Looking for some video game suggestions based off some specific parameters

I don’t have much experience with deck builders outside of StS and Balatro, so I’ll lean more skill.

Since you didn’t mention it in the post, I’d say give Hollow Knight a try. It fits alongside cuphead and Furi. Very little dialog, pure skill. While there are ability unlocks, it’s emergent gameplay rather than power scaling like you get in rogue-likes. Add to that great artwork and sound track. I haven’t played the second one yet, but the first one is great. The only knock is that there is a fair bit of exploration. I usually avoid metroidvanias for this reason as well, but somehow I don’t mind it in Hollow Knight.

Celeste would be a good addition as well. Amazing platformer with a high skill ceiling.

Play Picross :D

In all seriousness, you wrote mostly about card-based games. It's unclear to me whether Roguelites have too much progression for you and you like Slay the Spire in spite of those mechanics, or if it irritates you that card-based roguelites are too similar to Slay the Spire but you'd be willing to try other roguelites?

I think you would have enjoyed old, unfortunately obscure Spectromancer. It's a computer card-like multiplayer game designed by Richard Garfield in which players start with a fully available spread of 20 cards (no unknown deck), 4 from each of 4 basic elements/mana types plus a special "element" of your choice. The players can't have repeated cards, and no two cards have the same mana cost, so your own hand tells you something about the opponent's. Moreover, there are a number of automatic constraints on hand composition that ensure that most of the time both players have a fighting chance. I had a lot of fun playing it back in the day, since it has a more level playing field than basically any CCG... The servers still seem to be up so if you wanted I'd be willing to play a few matches (though it's been several years), but unfortunately I don't think you would find a large enough player pool to justify getting into the game anymore...

I could be wrong, but would 'arcade-y' appropriately describe the sort of game you're looking for right now?

You haven’t mentioned a single FPS, but if you liked Cuphead and Furi, I would imagine that “boomer shooter” style FPSes might work well for you, even if you choose to go for a lower difficulty per the points you mentioned in your post. They obviously don’t play like any of the other games you’ve mentioned, but they offer a high skill ceiling and often have little to no required exploration or story. There are often secrets hidden in the levels, but they’re never necessary to find, and outside of that, it’s just solid core gameplay loops and some fast paced strategic decisions, I.e. entering a room and deciding how to tackle the enemies you see in the moment.

Some of my (somewhat) recent favorites in the genre include DUSK, Amid Evil, and the newer DOOM games (though the original entries from the 90s are great too if you haven’t played them, as well as games like Quake and Quake 2).

If you like X-Com and Balatro, may I introduce you to Fights in Tight Spaces? Turn based strategy deck building game where each level/room is a puzzle to solve by beating the crap out of a variety of enemies with special moves. Just started playing it a couple days ago (75% off on Steam) and it's enjoyable.

Something Tetris-adjacent would be Lumines Arise

Made by the same makers of Tetris Effect. Very pretty game with a good soundtrack that I cannot play or I will never be able to sleep.

A couple years ago I did some work with the Spitfire developers on their game Capes. The launch was fumbled a bit so it didn't get the best reviews out of the gate for who the publisher was trying to pitch it to but it is a pretty good turn based game with no random factors or meta gaming, just challenging missions. It has a lot of dialog and cutscenes but most of it is skipable and isn't that important for the mission objectives which are generally just stay alive and kill the baddies.

Since you mentioned Midnight Suns and Xcom you might like it. CristopherOdd also did a pretty good letsplay series for it.

I’d like to recommend Mount & Blade and Banished

Mount & Blade is kinda difficult to describe. It’s in a medieval setting, you pick your starting character like an RPG but then after the tutorial “quests”, you can completely ignore the quests, story, exploration, and while there are no “unlocks” there are shops which sell higher stat weapons/armour/horses for exponentially more money, so you can’t access the best of the best right from the get go. You can visit small villages and recruit the peasants to your army, and as they get more experience in fighting, you can sorta “level them up” by buying them better equipment and gear (or rather, paying some gold to instantly upgrade them, and they will magically have the new better gear straight away)

It has my favourite combat system ever — slightly physics-based combat, where you swing your weapon and it has to actually collide with the target to deal damage, and if you have much faster or slower relative velocity then you deal more or less damage. Think shooting an arrow at a horseback rider — if they’re moving towards you, the relative speed is much higher, and if they’re riding away from you, the relative speed is much lower.

