Any good PC games that are inherently slow or cooldown-based?
I find myself in an unusual situation wanting to play PC games that can't suck me in. Bear with me, this is a weird and specific request.
Ideally I want something I can easily pick up and put down maybe 1-2 times an hour between tasks. Chess or Risk came to mind, but I don't want something that mandates input or else you forfeit. Also thought of Civ, but in the past I've played that for hours at a time. I haven't found a setting that could force me to slow down, but maybe there's a mod I could use? Seems like I need something that either has built-in cooldowns or allows custom time controls.
Maybe there's some mobile games that are on PC that would fall into this category? I played "Egg, Inc" years ago, but remember the cooldowns started to extend into days which is when I stopped.
For reference, I typically play via Steam, Epic, or GOG and I like these game genres: strategy, RTS, tower defense, puzzle/logic, city building, simulation, automation, and exploration. But since there's probably not many games like this I'm definitely willing to branch out!
Turn-based strategy games come to mind. If you like Risk, I recommend Compact Confilct, a Risk-like game that you can play in 10 minutes. It's a web game that's free to play. (Unfortunately it's a bit awkward on a tablet or phone.)
Nowadays I play Ozymandias, another strategy game that takes maybe two hours to play, so I typically finish in one sitting and no danger of staying up late with "one more turn" syndrome. If I don't finish I might start over anyway, since I find it more fun than remembering where I left off.
These games are much better-paced than Civ because how much you can do in a turn is limited, even if you obsess about it. With Civ the game slows to a crawl as your empire gets bigger and there are more decisions to make.
You didn't say whether you want a single or multi-player game. I play in single-player mode and the AI's are decent but beatable. Ozymandias is simultaneous-turn which I imagine would improve pacing for multiplayer.
There is an entire genre of idle/incremental games that are right up that alley.
NGU Idle has an incredibly long "story" mode and is one of the best that I have played. Melvor Idle is another one that seems to be good, especially if you ever played Runescape.
I have played and enjoyed Runescape. Do you know of any idle games that let you customize the cooldown periods? Seems like most I've tried in the past just keep increasing into oblivion
I can't speak to customizing the cooldown, but Melvor is not the kind of game where it idles your time into the billions of seconds or minutes.
+1 for Melvor. Picked it up during Steam Sale and it is a loving game to play out when doing tasks or working. Plus, it can be really complex depending on your goals. You can really sink some time on it when you have some free time.
Possibly FTL or Into The Breach might be what you are looking for.
Those are pretty good/great games.
Especially "Into the Breach".
Into the Breach is perfect for what they're looking for. Hits all the boxes.
I'll elaborate on why FTL is a good fit for OP's criteria: The gameplay loop is based on resource management and handling a series of fights while upgrading your ship to prepare for the final boss (and not die on the way). While an entire run takes anywhere from 1 to 4 hours, the events themselves take little time to go through, an emphasis is put on pausing during combat to assess the situation and issue orders to your ship without relying on quick thinking and reflexes, and the game autosaves between pretty much every actions you take, letting you stop the game at any time and continue where you left off later.
The combat mechanics hinge on timers for your (and your enemy's) ship's systems: weapons take time to reload, crew move at a set speed, special systems have a cooldown after being used, destroyed drones have a cooldown before being able to be redeployed, and so on.
Something you maybe haven't considered - Snow runner. It's not like Civ whats so ever, but the gameplay is slow, and you can pause and come back to a mission. Maybe it's not your cup of tea, but I enjoyed playing Snow Runner because of its pace.
I love snow runner but I think he's talking more about games that will give him something to think about and come back to? Something turn based probably it sounds like.
Into the Breach is on mobile now. It doesn't have a built in cool-down, except I found myself taking breaks all the time to go do other stuff while I thought of the perfect move to make.
It's basically a turn-based puzzle game where you'll be looking at the same board forever and thinking about it when you're not playing, then you'll have an aha moment and the perfect move will come to you.
Something like words with friends might also be good.
Yes it'll mandate input but you can go quite a while between turns and have several games going if you want.
Yeah, I tried to caveat my comment. I'm not a massive gamer, but I found that SR was so much slower than other games.
OP, another game to consider is Satisfactory. I would spend my entire day dreaming about what I wanted to build that night when I played Satisfactory
I also spent my day dreaming about what to make in Satisfactory. The planning phase is so much fun it's crazy.
But this person said games that can't suck them in and you just dangled the most addicting game of all time in front of them. This poor soul is going to post a year from now saying they put in hundreds of hours and lost their real job because they couldn't stop playing their fake factory job.
