I think most of the free PC games I’ve played have already been mentioned, so I’ll throw out the only two mobile games I play, both of which are free:
Plague Inc. is available on Steam for about 15 bucks, but there’s a free version available for Android as well. It’s been a while since I’ve played it but there was no ‘pay to win’ features that I recall. Really fun strategy game.
Pixel Dungeon is pretty popular here in our office as well. No ads, no pay to win, just a simple dungeon questing game. Pretty challenging.
I also just found out that Prison Architect is free for tablet devices, but I haven’t tried it yet. I love the PC version though.
Wanted to give it a try. It’s currently not working on Ryzen 3000 CPUs. Their Forum has a patch you can compile yourself, but it leads to an Out of Memory error later in the game, so… Sadly won’t try that today.
If you’re into rhythm games, this one is by far my favorite. You can play all the way through the main storyline for free. There are tons of extra songs you can buy, and an expansion as well for only $2.99 (basically just re-playing through the story but with newer and more difficult songs).
Well over 1200 hours in Unturned. I’ve been playing it on and off for several years now. For what is essentially a one man show, it’s one of the best free games on Steam that has worked natively in Linux since I left Windows over 5 years ago. There are lots of ways to play and tons of mods out there as well. Like most zombie survival games today, once you get the feel for the survival part you can then expand on crafting and exploring. Plus the simplistic look can be a bit more kid friendly with things like rag dolls and blood turned off. My nephew loves spawning in jets and blowing things up.
The guy has also been working on a new version using Unreal engine instead of Unity. No idea if it too will be free, but his blog has a bunch of videos on the progress if anyone is interested -
I forgot one. It’s an oldie but still lots of players - Runescape. I had a problem trying to install it via their instructions (dependency hell in Lubuntu 19.04) and found out it has a Snap. It’s the only time I’ve had a Snap actually seem better than the native install!
If you’re talking about Old School Runescape, i highly recommend the Runelite client. They fully support Linux, and the standard package for their stable release is an appimage with all dependencies included, so you can just download and go, no problems. Also, they’re open source and are very open to new contributors if you get an itch to work on FOSS.
That being said… dang that game is so fricken addictive lol. I have sunk far too many hours into it.