Banished is also medieval setting, but it’s much closer to a city builder. There are no “unlocks” (that is, you can build any and all buildings right from the start as long as you can collect the resources) but there is progression — it’s much easier to collect enough wood for a wooden house than it is to collect enough stone for a stone house. However, the stone house consumes much less firewood per winter than the wooden house. You have a handful of villagers to start with, and you can build specific buildings and assign the villagers those jobs.

The game is pretty difficult because it doesn’t hold your hand with the simulation — I’ve had my village wiped out because I didn’t build enough houses early on (children will not pair up and make new villagers if they’re still living at home with parents) or because I made too many houses early on and couldn’t produce enough food in the middle of a population boom. I’ve had a tornado rip through the village, and I’ve had nomads join the village only to spread a pox across the whole town. I’ve had my townsfolk freeze to death because the distance between their workplace and their home was too great and they couldn’t warm themselves in winter. I’ve had large successful towns spiral into decay because we didn’t have enough iron to make quality tools and the entire township’s productivity suffered and our food collapsed, or our farm animals were diseased, or the fields and orchards were hit with blight, or the local blacksmith caught fire and I didn’t build a water well close enough. And after all this, I still love it, probably because it’s so unforgiving.

Have you tried Sifu? This is a game in the vein of Furi but larger in scope, so it's not just a boss rush game. It's got levels to explore and various enemy configurations and arenas to challenge you along with boss fights. The game is purely martial arts action, and demands perfection of skills to get through the levels. There is an interesting twist where every time you die, you respawn with a slightly older character.

I do enjoy simulation games like Civilization to an extent, but the "one more turn" aspect of them really hurts - very rarely do I want to go back to a campaign I've already started and have to re-figure out what my plans were. Something that is either a lot quicker of a loop or a lot easier to drop back in would be interesting to me though.

Based off this, I would suggest checking out Warhammer 40,000: Gladius - Relics of War

It's a 4X, but since it's Warhammer it's all about combat really. The maps are smaller and faster than Civ, but I often just start over and don't really care about it. Although it's easy to pick back up, as you're really just always building more stuff to help you murder everything. Easy to pick back up. Story is there, but easily skippable, not important and can be ignored. Often goes on sale and plenty of fun without buying any of the DLC. I don't know if I will ever get tired of playing the Necrons.

ive grown to call pick-up-put-down skill-based games 'desk toy' games. my two favorites are rocket league and osu. although i stopped playing rocket league a few years ago i still always recommend it for its raw gameplay loop and nearly infinite skill ceiling. you can play 1v1, 2s or 3s. youve likely heard of it, so ill be short. skins, season passes, mixed-bag playerbase.

osu is a decades running free to play rhythm game based on a japanese NDS minigame within a game that has, in my opinion, the least eye fatigue and most satisfying note hitting (circle clicking) around. the circles arent on a highway like guitar hero or dance dance revolution, instead appearing and fading in within a 3:4 area on your screen in the same place theyll be clicked. as much as i love guitar hero, i hate looking away after a song and seeing the walls warp at the speed of the notes pace that i stared at for 2-6 minutes. all that moves in osu is the timing circle that closes in on it and your cursor. you really feel like a metronome with one hand and a well-seasoned ballerina with the other when you get the hang of it and speed things up with complex patterns and timings. the game has nearly 20 years of user submitted beatmaps from every country in the world, with no shortage of content or skill ceiling in site. whether you choose to play solo or multiplayer, i recommend using the osu lazer client, as it has gameplay mechanics that were fixed alongside tons of QoL improvements and active development. only first party purchases are irl merch shipments and (what mostly amounts to) a server supporter tag.

Mario & Rabbids might be a shout , for an X-Com adjacent game.

I'm a fan of games with no/skippable story, no/limited exploration, no/limited unlocks, no/limited power ups - but high in strategy and/or skill based games that are pretty simple while still giving depth to it (aka something that can be picked up and put down without issue, eg picking right back off where you were after not playing for months

I feel like roguelites in general fit the description, stand outs for me would be FTL and Into the Breach

Both have unlocks, but you can hand wave it away with a save edit. Both have basically zero story. Just a basic premise that explains the theme. FTL is a space combat sim, and between fights there's strategy in route planning (in sector and between sectors) and crew/ship outfitting. There's also plenty of mods to extend the game if you find you like it and get bored with the core game.

