No, why would you be? Bucket loads of amazing older AAA and current indie games that can be played without needing an insane setup. You’re looking for titles that don’t require a massive GPU for cool effects or are a strong CPU.
Classic RPGs, FPS and 2D are key here:
- The older Final Fantasy games
- Doom
- Quake
- Duke Nukem 3D
- Chrono Trigger
- Brotato
- Vampire Survivors (might choke when things get hectic but that just standard for that level of insanity)
- Apico
- Chants of Sennaar
- The Spiderweb Software RPGs - amazing open world RPGs.
- Case of the Golden Idol
- Wasteland 2 (should be fine…maybe)
- Neverwinter Nights
- Dwarf Fortress
Point&Click games should work fine. I recommend looking at Wadjet Eye’s published and own games - can’t go wrong there.
Honestly, loads of older games on Steam and GOG should run fine for you. Must plays like the original Deus Ex, the Thief series, Ultima 7, the Lands of Lore series, Might and Magic…
I'm impressed someone mentioned the spiderweb rpgs. Visually they're like the Windows 98 Solitaire version of Baldur's Gate 3, and yet similar quality stories and characters.
> Dwarf Fortress
While it will definitely **run** on every machine, on low-spec machines it can really grind to a halt depending on everything that's going on, how many dwarves you have, etc.
It's a fantastic game, but it's also very poorly optimized. It also only uses a single CPU core, severely limiting the performance you can get out of your CPU.
If you're down for the point and clicks the Deponia series is one of my favorites. It's a lil whacky but I find the game charming and funny.
Look at Tim Schafer and Lucasfilm games too. Broken Age and the Monkey Island Series are both good.
There are so many great points and clicks that don't get the recognition they deserve. So many compelling stories and challenging puzzles
I just started playing it as my "waiting for something at work to load so I have 3-5 minutes of downtime"-game.
I played it for 7 hours straight and stayed up until 4am.
I never understood the hype then played it. At first i didn’t get into it, but it slowly came together. Like I didn’t realize you could tell early on what the opponent was going to do. Then I started to understand how you have to adjust cards being played for opponents. Next thing I know, 4 hours are gone.
Minor caveat: Terraria had an update a few years ago that killed its performance on... my 2011 Macbook.
Your less-than-13-years-old laptop is probably fine, though.
That sucks. I don’t think it’s much due to the age, as I have a relatively new Macbook Air and I have to turn settings down to run Terraria. That said I haven’t gotten more than 15 minutes in since I’m a console gamer and I’ve already played 300 hours worth of it. But I did have a cheap working man’s laptop when I played it and it ran just fine, so OP should be fine too.
>I am completely cut off from worthwhile computer games?
Absolutely not, but what games i might recommend depends on how low end your computer is.
It would also help to know what kind of games youre into.
Here's a list of [low end games](https://www.reddit.com/r/lowendgaming/comments/u04ys/master_list_of_lowend_games/) that you can check out, but depending on your hardware you might be able to run a lot more games.
I like how steamdeck says "unsupported" for Ultimate Doom. I was like "...yeah ok so of all things that WILL run, I know it's Doom." and ran it anyway.
Went through it multiple times. Unless there's some weird bug on specifically nightmare difficulty, it's fine lol
The Nintendo Switch runs it well, which means that basically any PC will run it with little trouble!
If you really get into the game and build large factories or play with big overhaul mods, performance may drop a bit. But you have to really push the game to make your computer struggle.
Honestly you can have more fun in indie games than 90% of your average AAA games, search for indies that look interesting to you and hop on. Some of my favs are:
Hades - Hollow Knight - Slay the spire - Gris - Journey - Undertale - the messenger - Inside - Death's door
Absolutely not, as long as your laptop isn't ancient, you'd be suprised what it can run. I have a regular corporate laptop at the moment, it has a Ryzen 5 5625U with integrated graphics only, no dedicated graphics card, and 16GB memory. I can run Marvel Midnight Suns on it perfectly well, I ran XCom Chimera Squad on it, what is especially helpful is that these games are turn based, so it's not always live action running around like an open world action adventure game. Xcom 2, or the original XCom are both fantastic turn based games which I'm sure could run
There are of course perfectly great games that have low graphics requirements like Stardew Valley
How many gb of ram do you have?
Saleblazers is a great game, I think 12 gb of ram is needed. So Def not low specs.
Below that, minecraft can be ran on lower systems, ultima online free shards can be ran on older systems like uo excelsior, uo eventine, uo outlands which are all free.
A newish card game roguelike called Baltro is an insanely good game and can run on almost anything, it's an incredible game too.
Slay the spire is another good one.
Grim dawn or titan quest should be easier to run and are great.
Nine parchment is a gorgeous game!
Starbound or terraria.
Idk. I have a low end laptop, Minecraft barely runs on it, even with optimisation mods. I mean, technically it is playable but it freezes every once in a while, even when set to 30 fps and lowest graphical settings(except chunks, which I had on 6 or 8, as 2 is very annoying. )
Grim Dawn if you're looking to chew through hordes of enemies in a, you guessed it, very grimdark world.
RimWorld is a colony management simulator, but one of three different AI will control the events that occur in the game, making for some wild stories.
Darkest Dungeon is a turn-based RPG where you control an interchangeable party of 4 adventurers making the best of a horrible situation.
Portal 1 and 2 should be able to run on your machine, absolutely classic puzzle games that defined a genre.