You may be interested in the format of asynchronous multiplayer games. Steam even has a "turn waiting" notification feature, though it's never worked very well, and few games actually implement it. However two games I've played that I know do implement it are Frozen Synapse and Hive.
If you like Scrabble, you may enjoy Wordfeud on mobile. You can have one or multiple games going simultaneously, and it's usually not a lot of mental overhead compared to games like Chess.
You will technically be disqualified if you don't play your turn, but it's on the scale of days, not hours.
Advance Wars By Web has a correspondence mode, I think its a 2 day turn timer.
Frozen synapse is excellent, I wish it was a web game so that I could play on my work laptop
Super Auto Pets is a nice one, each turn is it's own separate thing, I play it a lot when I have meetings and can turn attention on a dime. Plus it's free.
Otherwise for me I used to take long breaks between Slay the Spire runs between floors, if you remember what your deck build is like it's not too bad!
I agree, SAP is really fun! That's one I have trouble setting down even though I know each round is pretty isolated.
I've tried Slay the Spire before briefly and it was ok. I don't recall the concept of a floor but I'll try giving it another go.
I feel like lots of modern turn-based traditional roguelikes could fit this description. Ones that come to mind would be: Cogmind, Rift Wizard, Path of Achra, Brogue, Tales of Maj'Eyal, Jupiter Hell, HyperRogue, Hoplite (mobile game), 868-Hack, WazHack, Rogue Fable III, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, and Golden Krone Hotel.
Based on your preferences for city builder type games, you may also enjoy Against the Storm, which is a real-time-with-pause game that you can pick up and play in a very civ-like fashion I think.
Maybe any asynchronous turn based games - single or multiplayer should would work. There's technically a timer on your turn if multiplayer, but the turn is something like a day. Main things that come to mind on that are digital board games - Root or Spirit Island on Android are games I've had fun with that way.
I remember that DEFCON has a slow mode where a game literally lasts 8h
I enjoy Warzone on mobile. It's a decent risk-like clone with some quirks. It's easy to pickup and put down, but doesn't necessarily have hard stops beyond the end of turns. It also has an 'idle' mode, but I haven't played too much of that. Lots of custom maps available to play against the AI.
I played Solasta exactly as you just said. I would just play for 10 minutes at a time, here or there.
Thoughts on games like cookie clicker?
I haven't played CC proper but have tried a few other games like it over the years and they were pretty fun.
Check out Dorfromantik
The "console-class" gacha games might be up your alley? Mainly Genshin and HSR, although the success of both (Genshin, believe it or not, makes a similar amount of revenue as the entirety of Ubisoft) has led to more of these coming out. They're really intended for you to play ~1 hour a day, and no more.
The last game I played that had long cooldowns between actions was Farm Together. It's a fairly casual game but all the crops you grow have set timers that can range from 10mins to 2 real days. The timers work even with the game closed so you can just plant the crops that have timers for however long you want and then load it again after that time.
I guess not many games do this because it sorta goes against the design of wanting to keep players engaged but it can be a nice feature to have when you have unpredictable downtime.
I would like to bring up Snowrunner. It is such a slow-burner because the main goal of the game is to haul stuff from point A to point B in trucks that are only somewhat up to the task. You'll get stuck, have to winch out, bring in another truck to help your first truck out and the whole map becomes a big and constant puzzle. Couple this with some easy-going music and it's perfect to wind down or put your thoughts aside for a while.
While this might not be the easiest game to play in only short stints, I still feel it might be something looking into.
I would like to note that the UI can be heavily optimized for bigger audiences. It takes a little time to get used to but once you get the hang of where you can find things it becomes second nature.
Highly recommended and I would like to shout out one of my best friends for gifting it to me in times where I thought I wasn't able to touch video games at all.
Microsoft Flight simulator! I prefer flying low and slow but I know lots of people who boot up a airliner, program the flight path and have the plane on autopilot for most of the multi hour cruising.
I do a similar thing when playing sailing sims (esail/sailwind). I set a course, make sure all the sails are trimmed and start writing in my journal or read a chapter of a book.
Realm Grinder
Enjoyable idle game where you build up a kingdom. Bunch of different races and flavors to choose from. Rewards you for not playing for a while with plenty of currency to spend on stuff when you get back.
Also if you're not averse to emulators, I will always zealously recommend Azure Dreams GBC to anyone. This game is a monster taming roguelike where time doesn't pass when it's your turn if you don't do anything so you can put it down for as long as you like. Unlike Realm Grinder, it doesn't reward you for your idle time but it's a much more satisfying game overall and I just want more people to know about it and play it ^_^