Into the Breach plays like a turn based board game, where you need to consider placement, priorities, and what the board will look like in X moves. If you have Amazon Prime, it's free to keep forever from prime gaming

Edit: if you don't have prime I usually find that you can add something that's prime eligible to the cart and when you click checkout it either triggers a free trial or $1.99 for a week of prime. It's a way to pick up games from prime gaming for basically nothing if anything ever catches your eye. Edit edit: you don't actually have to complete checkout, once you activate the trial/week of prime you can cancel out the cart and just reap the other benefits of prime (TV, music, gaming, etc).

Since you mentioned Civilization and card games, I was reminded of Hexarchy, which is basically Civilization reimagined as a deck building game. Discovering new technologies adds cards to your deck, and then you juggle your current hand with some other resources to improve your cities and create new units.

The games tend to go a little faster than full Civilization, and there are campaign modes where you'll have smaller self-contained quests like "get a city to size 8" or "control 4 holy sites" so you can be making progress on the campaign without having to remember exactly what you were doing in previous steps.

The other one that jumps to mind is Forge, which is a knock-off version of Magic: The Gathering that includes a fun campaign mode similar to the old Shandalar game from MicroProse. You get to scratch the MTG itch without feeling like you're missing out or falling behind if you miss a day.

A lot of my favorite games tend to be the opposite of this, but I do love high skill level arcadey stuff based on score, time attack, high skill ceiling, etc. A few random suggestions:

• Archipelago: Take games, randomize everything in them, and do it across multiple games, or players, and to your level of customization. Infinitely replayable. Most of the mods skip story entirely. Check the list and see if any of the games catch your fancy!

• First-person shooters: There are many skill-based single player experiences like surf maps in CS that may do you well. Specifically I'd love to call Neon White out - it's a level-based time attack game where your guns have a "discard" function, eg handguns let you do an extra jump. VERY skippable story. (Some people recommend doing so!) And the Machine Girl soundtrack fucks, as a bonus.

• Light gun shooters: Point Blank and Time Crisis 2 or 3 may do you well as some examples?

• Rhythm games: Someone already mentioned osu, but Bemani games like DDR, SDVX, and IIDX extremely skill-heavy and have a long, steep hill if you want to climb em.

If you're into RTS, I can heartily recommend Beyond All Reason. It's a total annihilation like large scale strategy game, but if you've never played one of those, it doesn't matter (I haven't either).

It meets all of your requirement, plus, it's open source, free (gratis), and the official website is very, very well laid out, with great descriptions and stats for all of the units, buildings and hotkeys.

One of the things I really love about the game is that unlike a lot of RTSes, it's not interested in player clicking speed as a measure of skill. The game has very few "housekeeping" tasks like a game like StarCraft 2 has (spitting on hives, boosting nexuses, etc). You can queue up build orders wayyyy ahead of time and have units just perform those actions without having to babysit them, or even have them automatically repeat certain actions forever.

The result of this is that the games are determined far more by what type of strategy you decide to use, how well you manage your economy, and how good you are at adapting to the opponent doing those things rather than your APM or detailed micromanagement.

There's a very strong multiplayer community, and the most popular format is 8v8, which makes the game feel more like a team based game like a MOBA, with everyone having a defined role, rather than other multiplayer RTSes I've played.

There are also a few guys single player or coop options if paying against other people isn't your thing.

I've convinced most of my friends, many of whom aren't really even RTS fans to play, and it's been a blast.

I will recommend Solar Settlers. It's a sci-fi board game-like worker placement game where you need to balance production of resources to move workers around, to maintain a workforce and to build habitats for workers to eventually settle in within a given number of turns. Mechanically simple yet strategically deep and infinitely replayable. Difficulty will ramp up if you start winning, and then jump back down a bit if you lose, so it kind of self-balances to your skill level as you play more and more rounds. Rounds are short and all the context is on a single screen. You eventually get to unlock new alien species to play, so there is some degree of drip feeding new game elements, but not in a way that feels exploitative or particularly limiting.

BrainGoodGames has a few more games that may be interesting to check out as well. Do note that the Linux build is stuck on some earlier version of the game, but it runs well using Proton.

Look into asynchronous or singleplayer auto battlers. I'm going to suggest games off the beaten path, as I imagine you're aware of the bigger name titles.

Singleplayer-focused:

Vivid Knight (out on Steam, mobile)/Vivid World (sequel, not out, has active demo) - If you like a blend of light auto chess with active abilities and dungeon/loot management.

