I’d like to get back into playing video games, but I don’t want to have to sign up for an online service like Steam or Ubisoft Connect.
I love technical sandbox games like Scrap Mechanic, especially if they have a “creative mode” that allows me to just make stuff.
Desktop Dungeons
Dwarf Fortress
a bunch of roguelikes
emulated SNES games
Well, GOG sells a lot of commercial games and doesn’t require online connectivity for anything marked as “DRM free”. Tend to be older. Once you download it, no link to the service required.
I think that all the – be they free or commercial – games on itch.io don’t require signing up for a service, unless the game itself has some sort of service. I don’t have specific recommendations there, though.
Games bundled in a Linux distro won’t require a service.
There are open-source games.
I personally like Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, which is a very deep open-world roguelike set in a post-apocalyptic world with zombies. Steep learning curve, as a warning, but you can do all sorts of stuff. NPCs, build bases and set up electrical power, build ground vehicles, boats, and rotary-wing craft. Vehicles can carry other vehicles, can have video cameras, turrets, armor, various sorts of lights, rams and other melee weaponry. Bionics, mutations, skills, farming, crafting, quests, music and sound packs, graphical tiles. Martial arts. Contains probably more real-world firearms than any other game I know of, does stuff like multiple optics, various stock and handle modifications, powder fouling. Moddable melee weapons. Artifacts. Mods to add spells, psionics, and various magic items. Traps and static defenses. Cooking, brewing, drugs, alcohol, various types of clothing. Explosives. Waifu body pillows. Regional weather simulation. Heating and cooling. Lovecraftian stuff. Radiation. Remote-controlled vehicles. Senses including smell, hearing with temporary and permanent impairment modeling, infrared, vision to see magnetic fields, light-amplification optics, eye dilation simulation when entering different light levels. Vehicle-mounted battery chargers, kitchenettes, water tanks, rainwater collection systems, water purification systems. Radios. Various factions of enemies, some of which fight each other. Bandits. Lockpicking, teleportation, various types of diseases, parasitic and fungal infections, various types of poisoning. Hacking. Furniture. Various types of psychological conditions. Gasses, gills, skates, broken limbs, stances, folding bicycles, body part level encumbrance, container size maximums (including modeling things like mesh bags that can’t contain small items and waterproof containers that protect things that are destroyed by immersion in liquid), pockets in clothing, various types of holsters and sheaths that can be worn on various places on the body. Pain, guilt, cannibalism, music. It’s got a lot of stuff. There’s a build on Steam now pre-set up with graphics and sound if you want to donate, but you can also just download the builds from the dev site for free. Has mobile builds, but I think that it really benefits from the computational power of a PC, as well as a keyboard.
Dwarf Fortress also has a steep learning curve, is a colony simulator. Not open source, but free, also deep, many hours you can spend there.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon is an open source roguelike, relatively shallow learning curve. Really aimed at touchscreen devices like smartphones, but has computer builds, has support for keys and stuff. See [email protected].
Mindustry is an open-source factory automation game in the vein of Factorio. Works on mobile or PC platforms.
I’ve only played Unciv on smartphone, but apparently it also has PC builds. It’s an open-source reimplementation of Civilization V, sans all the pretty graphics and animation and music and such. One of the deeper games I think you can get on a phone.
Someone else mentioned Minecraft. I think that that requires an account with the service these days, though Luanti – until recently known as Minetest – is a similar, open-source project that does not.
Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup is a tough roguelike known for being well-balanced, with the devs stripping out unnecessary stuff and streamlining it. I don’t play it much these days, but I’ve enjoyed it in the past.
Endless Sky is an open-source clone of Escape Velocity for the classic Mac, a 2D space exploration, fighting, and trading game. I don’t play it much, but I think that it’s worth a look if you’ve never played it.
Battle for Wesnoth is an open-source tactical hex-grid game. Characters can level up and gain abilities. Can be played on mobile OSes, though I think that it really benefits from a mouse.
I am not personally all that into OpenTTD, an open-source game based on Transport Tycoon Deluxe, but I have played it and have seen many people who are super-into-it.
I’ve played and enjoyed the open-source 0 A.D., some time back, but last I played it, it had a bunch of work still to be done. An Age of Empires clone.
There are a handful of open-source RTS Total Annihilation-inspired games based on the open-source Spring engine, like Beyond All Reason.
Oooo that cataclysm games sounds interesting. Gonna have to check that out and see what’s up!
I really like it, but I will warn that the learning curve is not shallow, and this is exacerbated by the fact that the game keeps changing and being rebalanced, so strategies change a lot over time.