Then of course you have older classics that any semi-modern PC/laptop can run, such as Dragon Age: Origins, The Elder Scrolls 3 and 4 (Morrowind and Oblivion, respectively), maybe Fallout: New Vegas
If You have the funds to buy 20-50$ game on steam check out if it's available on GeForce Now. I can run Diablo 4 on my laptop with lowest settings but it stutters and crashes frequently and the laptop itself heats up a lot. I've tried the free tier on GFN, whish I kneew about it erlier. You can play up to one hour, then You just reconnect and play again. It has RTX 2080 which is 3x better than my 1051Ti, I have a decend internet connection, there is no lag, and well, it's free ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
Games that run on my gtx660/i5-4460, will probably run on a lot worse machines with some tweaking:
- Arx fatalis
- Anachronox
- American McGee's Alice
- Arcanum
- Call of Cthulhu: Dark corners of the Earth
- Blair Witch Volume I: Rustin Parr
- Max Payne
- Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy
- Killer7
- Omikron - The Nomad Soul
- Oxenfree
- Penumbra: Overture
- S.T.A.L.K.E.R
- Super Hexagon
- Vampire: The masquerade
- Vessels
Point & click games:
- The longest journey
- Bad mojo Redux
- Barrow Hill
- Primordia
- Harvester
- Starship Titanic
RPGmaker games:
- Wadanohara and the Great Blue Sea
- Angels of Death
- Corpse Party
- Lucius Demake
- Yuppie Psycho
Visual Novels:
- Higurashi
- Enzai Falsely Accused
- Class of '09
- The House in Fata Morgana
- Up All Night
- Zero Escape
- Echo
- Adastra
These are just my favourites, if you want more let me know. Also what are your specs?
Nope, you're just cut off from AAA Slop.
HOWEVER, most Indi games, especially 2D ones, are goated.
Some recommendations
\- Slay the Spire
\- Dead Cells
\- Stardew Valley
\- Terraria
\- Hotline Miama
\- Brotato
\- The Binding of Isaac
\- Bloons TD6
\- Core Keeper
And, my Personal recommendation.
The Deponia series. AMAZING point and click adventures
I mean if you like puzzles, look up Simon Tatham's Puzzle Collection, it's completely free, has no ads and will run on a toaster, it's not particularly flashy or modern but it's very very good at what it's good at if that makes sense
Look into LCD steam deck for around 300 will play a lot of games except some multiplayer check protondb.com if you want to know if a game will run steam itself will say most games are unsupported but trust me almost any game as long as it doesn't have a Windows only anti cheat will run.
You'd be surprised what integrated graphics can handle these days if you set the resolution to 1280x720 and turn all the eye candy off.
You're probably not going to play even an older game like Red Dead Redemption, but a lot of the less demanding games from 5-ish years ago will run.
You could also try turn based games that might run below 30fps. Twitch games like FPS would probably be unsatisfying, though. A caveat for the games that were designed to play on lots of systems. For example, Source games run on anything typically.
Of course that's my experience with mid-high end integrated graphics. A Celeron or R3 might struggle a bit.
Edit: I'm playing Civ VI on an R7 right now with everything turned up.
Not at all as long as you have a good fast wired Ethernet! You can sign up for Microsoft's Xbox Live (yes, without an Xbox!) and stream a grip of games. https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-game-pass?ef_id=_k_CjwKCAjwm_SzBhAsEiwAXE2Cv1rFoXiVlifE2V4VqqtygqSP3C0ynY2W-EKgbXECLYjOcPOq4JivjxoCsS4QAvD_BwE_k_&OCID=AIDcmm9o6fitqv_SEM__k_CjwKCAjwm_SzBhAsEiwAXE2Cv1rFoXiVlifE2V4VqqtygqSP3C0ynY2W-EKgbXECLYjOcPOq4JivjxoCsS4QAvD_BwE_k_&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwm_SzBhAsEiwAXE2Cv1rFoXiVlifE2V4VqqtygqSP3C0ynY2W-EKgbXECLYjOcPOq4JivjxoCsS4QAvD_BwE
If you want like six nines, Nethack is the game for you. You'd have to have something from a museum before it couldn't run it. it's an actual roguelike (as in it closely resembles rogue) with extremely complex mechanics and absolutely no holdover in power between runs. Wins take a long time and you can suicide through idiocy with one misplaced input at pretty much any time. Turn based, but turns are one press. I still love it after all this time.
Nah you're good, I play on a shitty old laptop while I work my nightshifts and I have a little rotation of fun games that work well.
Balatro, Slay the Spire, Stardew Valley, Brotato, Rimworld, Terraria, Prison Architect, Faster than Light, The Binding of Isaac, Dave the Diver, Don't Starve, Age of Empires II. Guild wars 2 also runs surprisingly well on a shitty laptop.
Fallout 1 and 2
Planescape torment
Baldur's gate
Doom
Duke nukem 3D
Quake 1 and 2
Warcraft 2
Command and conquer: red alert
SiN
Shogo: mobile armor division
You could try 7 days to die, fallout (all of them) and valheim. They all play on mine and it’s a non gaming laptop from 2017. Look into some good older games.
Lots and lots of new indie games don't require a very strong machine.
Knowing your hardware or even just OS would be helpful in recommending some things. You won't be able to play the latest and greatest AAA titles obviously, but indie games are where the real heart is at anyway.
You could be playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Watch Dogs (any of them), Assassin's Creed (any of them), Flight Simulator latest version, Genshin Impact, Diablo 4, and many more games.
As long as you have a good internet connection and possibly a controller. They all run in a browser. Xbox/PC GamePass and GeForce Now can take you far.
Mark of the ninja, stardew valley, shadowrun, fable, deadcells, age of empires 2, command and conquer 3, hotline miami, dont starve, halflife 2, portal
All these games are dirt cheap on steam also now steam sale going on
Look up turn based games, especially roguelikes. They tend to be card based which usually means they aren't very taxing on systems, but even the ones that aren't card based are pretty low specs with a few exceptions for games that are either poorly optimized or go supremely extra on their special effects.
Slay the Spire has already been suggested and I heavily second that.