Gods vs Horrors (recent Steam release) - Simplified but fairly deep auto chess, if auto chess didn't have a chess board and you could only upgrade each unit one level. There's a focus on endless difficulty climbing if you're into that, and several ways to customize your starting conditions.

Esports Godfather [Warning: AI Art, decent but not ideal English localization] (Steam, complete experience but support ongoing for more content) - MOBA coaching simulator with a focus on the economic and tactical in-match decisions. Upcoming beta modes should offer a shorter experience, but the default way to play is in a long campaign climbing division ranks.

Teamfight Manager (Steam)/Teamfight Manager 2 (not released yet) - MOBA-like simulator, but the focus is on teams in a generic arena duking it out team deathmatch style, and the emphasis is heavily on being able to outsmart a fairly smart AI in ban/pick character drafting. There are economic sim elements, but they're relatively light. This does support private multiplayer leagues, and the sequel seems to be going in a more traditional MOBA direction with lanes and such.

Cauldron (Steam) - Hard to describe what exactly this is without getting into spoiler territory, but think of it as a sandbox that expands as you metaprogression your way through it. While there's always the ability to manually engage with the various games and puzzles present, much of the game nudges you towards setting it up to play itself.

Multiplayer:

I'll start by saying I've played a lot of them and have yet to find my ideal fit as a high-skill, low-APM player who also doesn't like tolerating F2P monetization but knows its hard to populate a userbase without it. I've very much been around the block with card games and competitive auto battlers, and they all have issues. If you want my opinions on those, it tends to boil down to one of "my APM can't handle the timer", "unethical monetization", "terrible balance team", or "sold out to Crypto/NFTs/etc post-launch period".

Evolve Lab (Steam, Early Access but playable and lacking bugs afaik in current state) - Pick up to three sea creatures with different variations on starting stats, movement, action tempo, etc. Each round, go to a shop and buy various actions for them to automatically use at times you specify, stat points, modifiers to make actions perform differently, and so on. Each third round, also draft a Core that acts like a Relic would, but specific to each of your units. And finally, each round fight against someone else's creation that lost at the round you're currently at, losing your unit permanently if you lose the fight. Lose all units, and that run is over. Making it past 12 rounds is considered a win, but the round count is endless unless you get past every previous player's best attempt, making you the new king of the hill. There's even a gradual unlock system that doesn't take long, but slowly introduces the game through having planets, each of which has larger drafting selections than the previous. This is a recent release and I'm enjoying my time with it so far. It can be played without online as well, though I have little experience with that mode of play.

Tears of Adria [Warning: Always online, can't get 100% unlocks without access to 4p] (Steam) - It looks jank and to some extent it is, but I've played nothing like it before, and it supports solo, co-op, or PvP play for up to 4. You start with an adventurer that can eventually be a party of up to 6, and run around collecting loot and doing quests depending on your character's background. Combat is fully autobattle, the strategy comes in deciding what loot to wear and buy, and what quests to do when, while you're being incentivized to go after various achievements for character unlocks. Characters differentiate themselves from what they can learn on level ups, what factions they're friendly/enemy to, and what DnD-esque statlines they have which dictate what types of equipment they can wear. Lots of secrets to find despite the world being static.

There's more I can list, let me know if this kind of post is helpful or not.

Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales has interested me since I've heard good things about Gwent, but since it's a Witcher game I don't know if that means it's mostly a story-based game and the gameplay is just a means to server the story.

11/10 game but it is indeed all story. There are some gwent-based puzzles in there, but like you said, they are to serve the story.

I've heard good things about Monster Train, but the fact it gets compared to Slay The Spire has led me to skipping it.

Another great game, but yes it is very similar to Slay the Spire and Balatro.

It sounds to me like roguelikes would be totally up your alley except for the rng nature of them. Maybe there are some roguelikes out there without too much rng? (can't think of any off the top of my head though)

Here are some games I've played recently that seem like they might fit your requirements:

• Beat Saber - vr game, pure skill based, can pick up and put down whenever, not really any microtransactions or powerups or whatever

• Bridge Constructor: Portal - fantastic little game, lots of levels, very strategic, can pick up and put down until you beat all the levels, then maybe replay to improve your scores

• Hexcells trilogy / Tametsi - minesweeper games with no rng, just pure thinking, clever and well-designed levels, can pick up and put down whenever (saw someone else recommend pictocross-like games, this would be in a similar vein to those in terms of casual and relaxing, yet very thinking-heavy)