Also, there used to be a (seriously out of date) wiki that a fan ran, but that went down a few months back, so it makes the curve even steeper.
When I first started playing, many years back, recreational drugs were a fantastic tool, because they provided tremendous stat bonuses. Those got nerfed; there are stat bonuses and reasons that you might want to take a stimulant or depressant or maybe stay awake, but drugs aren’t magical enhancers any more, work more like in real life.
There was an era when unarmed combat was really powerful – unreasonably so. I personally enjoy playing unarmed characters, and you can still do it, but it’s a lot more like trying to play unarmed in a real-life apocalypse – not easy.
Fighting basic zombies changed a lot, making crowds much more dangerous, when they got the ability to do things like grab someone and prevent dodging when grabbed, when the number of attacks one could dodge was capped outside certain (weapon and unarmed) martial arts forms bonuses, and got the ability to do things like have the collective mass of a crowd of zombies pushing against a wall push things over.
Food used to be a serious problem; now I don’t find it to be particularly an issue.
And there’s a lot of unintuitive stuff. In almost all games with zombies, night is the enemy. But for most types of builds in Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, night is your friend, especially in the early game. Yes, it hides zombies. But it also hides you and aside from their sense of smell, for most zombie types, your senses are superior to theirs at night, and it’s more critical to not run into crowds of them at night). So doing night raids on towns for supplies is generally a good idea.
There are a ton of stats, and a lot of them are hidden, and a lot of complicated mechanics, like multiple items in one slot (e.g. multiple items on a given layer on a given body part having an encumbrance penalty over the normal impact).
So it has an extremely ungentle learning curve. But…you also won’t run out of stuff to play with for a long, long time in that game. Can modify clothing items, like Kevlar or fur-line clothing. Firearm recoil is modeled. Can follow various mutation trees and “break threshold” in one tree, get more powerful mutations in one (be a humanoid feline or a tree-like critter that can feed on sunlight). Fat reserves. You can have tank treads on a vehicle, stick solar panels on the roof of a building and then wire the walls down to a subterranean base and set up lighting and dig a well, hack into robots to control them (or in some cases, use relevant credentials, like military or police), start wildfires, join forces with alien species trying to wipe out humanity, mount a tank gun on vehicles and blow through walls, reach the sea and board an aircraft carrier, auto-drive vehicles around the highway system…Caves of Qud (also a good game, considerably simpler) might have some degree of comparability in the number of ways in which you can interact with the world, though it has far fewer mechanics and amount of stuff.
One way I see people often recommend to come up to speed is to watch a streamer. This is not how I came up to speed, so I don’t know if I can recommend this personally, but it clearly works for some, and it does teach you some strategies that work with current builds.
Vormithrax is a popular streamer:
https://youtube.com/c/vormithrax
There’s a subreddit which has a fair bit of activity:
https://old.reddit.com/r/cataclysmdda/
And a Threadiverse community that doesn’t have much activity (well, yet!):
Endless Sky is a lot of fun. I think I’m through all the reasonably complete plotlines, but there’s plenty of different ways to play and self-directed goals to go after.
I think itch.io might allow game purchases without any account, depending in the game, but even getting drm-free games is almost always going to require some kind of account somewhere. There’s always the “high seas”, but that’s not something everyone is comfortable with.
GOG is probably your best option for completely DRM free games, and fwiw, a lot of Steam games don’t require you to use Steam to launch them. A fairly thorough list is kept here: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam
Starsector is amazing, even though buying it on the website made me wonder if the storefront was made in the 90s.
Second this. Amazing game that I’ve been following since it was called Starfarer. Highly recommend.
Beyond all reason. Pretty sure it’s open source too. Or partly? I looked it up a while ago and can’t remember the details.
Dcss is the best game ever and I’m still playing it after 20 years
Quite a few, actually. And it’s worth mentioning that many games, while sold via steam, can also be bought directly from the makers. Factorio and Songs of Syx come to mind.
2nd Factorio and Factorio Space Age. Once you get your key (which doesn’t require Steam) there’s even a package in AUR for installing it and keeping it updated on Arch.
You forgot to include the most important phrase… “I use arch BTW” :)
Minecraft.
You can get partway to Scrap Mechanic with Minecraft and the Create Mod.
Minecraft itself requires an online account, though, yes? Is linked to some sort of central authentication system, needs to be connected to play?
You need a Microsoft account to sign in to the launcher, download the game and play online, but if you already have the game installed you can launch it and play singleplayer without an internet connection.
