What they’re saying is that you can easily get screwed by the Random Number Generator (so the speak). Getting attacked by a boarding party before you’re prepared, etc.
Setting aside any arguments on whether those thing should kill you or not, each game is pretty much disposable. I play until I win or die and I don’t even know if there’s a save feature or not because I’ve never saved mid game. Games are pretty quick, sometimes you die brutally in the first couple systems, sometimes you build up a rockin’ ship. If you’re not going to feel overly invested in any single game, there’s no reason to hate the game when you get crushed by a bunch of Mantis dudes overrunning your crew.
Terraria is an explore/build game with actual character advancement (you gain more health, better weapons, spells, etc). People compare it to Minecraft but, even ignoring the 2D/3D thing, Terraria is more of an adventure/explore game with sandbox construction elements whereas Minecraft is more sandbox that people sometimes try to make into an adventure game.
Saints Row the Third and Just Cause 2 are both games that have a nominal plot but you’re free to ignore it and just sandbox around causing problems and blowing shit up without sacrificing your “real game” progress. Sometimes that’s a lot more fun than trying to actually progress the story. Saints Row 4 is the same but it’s essentially an expansion for SRTT and they’re adding the SR4 mechanics to SRTT anyway so if you’re just looking to dork around you might as well go with the cheaper option.
I freakin’ love Terraria, have put hundreds of hours into it. Lovely lovely game.
Rogue Legacy captured my heart for a long time. It’s a side-scroller fantasy game with a very high fatality rate–but when your character dies, you can spend the money you gathered on upgrades for your next character. Slowly you go from being a total wimp to being a Lich Queen or a Dragon or an Archmage with incredible swords and armor and magical runes. I gave up on the final boss battle but may return to it one day. Lots of fun, and a single game, especially in the beginning, can be less than five minutes.
There have been a lot of pretty good games that have come out in the past few years. I’m pretty pleased with a lot of what I’ve seen (although I do tend to ignore the type of games I tend to ignore…).
But I’m not sure I can come up with any (that are in my sphere of awareness) that aren’t “too involved” for what you’re looking for.
Torchlight comes to mind, as mentioned above, if D2 works for you. You can definitely pick that one up and put it down as you like.
The Portal games might work. Very clever and engaging puzzles and writing, but the plot is simple and light.
Along the lines of Saints Row and Just Cause, there’s Sleeping Dogs - a martial arts GTA style game set in Hong Kong. This game was surprisingly good, IMO, although it might be more involved than you want. The Zodiac Tournament, alone, was worth the price of admission for me - a DLC addon quest that puts you in the lead role of an Enter the Dragon style movie, complete with Grindhouse style movie effects, cheesy badass dialogue, and a perfect soundtrack.
Another game that I found surprisingly good was Game of Thrones. The Metacritic rating is really low, and it does have its flaws, but if you like the show or the novels, you may very well enjoy the game. It captures a lot of the atmosphere and utilizes the tropes of the source material very well (as it should, since GRRM was involved in writing the game). The game is pretty linear, with a heavy plot. I doubt it fits what the OP was asking for, but it was such a nice surprise that I felt it worth a mention anyway in case any ASOIAF/GOT fans are reading.
Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space, the sequel to Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, isn’t all that new but it just hit Steam earlier this year. Both are great little 2D space exploration/trading/combat (sort of 4X lite) games that can be completed in less than an hour with lots of replay value because each map is randomly generated.
While technically this is true, the model for the game is different than typical. It is fully playable and very entertaining as is. The devs are adding new features on a monthly basis, but as it is so much fun to play around with what is already in place, I would advise anyone interested to not hesitate at all in giving the game a try.
Papers, Please is worth a look. It’s one of the most unusual games I’ve ever played. Not sure what genre it is, even. You play as a border guard and examine passports. Sometimes you deliberately let people with forgeries through. It sounds terrible, but even Yahtzee Croshaw liked it.
Cardhunter is a free tactical TBS game. It has a good looting mechanic to help keep your interest.
There are also already tons of mods for the game as well. It’s simply one of the most fun games I’ve played in a long time if you enjoy construction type games and space flight. I have a blast just trying out new designs and sacrificing my Kerbal’s for the benefit of learning and seeing their smiling faces when one of my more outlandish designs comes apart and they join the list of the fallen heroes.
Cardhunter is really a lot of fun, although I kind of stalled out on it at some point. Hmm, maybe I should start it up again.
I’m also playing a ton of Hearthstone these days. It’s a closed beta right now, I think, but it’ll be open beta soon. It’s a free-to-play online collectible card game set in the World of Warcraft, with the option of paying both for more booster packs and for more opportunities at a semirandomly-designed pack arena system (that in turn generates treasure). But the matching system is good enough that even if you pay nothing, you’ll still mostly play against people at roughly your own level; you really only need to pay if you want to compete at the upper levels against other upper-level people.
Sorry, but I think they do the collectible model exactly right. I pay nothing and still have a lot of fun; others want to play at higher levels, put more money into it, and have lots of fun. Why wouldn’t I be happy with a game that costs me nothing and is lots of fun?
Presumably because it’s fundamentally exploitative. Yeah, yeah, I can’t argue with ‘people having fun’ and that’s why slot machines are legal in some areas too. And yes, I just compared collectable model games to gambling, because it pretty much is.
It’s nice that you don’t pay anything, but by that logic, all free to play games are completely fine and fair and not at all using psychological tricks to rob people, because I’ve never paid them any money.
So yeah. Principles. Seldom very persuasive around here, I find.
“Principles” around a totally frivolous past-time don’t even get the dignity of being called principles by me. Principles involve social justice, involve questions of suffering and self-determination, involve what it means to be human. They don’t involve whether the game is free or not.
But even if they did, this game still does it right. Because paying more money into the game does NOT lead to winning significantly more games: it leads to playing at the higher levels of the game. The matching system ensures that I’m almost always playing at a level comparable to my own.
Don’t try playing the card “nobody cares about principles anymore.” That’s a really weak card.
If you can find 90 minutes to play Hearthstone every three days, then you’ll be very competitive and never need to spend a dime. It isn’t the most generous free-to-play game I’ve ever seen, but I don’t feel exploited for a second. Nevermind that the polish level is fantastic and everyone should at least check it out once the beta is more open.
Trying to monetize a F2P game is predatory business practices? That’s a really low bar. I guess 2-for-1 beers night at the local pub is predatory. What if I want only one beer? Shouldn’t the first one be the free one?
