Faster Than Light, I've sunk more time into that game than any other.
this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
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Low-Spec Gaming
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After almost 1000 hours and prestiging all achievments on hard twice, it finally lost its shine for me. I know all the events, fights are almost all completely formulaic. Most of the time that I lose, which is maybe 60% of the time on hard, I know I lost the fight before the first shot is fired.
This is a positive review of the game, btw. 1000 hours of enjoyable gameplay before I became tired of it is an astounding value proposition.
Into the breach, by comparison, I became frustrated with it quickly and stopped playing after just 39 hours.
And a fantastic OST to boot, I often use it when I'm facing a deadline and I need to work against the clock.
Once you've played FTL and Celeste, you start hearing both of their background musics constantly in soft background music for streamer videos and similar places.
I'm not sure how good the quality level and balance are compared to the original (I haven't played the modded version), but you may be interested in the multiverse mod.
Endless sky! It’s also open source and actively being worked on
This is a great suggestion. Also, it costs $0
Balatro never fails to entertain, if you like roguelikes and deck builders. I'm an enormous fan of Morrowind, I typically play using the engine OpenMW. If you like rpgs that reward you for your time, it's one of my favorites.
halo 1 is one of my comfort games.
running it through mcc kind of sucks but it gives you easy access to really nice mods like ruby's rebalanced 😊
If you need something for seriously low spec hardware the Flashpoint Archive is nice. There are old flash games you might know. Dad 'n Me comes to mind or Motherload or Insaniquarium.
flashpoint nano is a tiny flashpoint implementation that is just a simple shell script that downloads and launches games. It mainly targets Linux but it's simple to use.
When combined with the flashpoint database search: https://flashpointproject.github.io/flashpoint-database/search/ , it can be used to play games (flashpoint nano can't search or launch for games by name, only download them by their game ID.
Another thing to note about flashpoint, is that flashpoint also archives modern web games... but only select ones, like winners of competitions and other high quality choices. Because of this, I've found that flashpoint is not just an archive of flash games, but also a curated selection of newer browser based games from itch.io.
I don't have a low spec rig myself but here are some games i've gotten a lot out of that'll run on most anything...
Terraria, Grim Dawn, Chronicon, Heroes of Hammerwatch, Vampire Survivors and Into the Breach.
OpenTTD comes to mind! I’ve been playing it since Transport Tycoon came out in 1994 and it still really holds up.
As an addendum, OpenRCT2 also fits this bill. It took compiling it myself, but it can even run on an RPi.
Sega emulator with some games
ZZT
The 8bit game where a robot tries to grow a flower and different pests pester it?
It was one of Cliffy B's first games.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZZT
I'm not even sure how to describe it because I always saw it more as a toolset to create your own games and adventures with.
Taught me the blues scale.
Rogue, or something like it
Dungeon Keeper, Quake, and Diablo 2 are games that I often go back to play. The latter two less so as there are so many similar games. But the ones that I have invested most hours across the years are: SimCity 2K, civ 2 and theme hospital.
doom2.
Seriously though, i play mindustry quite a lot now.
Link's Awakening on Game Boy
Master of Orion, 1 & 2
The original colonialisation!
Railroad Tycoon 3. I still play it a few times a week.
Quake 2 has software rendering (cpu only), you can use Yamagi as a modern client for that. Was great on my kids' slow computers.
Carmageddon is great fun, too.
Death Rally, top down racing mayhem game, also good :-)
Check out the game Crayon Physics, it works using Wine, I don't think it's super demanding, but really fun. There's also Crayon Physics Deluxe on steam.