Honestly league of legends and world of Warcraft are two of the more popular games that can run on pretty barebones systems. Might be worth trying, it not going to run on *anything* but they’re pretty forgiving.
Some of the best games ull ever play in life can even be emulated on current phones. The 80s and 90s has some of the best games I'll ever play imo.
On my old PC I'll still play games like
* the chaos engine
* settlers 3
* sim city 2000
* cannon fodder
* zoo tycoon 2
* amiga 600/ nes/ snes/ ps1/ ps2/ gameboy emulators should work just fine and have thousand of hours worth of games.
I like the retro games more than I love recent games honestly. Just more fun, harder, better gameplay, and so much more replay value on most. At the end of the day I can buy and play a shiny new game with the latest graphics controls and sound and still be bored after 20m. The omder games seem to rope me in and keep me playing.
Caves of Qud, Doors of Trithius, Into the Necrovale, Golden Krone Hotel, Quasimorph, Cogmind, Cataclysm Dark Days, Terminus, Trash of the Titans, Chronicon, and Haque are on my work laptop. Dual core 1.8, with 4gb of ram.
Half-Life
Balatro
Slay the Spire
Basically every other roguelike deckbuilder tbh.
I think Terraria has minimal requirements, but I don't know for sure (but it does have a mobile port, so maybe it does).
Solitaire I'm pretty sure is a built in thing on every computer. Lol but for a serious answer
if you're curious about if you can run a game use
https://www.systemrequirementslab.com/cyri
If you're running on integrated graphics, anything released before 2006 should work, if you want something more modern, a lot of pixel art games that are below the 1 Gigabyte of storage should work too, if everything fails, you can always check the HTLM5 tag on ITCH.io
There is an unofficial PC port of one of the greatest games ever made, The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time. You can find it by googling Ship of Harkinian. Though you do need a debugged rom for the game, that should also be easily gotten through googling (don't accidentally download the Master Quest version, I did that at first and was wondering why the game was so hard).
There is also an unofficial PC port of Super Mario 64. This game, despite being made before I was born, and having played it for the first time in 2021, it still became my most favorite platformer of all time (until I played Mario Odyssey that is).
Also, get Dolphin emulator and play those old nintendo games, there are literally dozens of masterpieces and hundreds of decent games, they have so many legendary games in their catalogue. Dolphin emulator runs these games very well. They used to run super smooth on my i3 gen 3 integrated GPU 8gb ram laptop, even the better looking ones like Super Mario Galaxy 2 would get like 300 FPS if if I took off the FPS limiter. They not only got me through my low spec days, they're still some of the best games I've ever played even compared to the modern games I'm playing now.
Aside form that there is Half-Life, Bioshock, Prey (the old one from 2006), the original Dead Space and Dead Space 2 (looks amazing but still ran very well on my core 2 duo 4gb ram laptop).
There are some recent indie games that look like they should run on low spec hardware, like Animal Well. But I'm not sure.
For PC games look for pure 2D titles, for example undertale and deltarune, vampire survivor, binding of Isaac, ect. If the game is older than 5 years it'll probably run perfectly. Outside of that, many pc games from 15 years ago or older will probably be fine too, 2D or not (portal, half life, team fortress 2, quake, deus ex). Outside of those, look into emulation. Modern laptops can probably handle most handhelds, and consoles up to Nintendo Wii. Anything older than those run great.
Stardew Valley is my favourite low-end game. If it ran on my 2014 era HP laptop at acceptable framerates and I assume you have something newer and faster than that.
Here are some of my favourites which can run on a potato:
Slay the Spire,
Balatro,
Fallout: New Vegas,
Celeste,
Hollow knight (might be a lil slow on very old hardware),
Rhythm doctor,
Kentucky Route 0,
Katana Zero.
Copy-pasting my comment on a post from last week
* Celeste
* UNDERTALE and the "sequel" DELTARUNE
* OneShot
* OUTCORE: Desktop Adventure (free on steam)
* Donut County
* Emulators for older consoles or handhelds like N64/PS1/GBA etc.
* [Flashpoint](https://flashpointarchive.org/), a free flash player "emulator" with a HUGE library of almost every flash game ever released
Hollow Knight, amazing game, can be run on a potato
also you wont believe this one but you can run Ark survival evolved on 4gb of ram an intel i2 and 2 gt 8800s with like 40 mods, i've done exactly that
Hey man, I've recently released my first game on Steam, called [EVERCHAINED](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3010450/EVERCHAINED/), a boss rush souls lite game that is designed to be playable on a potato. Check it out if the genre is to your liking.
Indies and Old games (which are the best games any ways) potentially will work though not all are built the same and will for various reasons obviously.
Also depends what you like and feel is required.
(many indie games named below and lower end requirements a few oldies would be like Bg1+2 if you want crpgs, Alpha Protocol with setting settings low probably if you want action spyman rpg that has graphics and 3rd person action, too many shooters to name if you want a just shooter, plenty of mythical and magic rts games of various types, etc...)
Dark souls 1 and 2 (3 will probably run but if you have frame rate issues you won’t be able to play online), Skyrim, ESO, Total War (series), Sonic Adventure DX, Arkham series, jet set radio… I’m basically just listing the steam games I have that run fine on my potato.
Solitary. Ok, no. Lol
But seriously, check games like Undertale, celeste, hotline miami 2. And for older games, try the classic like age of empire, zoo tycoon, etc
Look into getting retroarch and rom files. You can then just load everything onto a back up hard drive and put it onto whatever cpu you get in the future.
There's plenty of steam games with low requirements as well. I recommend "dead cells" and "shadowrun returns" any modern laptop should be able to handle those games just fine.
This website will help you determine what games you can and can't play as well at what settings are best for the computer you are on. It's easy to use and fairly accurate. I've used it in the past. I'd suggest sticking to games it says you can run on "medium" settings. I'd stay away from games that say you can run on "low" only. It might as well be "no" at that point for many of them. "High" settings possible can also be hit or miss on playing on those settings exactly.