My game preferences are almost the inverse of yours, so take this with at least a tablespoon of salt, but I think Tactical Breach Wizards might be worth a look. Basically, you control character(s) on a grid, they have abilities, and you are trying to coordinate them to achieve a goal (usually defeating the baddies, but there are additional bonus goals too). You get to reset whatever actions the characters take however many times you like, which lets you try a bunch of different things. For me, this basically turned every level into a puzzle where I tried 27 things just to make sure everyone was thrown out of a window and I shoved at least one person into the void and sealed the doors to stop the flow of enemies and only took two turns (it turns out I am a very slow player because of this). Levels aren't very long, you can play them out of order, and you can replay them with different characters (and skills) after the first time through (you do gain abilities on your way through though, so it doesn't meet that requirement). Might scratch the strategy/puzzle itch, at least?

My suggestions might all be a few years old, as I'm fairly out of the loop. Everything listed is available on PC.

Fighting games on the whole seem to fit your criteria pretty well, but I don't know which are the latest and greatest. If you grew up on arcades you can likely navigate the genre to find what tickles your fancy. I do know some of the newer games have simpler a.k.a. "modern" control options to help ease you into them, like Street Fighter 6. Or maybe you'd prefer a Smash Bros.-style game like Rivals of Aether I or II.

One Finger Death Punch and its sequel, are brawlers that kinda play like rhythm games. They are both on the extremely simple side in terms of controls - you only use two buttons - but can get fiendishly challenging and are quite addicting.

Also sounds like puzzle games could be a good genre for you... certain types of puzzles might click with some people more than others though. Baba Is You and Stephen's Sausage Roll probably fit your criteria best, though remembering the nuances of certain rules/techniques may fade over time away from the game. There are others I'd recommend as well, like Linelight, Pipe Push Paradise, Starseed Pilgrim, and Bonfire Peaks. I see Tetris Effect and Lumines Remastered have already been mentioned.

Iron Crypticle is a fun little arcade-style twin-stick shooter. Seems simple enough, but the challenge is in keeping that combo multiplier up to get to the endgame in good shape.

Invisible, Inc. is a highly underrated stealth strategy game. By all accounts it's one of the best in the X-Com vein.

If you're open to platformers (like Celeste or Super Meat Boy) you can try Geometry Dash, Octahedron, N++, or one of the OlliOlli games. I've not played Sanabi myself but I think it mostly fits, maybe apart from the story bit. There are also puzzle platformers, like Stealth Bastard Deluxe.

Metroidvanias (like Hollow Knight) are generally designed to have quite a bit of exploration/backtracking, gradual unlocks, as well as story segments that may not always be skippable. However, they are also usually designed for speedruns as well, so if you want to mainline the game you don't necessarily have to do it all. If you want to look into that genre, I'd suggest the two Ori games (original and sequel), which are platforming-focused metroidvanias with high skill ceilings that allow you to get into a nice flow state, especially the first one.

How do you feel about racing games? I was searching for one a few months back and got a lot of suggestions. Maybe something more arcade-style might suit you, like Trackmania. I expect most others I would suggest (like Parking Garage Rally Circuit or maybe #DRIVE Rally) probably will have car unlocks though, so you'd have to look around to find your sweet spot.

Actually, sports games on the whole can probably qualify, but again I'm not sure what's the current state of the genre. You'd probably have to go for something more arcade-y or retro-themed to avoid some of the stuff you don't want though.

Hope this helps.

I would say Into The Breach for a puzzle game. If you can handle ASCII, give Brogue CE a try (free! open source!). In my family, the go to game for what you describe is Spelunky 2.

Hear me out, golf. If you’ve got the time and this doesn’t need to be a “while I’m holding a child” game, you might enjoy it.

• No/skippable story
• no/limited exploration
• no/limited unlocks, no/limited power ups (there is equipment, but there’s no reason to buy fancy clubs if you don’t want to)
• but high in strategy and/or skill
• pretty simple while still giving depth to it
• picking right back off where you were after not playing for months (totally normal for all casual golfers)

The time commitment can be flexible, especially if you have a 9 hole course nearby, or if your 18 offers a 9 hole price. Twilight golf in the afternoon/evening seasonally is a great way to fit in 9-18 holes for significantly reduced prices.

All this and you get to go for a walk, and/or drive a golf cart, which is a surprisingly fun minigame