don’t hear enough people talk about it
My fav games that havent been mentioned yet and should work for you:
OpenRCT2 (Roller Coaster Tycoon)
Sid Meier’s Civilization III (and IV really but especially III)
Quake & Quake 2
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon (and expansions)
Football Manager (only if you’re into football/sports ofc)
Without knowing your exact APU I’d wager you can probably emulate lot of great classic games maybe up until Gamecube/PS2. My specific recommendations would be playing Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Zelda: Majora’s Mask with the decompiled and rebuilt native C versions, can’t remember the name of the project at the moment but it should be easy to find on google. The original N64 versions are also well worth playing but after playing the recompiled windows versions with free camera and other quality of life hacks I’m not sure I could go back.