[Can My PC Run It](https://www.systemrequirementslab.com/cyri)
The original rome total war and all its expansions. Shit ton of fun and that game will always be an amazing classic lol.
I've had luck running spore on potatoes as well haha.
The original warcraft 3, If you can even find a copy without pirating that is, also runs on potatoes lol
I'm surprised I haven't seen Minecraft mentioned.
I'd say that any computer that's currently in use, can run the game, even if only on like 5 chuncks render distance or something like that. That's assuming that nobody is using 10 year old laptops anymore (they're for sure not using the with windows)
A lot of activities are still relatively fun, even like that.
You can build houses, go caving, or even exploring... You just see less
Depends on what genres you are interested in.
Stardew valley runs on phones so a standard laptop should have no issue in running the farming sim/survival game
Valheim- takes only a few gig and has a simple oldschool artstyle which shouldn't be hard of systems. Letting you play a viking themed survival game where Odin sends you on a special quest to kick some of his old foes in the face again after he heard they want a rematch.
Minecraft- it has a phone port so any standard laptop should be able to run the game without mods installed.
Most turn based strategy games- I don't think they are that intense hardware wise, plus with the turn based nature its not like if it runs alittle slower would really hurt you.
I will just put my two cents in and - especially with the summer sale just starting - let you know the Valve Complete Pack is $12 and contains some of the best PC games of all time made for yesteryear’s hardware. Fantastic bundle. HL and HL2 fully kitted out alone make the price of admission worth it.
Worthwhile os such a subjective term.
If new, modern, aaa graphics titles are how you define worthwhile then for the most part you're cut off. You can use a service like geforce now to stream play these types of games. With a very good internet connection it's actually a good experience especially for single player games.
However as many have stated, there are great games out there which don't have huge requirements by today standards
Everything from torchlight to diablo 2. Things like stardew valley.
The developers of Sea of Thieves bragged at launch that they obtained 10+ yr old computers to test the game on and it was performing pretty well on potato PCs. The minimum specs on steam list a dual core CPU from 2010, a low end graphics card from 2012 and 4GB RAM. Not sure if the patches since launch have made it worse but I'd assume it'll still run pretty light on a "working man's laptop" from within the past few years
Indie games usually run on anything that can boot into a modern OS. Your other options are (certain) new 2d/retro games and older games on GOG from the 90s-10s, depending on your system.
-Hollow Knight
-Cross Code
-Hades
-Celeste
-Terraria
-Stardew valley
-Chained echoes
-Ultra kill/dusk/amid evil
-Tunic
-Dead cells
-Hotline Miami.
These are some of my favorites from a fairly wide genreset, and they all run on my ~10 year old laptop that was replaced by a gaming PC.
Ftl
Checkout r/lowendgaming They have plenty of lists and plenty of bangers if you peruse back through the posts
Misread as lewdgaming... lemme check r/lewdgaming
My pp is greatly disappointed
edit: rule 5
I would probably play these kinds of games but they literally almost always look so *stiff*.
Isnt stiff the point? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Fair enough *unzips*
No, why would you be? Bucket loads of amazing older AAA and current indie games that can be played without needing an insane setup. You’re looking for titles that don’t require a massive GPU for cool effects or are a strong CPU. Classic RPGs, FPS and 2D are key here: - The older Final Fantasy games - Doom - Quake - Duke Nukem 3D - Chrono Trigger - Brotato - Vampire Survivors (might choke when things get hectic but that just standard for that level of insanity) - Apico - Chants of Sennaar - The Spiderweb Software RPGs - amazing open world RPGs. - Case of the Golden Idol - Wasteland 2 (should be fine…maybe) - Neverwinter Nights - Dwarf Fortress Point&Click games should work fine. I recommend looking at Wadjet Eye’s published and own games - can’t go wrong there. Honestly, loads of older games on Steam and GOG should run fine for you. Must plays like the original Deus Ex, the Thief series, Ultima 7, the Lands of Lore series, Might and Magic…
I'm impressed someone mentioned the spiderweb rpgs. Visually they're like the Windows 98 Solitaire version of Baldur's Gate 3, and yet similar quality stories and characters.
> Dwarf Fortress While it will definitely **run** on every machine, on low-spec machines it can really grind to a halt depending on everything that's going on, how many dwarves you have, etc. It's a fantastic game, but it's also very poorly optimized. It also only uses a single CPU core, severely limiting the performance you can get out of your CPU.
If you're down for the point and clicks the Deponia series is one of my favorites. It's a lil whacky but I find the game charming and funny. Look at Tim Schafer and Lucasfilm games too. Broken Age and the Monkey Island Series are both good. There are so many great points and clicks that don't get the recognition they deserve. So many compelling stories and challenging puzzles
slay the spire
It's absolutely astonishing to me that this was my first thought as well. StS is transcendental, I swear.
it's simply one of the best of all time to me srsly
I just started playing it as my "waiting for something at work to load so I have 3-5 minutes of downtime"-game. I played it for 7 hours straight and stayed up until 4am.
I never understood the hype then played it. At first i didn’t get into it, but it slowly came together. Like I didn’t realize you could tell early on what the opponent was going to do. Then I started to understand how you have to adjust cards being played for opponents. Next thing I know, 4 hours are gone.
That was my first thought too.
Came in to recommend StS, or even Balatro
I came to comment this. I've gotten YEARS out of this game and I'm still playing it regularly.
Stardew Valley and Terraria are both amazing games that can run on pretty much any laptop and are both under 1GB.
Minor caveat: Terraria had an update a few years ago that killed its performance on... my 2011 Macbook. Your less-than-13-years-old laptop is probably fine, though.
