I have a laptop that's not bad but it's definitely not a gaming laptop, and I'm trying to put less stress on it now since I have a gaming desktop. What are some of the best games for when you're traveling and you do want to run stuff that's real easy?
In my experience Spelunky, FTL: Faster Than Light, Mitos.is and Worm.is, Sid Meier's Pirates, and Twilight Struggle all fit real well with that.
Desktop Dungeons, Fear & Hunger, Steam Marines, World of Horror , Slay the Spire, Dwarf Fortress. Basically anything I can channel my autism into for an entire flight. Nothing is really mechanically difficult to play on the confines of a small keyboard, but has difficult enough gameplay to keep me fully engaged so I don't start slamming cocktails to keep myself from seething over niggers, obnoxious children, or smelly fat fucks.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. It's a perfect baby's first roguelike. Unfortunately the developers are insane retards who actively remove content and features with each update for """"""""""""""streamlining"""""""""""""""" so once you get bored of the main branch, try out the Kimchi branch here: https://github.com/kimjoy2002/crawl/releases/tag/kimchi-1.3.2
Yes it's developed by a formicid but everything is still in English, not Korean.
the following games are all 2D games that run great on light hardware:
Vampire Survivors is a great addictive session game. if you somehow haven't played it yet, it's kind of hard to explain but instantly intuitive to pick up. you start out wandering around a giant field with monsters slowly coming at you, you have one auto-firing weapon to fight them off with. as you level up you can choose more weapons and upgrade the ones you have, and as you progress through each 15-30 min run and through the game's meta unlocks generally, it gradually turns up the intensity meter until you're shitting six different screenfuck rainbow lasers every half-second and obliterating hundreds of enemies every time you do. it's a simple gameplay model but there's so much content it'll keep you busy for dozens of hours. also, memes.
yes it has some performance issues towards the endgame but as long as your laptop isn't a toaster you'll be able to run it about as well as it's possible to be run. for reference I play that game on my home computer with a Ryzen 7 2700X and Radeon 6900 XT and even with like 20% CPU/GPU utilization it still runs choppy when everything starts getting crazy. the dev said they're working on porting it to a new engine to fix this but there's no ETA
various autists will screech heavily at me for this but Tales of Maj'Eyal is, IMO, the best roguelike around. it is enormous, it has depth, it has a bunch of different campaigns and is heavily geared towards replayability. it's also turn-based (the game only moves when you do) so you can put it down or pick it back up at literally any time. don't look up guides (it's been in development forever so most guides are from like 2012 anyway), just body it and explore everything on your own and figure out your own builds and strategies for not dying.
every Zachtronics game is great if you like spergy puzzle games. in particular I recommend Opus Magnum as it's the most normie-intuitive title. EXAPUNKS and SHENZHEN I/O are excellent programming puzzle games that require no prior programming knowledge or experience to play, and will also teach you basic assembly programming in the process (they both have very cleverly written manuals). MOLEK-SYNTEZ is a good one too. if you really like his other programming titles, TIS-100 is more of the same although quite minimalist. The Zachtronics Solitaire Collection is a unique gathering of solitaire-style games taken from his other titles, with one new game exclusive to this title.
Spiderweb Software makes great minimalist turn-based RPGs with good writing and a ton of content. Avadon, Avernum, Queen's Wish, and Geneforge are all franchises with multiple games in each. they're all fairly similar but they're different in important ways: Avadon is heavily story-based, Avernum is more of a classic dungeon-crawler, Queen's Wish is a dungeon crawler with a resource management metagame, Geneforge is a sort of monster battler. the recent Avernum and Geneforge titles are remakes of games they originally made in the 90s - get the ones that have subtitles (i.e. Geneforge 1 - Mutagen).
Factorio is an unmatched logistics/automation/real-time strategy game that requires a high level of autism to play. you may have seen some clones of it popping up here and there like Satisfactory or Industries of Titan or Mindustry, well, those games all suck compared to the original. it allows you to customize a ton of different gameplay aspects at map generation meaning you can make the game as stressful or relaxing as you want it to be. it also comes with extremely robust mod support and a huge modding community. mods range from just simple fixes or quality-of-life feature additions to entire gameplay reworks to enormous gameplay expansions that change the scope of the game entirely. it has a built-in mod browser and patcher so you don't have to worry about using nexusmods or any of that cringe shit. it has a learning curve, and it's the kind of curve where you have to learn by struggling - guides only help so much. if you have the right kind of brain for it though, this will become one of your favorite games of all time.
