Any of the Pixel Dungeon games.
There’s like 100s of them. You probably know, but to anyone else vanilla is super hard. I suggest giving a few of the knock offs a shot.
Shattered seems to be the currently most maintained one.
Smash Hit is a very chill game. You throw balls to smash glass, levels get progressively harder as you go along (but still chill)
Sherlock Zen is a logic puzzle game that looks like dos shareware from the win 3.1 era.
The previous version was one of the first android games I ever installed, I played through the free levels a couple of times but never bought the unlock.
I thought about it recently when doing a grid logic puzzle in a magazine I bought at the airport and went looking for it. I was sad that it didn’t seem to exist anymore and eventually went down a rabbit hole and found the creators website which gave me huge nostalgia. He is also active on mastodon. So I bought the new version finally and have been thoroughly enjoying it!
Egg, Inc is really good.
It has some freemium qualities. But you can get hundreds of hours out of it by purchasing the “pro permit” and nothing else.
The game has no ads (err, you can choose to watch a single ad to get an 8 hour bonus)
I play sand:box, it’s free without ads, but if you want some extra materials to play with you have to pay a dollar for premium, i never get bored of it.
Sokoban! It is the classic puzzle game. There are many versions, I prefer the one on F-Droid.
Everything by Bart Bonte.
I was bummed to see that those games I had previously aren’t supported on my device anymore (at least according to Google). They were relaxing.
Looks like Orange might work though.
Throw the man am email. He might help.
Orange I’m glad there’s a lot of games.
I have quite a few recommendations. They are not quite non-freemium since they are free, but if your reason to prefer non-freemium is to avoid ads and in app purchases, then none of these games have them. They are all also open source and the link I provided below will be for their respective F-Droid version (note: some of these games are not available on Google Play Store):
- Simon Tatham’s Puzzle - A collection of many puzzle games ported to Android. The puzzles include Minesweeper, Net, Sudoku, and more.
- Simple Solitaire Collection - As the name says, it’s a collection of card-based Solitaire games.
- Simple Brick Games - A game that imitates very basic handheld with very small pixel count. Games include tetris, breakout, and more.
- 1010 Klooni - A puzzle game where you have to use various shaped blocks to fill an entire horizontal or vertical line.
- Tower Jumper - This is a clone of a popular android game in which you move a jumping ball and try to reach the end of a tower avoiding the obstacles.
- Ball2Box - A puzzle game about shooting a ball into the box.
- Anuto - Another ugly tower defense.
This particular game requires far more attention and strategy than the ones listed above, but it can be played once every few minutes if you constantly save and reload (just don’t play online):
- Unciv - 4X civilization-building game, similar to Sid Meier’s Civilization series.
I second Anuto. I found out about and downloaded it a few days ago and it’s simple yet really fun.