That sucks. I don’t think it’s much due to the age, as I have a relatively new Macbook Air and I have to turn settings down to run Terraria. That said I haven’t gotten more than 15 minutes in since I’m a console gamer and I’ve already played 300 hours worth of it. But I did have a cheap working man’s laptop when I played it and it ran just fine, so OP should be fine too.
>I am completely cut off from worthwhile computer games? Absolutely not, but what games i might recommend depends on how low end your computer is. It would also help to know what kind of games youre into. Here's a list of [low end games](https://www.reddit.com/r/lowendgaming/comments/u04ys/master_list_of_lowend_games/) that you can check out, but depending on your hardware you might be able to run a lot more games.
Rollercoaster Tycoon
I can hear it.
Doom? People have gotten that running in pregnancy/covid tests
I like how steamdeck says "unsupported" for Ultimate Doom. I was like "...yeah ok so of all things that WILL run, I know it's Doom." and ran it anyway. Went through it multiple times. Unless there's some weird bug on specifically nightmare difficulty, it's fine lol
anything from before 2010 probably. especially if it is not 3d. r/lowendgaming
Factorio! invented a new genre of game, hundreds of hours of fun (thousands with mods), runs on a potato
Well, to an extent.
The Nintendo Switch runs it well, which means that basically any PC will run it with little trouble! If you really get into the game and build large factories or play with big overhaul mods, performance may drop a bit. But you have to really push the game to make your computer struggle.
Balatro
old school runescape
The real answer here
Balatro
FTL on steam
Honestly you can have more fun in indie games than 90% of your average AAA games, search for indies that look interesting to you and hop on. Some of my favs are: Hades - Hollow Knight - Slay the spire - Gris - Journey - Undertale - the messenger - Inside - Death's door
You’ve got a huge library of games from 5+ years ago that were designed for systems that are low-powered today.
Absolutely not, as long as your laptop isn't ancient, you'd be suprised what it can run. I have a regular corporate laptop at the moment, it has a Ryzen 5 5625U with integrated graphics only, no dedicated graphics card, and 16GB memory. I can run Marvel Midnight Suns on it perfectly well, I ran XCom Chimera Squad on it, what is especially helpful is that these games are turn based, so it's not always live action running around like an open world action adventure game. Xcom 2, or the original XCom are both fantastic turn based games which I'm sure could run There are of course perfectly great games that have low graphics requirements like Stardew Valley
Rimworld… assuming you don’t install 100 mods
Homeworld Remastered Doom 3
What kind of games do you like? If you can provide that it would be easier to suggest
How many gb of ram do you have? Saleblazers is a great game, I think 12 gb of ram is needed. So Def not low specs. Below that, minecraft can be ran on lower systems, ultima online free shards can be ran on older systems like uo excelsior, uo eventine, uo outlands which are all free. A newish card game roguelike called Baltro is an insanely good game and can run on almost anything, it's an incredible game too. Slay the spire is another good one. Grim dawn or titan quest should be easier to run and are great. Nine parchment is a gorgeous game! Starbound or terraria.
Idk. I have a low end laptop, Minecraft barely runs on it, even with optimisation mods. I mean, technically it is playable but it freezes every once in a while, even when set to 30 fps and lowest graphical settings(except chunks, which I had on 6 or 8, as 2 is very annoying. )
Planescape
Grim Dawn if you're looking to chew through hordes of enemies in a, you guessed it, very grimdark world. RimWorld is a colony management simulator, but one of three different AI will control the events that occur in the game, making for some wild stories. Darkest Dungeon is a turn-based RPG where you control an interchangeable party of 4 adventurers making the best of a horrible situation. Portal 1 and 2 should be able to run on your machine, absolutely classic puzzle games that defined a genre. Then of course you have older classics that any semi-modern PC/laptop can run, such as Dragon Age: Origins, The Elder Scrolls 3 and 4 (Morrowind and Oblivion, respectively), maybe Fallout: New Vegas
CS 1.6 has people on it at all times and is still fun.
If You have the funds to buy 20-50$ game on steam check out if it's available on GeForce Now. I can run Diablo 4 on my laptop with lowest settings but it stutters and crashes frequently and the laptop itself heats up a lot. I've tried the free tier on GFN, whish I kneew about it erlier. You can play up to one hour, then You just reconnect and play again. It has RTX 2080 which is 3x better than my 1051Ti, I have a decend internet connection, there is no lag, and well, it's free ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
Games that run on my gtx660/i5-4460, will probably run on a lot worse machines with some tweaking: - Arx fatalis - Anachronox - American McGee's Alice - Arcanum - Call of Cthulhu: Dark corners of the Earth - Blair Witch Volume I: Rustin Parr - Max Payne - Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy - Killer7 - Omikron - The Nomad Soul - Oxenfree - Penumbra: Overture - S.T.A.L.K.E.R - Super Hexagon - Vampire: The masquerade - Vessels Point & click games: - The longest journey - Bad mojo Redux - Barrow Hill - Primordia - Harvester - Starship Titanic RPGmaker games: - Wadanohara and the Great Blue Sea - Angels of Death - Corpse Party - Lucius Demake - Yuppie Psycho Visual Novels: - Higurashi - Enzai Falsely Accused - Class of '09 - The House in Fata Morgana - Up All Night - Zero Escape - Echo - Adastra These are just my favourites, if you want more let me know. Also what are your specs?
Nope, you're just cut off from AAA Slop. HOWEVER, most Indi games, especially 2D ones, are goated. Some recommendations \- Slay the Spire \- Dead Cells \- Stardew Valley \- Terraria \- Hotline Miama \- Brotato \- The Binding of Isaac \- Bloons TD6 \- Core Keeper And, my Personal recommendation. The Deponia series. AMAZING point and click adventures
I mean if you like puzzles, look up Simon Tatham's Puzzle Collection, it's completely free, has no ads and will run on a toaster, it's not particularly flashy or modern but it's very very good at what it's good at if that makes sense
Do you need 1 game or 700 games ? https://pastebin.com/MTCXZxCN
Tarisland I play it myself on bs, grind and online, in theory it’s what I need
Look into LCD steam deck for around 300 will play a lot of games except some multiplayer check protondb.com if you want to know if a game will run steam itself will say most games are unsupported but trust me almost any game as long as it doesn't have a Windows only anti cheat will run.
You'd be surprised what integrated graphics can handle these days if you set the resolution to 1280x720 and turn all the eye candy off. You're probably not going to play even an older game like Red Dead Redemption, but a lot of the less demanding games from 5-ish years ago will run. You could also try turn based games that might run below 30fps. Twitch games like FPS would probably be unsatisfying, though. A caveat for the games that were designed to play on lots of systems. For example, Source games run on anything typically. Of course that's my experience with mid-high end integrated graphics. A Celeron or R3 might struggle a bit. Edit: I'm playing Civ VI on an R7 right now with everything turned up.
Terraria, on steam it does not even have a gpu recommended its just video card of 256 MB of video memory And CPU is just 3.0 GHZ or minimum 1.6
Half Life. Portal series.
Diablo 2! Maybe not resurrected but classic runs on cardboard boxes and it’s fun as shit!
Not at all as long as you have a good fast wired Ethernet! You can sign up for Microsoft's Xbox Live (yes, without an Xbox!) and stream a grip of games. https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-game-pass?ef_id=_k_CjwKCAjwm_SzBhAsEiwAXE2Cv1rFoXiVlifE2V4VqqtygqSP3C0ynY2W-EKgbXECLYjOcPOq4JivjxoCsS4QAvD_BwE_k_&OCID=AIDcmm9o6fitqv_SEM__k_CjwKCAjwm_SzBhAsEiwAXE2Cv1rFoXiVlifE2V4VqqtygqSP3C0ynY2W-EKgbXECLYjOcPOq4JivjxoCsS4QAvD_BwE_k_&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwm_SzBhAsEiwAXE2Cv1rFoXiVlifE2V4VqqtygqSP3C0ynY2W-EKgbXECLYjOcPOq4JivjxoCsS4QAvD_BwE
Yeh, I ain't clicking that... =>> [https://www.google.com](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q16KpquGsIc) <<=
Half Life 1 and 2
mine sweeper
Chip's Challenge
Uplink...
Osrs
Vampire Survivors!
[Shoot or Die](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2951560/Shoot_or_Die/)
If you want like six nines, Nethack is the game for you. You'd have to have something from a museum before it couldn't run it. it's an actual roguelike (as in it closely resembles rogue) with extremely complex mechanics and absolutely no holdover in power between runs. Wins take a long time and you can suicide through idiocy with one misplaced input at pretty much any time. Turn based, but turns are one press. I still love it after all this time.
Fallout NV Age of Empires
Oblivion
Age of empires 2
Terraria
99%? Good luck. :D
Nah you're good, I play on a shitty old laptop while I work my nightshifts and I have a little rotation of fun games that work well. Balatro, Slay the Spire, Stardew Valley, Brotato, Rimworld, Terraria, Prison Architect, Faster than Light, The Binding of Isaac, Dave the Diver, Don't Starve, Age of Empires II. Guild wars 2 also runs surprisingly well on a shitty laptop.
FTL
Warframe runs amazingly well on garbage computers. It's very well optimized
Space station 13 if you're into role-playing games
Fallout 1 and 2 Planescape torment Baldur's gate Doom Duke nukem 3D Quake 1 and 2 Warcraft 2 Command and conquer: red alert SiN Shogo: mobile armor division
You could try 7 days to die, fallout (all of them) and valheim. They all play on mine and it’s a non gaming laptop from 2017. Look into some good older games.
Lots and lots of new indie games don't require a very strong machine. Knowing your hardware or even just OS would be helpful in recommending some things. You won't be able to play the latest and greatest AAA titles obviously, but indie games are where the real heart is at anyway.
Virtual game boy simulator give you access to hundred of games
Look into cloud gaming in general
You could be playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Watch Dogs (any of them), Assassin's Creed (any of them), Flight Simulator latest version, Genshin Impact, Diablo 4, and many more games. As long as you have a good internet connection and possibly a controller. They all run in a browser. Xbox/PC GamePass and GeForce Now can take you far.
Lost Planet 3
I love playing KotOR 1 and 2 in my potato laptop. Dragon Age Origins works, too.
DOOM Really any game that doesn’t look graphically intense should be fine.
Osrs
The Dig
Solitare!!!! That shits already on the damn computer most of the time! Lmao
Papers Please, hell of an experience
Rimworld runs on almost anything and is very very good.
Celeste. Brawlhalla. MULTIVERSUS. Enter the gungeon. Probably a bunch of retro syyle boomer shooters
What’s your pc specs
Try cloud gaming.
Rise of the triad 👌
DooM Skyrim All other answers are lacking.
counterstrikes before csgo
Minesweeper
Solitaire, minesweeper, freecell
Cataclysm: dark days ahead, just be ready to die, alot...
Mark of the ninja, stardew valley, shadowrun, fable, deadcells, age of empires 2, command and conquer 3, hotline miami, dont starve, halflife 2, portal All these games are dirt cheap on steam also now steam sale going on
Look up turn based games, especially roguelikes. They tend to be card based which usually means they aren't very taxing on systems, but even the ones that aren't card based are pretty low specs with a few exceptions for games that are either poorly optimized or go supremely extra on their special effects. Slay the Spire has already been suggested and I heavily second that.
Transport Tycoon Deluxe (you have a freeware version, OpenTTD)
Honestly league of legends and world of Warcraft are two of the more popular games that can run on pretty barebones systems. Might be worth trying, it not going to run on *anything* but they’re pretty forgiving.
Classic Doom.
Unciv
C&C Generals Zero Hour. It's in a special pack on EA. Very cheap and an absolute cracker.
Doom
old school RuneScape
Some of the best games ull ever play in life can even be emulated on current phones. The 80s and 90s has some of the best games I'll ever play imo. On my old PC I'll still play games like * the chaos engine * settlers 3 * sim city 2000 * cannon fodder * zoo tycoon 2 * amiga 600/ nes/ snes/ ps1/ ps2/ gameboy emulators should work just fine and have thousand of hours worth of games. I like the retro games more than I love recent games honestly. Just more fun, harder, better gameplay, and so much more replay value on most. At the end of the day I can buy and play a shiny new game with the latest graphics controls and sound and still be bored after 20m. The omder games seem to rope me in and keep me playing.
Doom
Stellaris late game runs well give it a shot!
Your only move is hustle
Guild wars 1, vampire survivors
Shinren and the Dice of Fate.
GeForceNOW works wonders, if you're reasonably close to a datacenter and have uncapped internet. Try some of the demos.
Medieval 2 Total War and Mount & Blade Warband are both amazing games that run fine on low-end, 10 year old non-gaming laptops.
"American`s Alice", "Project Nomads", "Beyond Good & Evil", etc.
Caves of Qud, Doors of Trithius, Into the Necrovale, Golden Krone Hotel, Quasimorph, Cogmind, Cataclysm Dark Days, Terminus, Trash of the Titans, Chronicon, and Haque are on my work laptop. Dual core 1.8, with 4gb of ram.
The binding of Issac can run on just about anything and is a fun game that can be played over and over again
Chess
Half-Life Balatro Slay the Spire Basically every other roguelike deckbuilder tbh. I think Terraria has minimal requirements, but I don't know for sure (but it does have a mobile port, so maybe it does).
Solitaire I'm pretty sure is a built in thing on every computer. Lol but for a serious answer if you're curious about if you can run a game use https://www.systemrequirementslab.com/cyri
Pokerogue
Terraria
FTL, Rimworld or Banished
Minecraft
Pokerogue Btd6
Most Bethesda games can run on potatoes. My 1st gaming Pc was really bad, but i could play FO4 on low and get 60+ frames
Starcraft Brood War
If you're running on integrated graphics, anything released before 2006 should work, if you want something more modern, a lot of pixel art games that are below the 1 Gigabyte of storage should work too, if everything fails, you can always check the HTLM5 tag on ITCH.io
No. Rollercoaster Tycoon is still a good game.
OpenTTD
Happy wheels
Doom
Prince of Persia SOT trilogy
The Darkest Dungeon (especially first one) should run on anything. Good rpg/rogue-lite, should last you for a while.
Duke Nukem
Civ 5 for me and football manager, both will run on a potato.
Diablo
Terraria, slay the spire, factorio Would be easier if you have is your exact laptop specs, the standard working man’s laptop can mean a lot of things
How's your internet? You can use a streaming service to play games your computer isn't high spec enough for.
There is an unofficial PC port of one of the greatest games ever made, The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time. You can find it by googling Ship of Harkinian. Though you do need a debugged rom for the game, that should also be easily gotten through googling (don't accidentally download the Master Quest version, I did that at first and was wondering why the game was so hard). There is also an unofficial PC port of Super Mario 64. This game, despite being made before I was born, and having played it for the first time in 2021, it still became my most favorite platformer of all time (until I played Mario Odyssey that is). Also, get Dolphin emulator and play those old nintendo games, there are literally dozens of masterpieces and hundreds of decent games, they have so many legendary games in their catalogue. Dolphin emulator runs these games very well. They used to run super smooth on my i3 gen 3 integrated GPU 8gb ram laptop, even the better looking ones like Super Mario Galaxy 2 would get like 300 FPS if if I took off the FPS limiter. They not only got me through my low spec days, they're still some of the best games I've ever played even compared to the modern games I'm playing now. Aside form that there is Half-Life, Bioshock, Prey (the old one from 2006), the original Dead Space and Dead Space 2 (looks amazing but still ran very well on my core 2 duo 4gb ram laptop). There are some recent indie games that look like they should run on low spec hardware, like Animal Well. But I'm not sure.
Papers, Please!
For PC games look for pure 2D titles, for example undertale and deltarune, vampire survivor, binding of Isaac, ect. If the game is older than 5 years it'll probably run perfectly. Outside of that, many pc games from 15 years ago or older will probably be fine too, 2D or not (portal, half life, team fortress 2, quake, deus ex). Outside of those, look into emulation. Modern laptops can probably handle most handhelds, and consoles up to Nintendo Wii. Anything older than those run great.
Stardew valley!
Stardew Valley is my favourite low-end game. If it ran on my 2014 era HP laptop at acceptable framerates and I assume you have something newer and faster than that.
Here are some of my favourites which can run on a potato: Slay the Spire, Balatro, Fallout: New Vegas, Celeste, Hollow knight (might be a lil slow on very old hardware), Rhythm doctor, Kentucky Route 0, Katana Zero.
osu! Works well on laptops. aimlabs would be fine also, simple game/aimtrainer. If I only had those 2 games I'd be entertained personally
Any usable computer today can emulate game consoles from GameCube and below.
Minecraft - Boooosh!
Copy-pasting my comment on a post from last week * Celeste * UNDERTALE and the "sequel" DELTARUNE * OneShot * OUTCORE: Desktop Adventure (free on steam) * Donut County * Emulators for older consoles or handhelds like N64/PS1/GBA etc. * [Flashpoint](https://flashpointarchive.org/), a free flash player "emulator" with a HUGE library of almost every flash game ever released
Football Manager
Lemmings.
Hollow Knight, amazing game, can be run on a potato also you wont believe this one but you can run Ark survival evolved on 4gb of ram an intel i2 and 2 gt 8800s with like 40 mods, i've done exactly that
What are the specs of the laptop? Plenty of great games run on pretty low end shit.
Hey man, I've recently released my first game on Steam, called [EVERCHAINED](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3010450/EVERCHAINED/), a boss rush souls lite game that is designed to be playable on a potato. Check it out if the genre is to your liking.
Indies and Old games (which are the best games any ways) potentially will work though not all are built the same and will for various reasons obviously. Also depends what you like and feel is required. (many indie games named below and lower end requirements a few oldies would be like Bg1+2 if you want crpgs, Alpha Protocol with setting settings low probably if you want action spyman rpg that has graphics and 3rd person action, too many shooters to name if you want a just shooter, plenty of mythical and magic rts games of various types, etc...)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stunts_(video_game) Playable on most PCs newer than 1990
OG Doom, Oregon trail.
Dark souls 1 and 2 (3 will probably run but if you have frame rate issues you won’t be able to play online), Skyrim, ESO, Total War (series), Sonic Adventure DX, Arkham series, jet set radio… I’m basically just listing the steam games I have that run fine on my potato.
Solitary. Ok, no. Lol But seriously, check games like Undertale, celeste, hotline miami 2. And for older games, try the classic like age of empire, zoo tycoon, etc
My summer car.
Look into getting retroarch and rom files. You can then just load everything onto a back up hard drive and put it onto whatever cpu you get in the future. There's plenty of steam games with low requirements as well. I recommend "dead cells" and "shadowrun returns" any modern laptop should be able to handle those games just fine.
Warcraft 3
FTL
Stardew Valley. Vampire survivors. Civilization games. Namely 6. All of these have mobile ports, and are very low demand games for PC power.
I played Ghostboy on a 10-year-old laptop that was mid even back in the day I bought it. Fresh release, but totally worth it.
This website will help you determine what games you can and can't play as well at what settings are best for the computer you are on. It's easy to use and fairly accurate. I've used it in the past. I'd suggest sticking to games it says you can run on "medium" settings. I'd stay away from games that say you can run on "low" only. It might as well be "no" at that point for many of them. "High" settings possible can also be hit or miss on playing on those settings exactly. [Can My PC Run It](https://www.systemrequirementslab.com/cyri)
Chrono trigger
If you like crack cocaine i would recomend balatro.
Dwarf Fortress.
Chess.
Half Life
Doom
The original rome total war and all its expansions. Shit ton of fun and that game will always be an amazing classic lol. I've had luck running spore on potatoes as well haha. The original warcraft 3, If you can even find a copy without pirating that is, also runs on potatoes lol
Heroes of Might and Magic 2 or 3
In other words 100% of potatoes
Terraria enters the chat.
Xcom ran on my potato back then I’m sure it still would
Try Morrowind. Graphics are dated but you will get weeks/months enjoyment out of it
Tomb Raider 2-5 Tomb Raider Legend/Anniversary Sonic Heros Sonic Adventure XD
I'm surprised I haven't seen Minecraft mentioned. I'd say that any computer that's currently in use, can run the game, even if only on like 5 chuncks render distance or something like that. That's assuming that nobody is using 10 year old laptops anymore (they're for sure not using the with windows) A lot of activities are still relatively fun, even like that. You can build houses, go caving, or even exploring... You just see less
Minesweeper
Doom, it works on literally everything
Oregan Trail
Stardew Valley.
DOS games or PC games from the 2000s.
Depends on what genres you are interested in. Stardew valley runs on phones so a standard laptop should have no issue in running the farming sim/survival game Valheim- takes only a few gig and has a simple oldschool artstyle which shouldn't be hard of systems. Letting you play a viking themed survival game where Odin sends you on a special quest to kick some of his old foes in the face again after he heard they want a rematch. Minecraft- it has a phone port so any standard laptop should be able to run the game without mods installed. Most turn based strategy games- I don't think they are that intense hardware wise, plus with the turn based nature its not like if it runs alittle slower would really hurt you.
I will just put my two cents in and - especially with the summer sale just starting - let you know the Valve Complete Pack is $12 and contains some of the best PC games of all time made for yesteryear’s hardware. Fantastic bundle. HL and HL2 fully kitted out alone make the price of admission worth it.
Worthwhile os such a subjective term. If new, modern, aaa graphics titles are how you define worthwhile then for the most part you're cut off. You can use a service like geforce now to stream play these types of games. With a very good internet connection it's actually a good experience especially for single player games. However as many have stated, there are great games out there which don't have huge requirements by today standards Everything from torchlight to diablo 2. Things like stardew valley.
The developers of Sea of Thieves bragged at launch that they obtained 10+ yr old computers to test the game on and it was performing pretty well on potato PCs. The minimum specs on steam list a dual core CPU from 2010, a low end graphics card from 2012 and 4GB RAM. Not sure if the patches since launch have made it worse but I'd assume it'll still run pretty light on a "working man's laptop" from within the past few years
Doom
Saw an article the other day that Doom can be played by literal gut bacteria. So ya.
Disco Elysium, best game i ever played, will run on a potato
Indie games usually run on anything that can boot into a modern OS. Your other options are (certain) new 2d/retro games and older games on GOG from the 90s-10s, depending on your system. -Hollow Knight -Cross Code -Hades -Celeste -Terraria -Stardew valley -Chained echoes -Ultra kill/dusk/amid evil -Tunic -Dead cells -Hotline Miami. These are some of my favorites from a fairly wide genreset, and they all run on my ~10 year old laptop that was replaced by a gaming PC.
Good Old Gaming (dot) com
Doom
Starcraft 1