The only game I have ever played is FIFA on a PS4. Now I have a gaming laptop but have no idea how I should go about playing games on Linux. Appreciate your help in advance!
A lot of these recommendations are for advanced gamers.
Some more entry level games include Portal and journey.
Slay the spire is also excellent if you like card games.
Red Alert 2 works on Linux if you’re willing to jump through hoops
Xonotic is a fun first person shooter, with gameplay similar to quake. It’s awesome if you have a bunch of friends thar just want to jump right into action amd random weapon upgradea
+1 for xonotic - runs on a potato, great gameplay, fairly pooulated servers
So steam is your best bet for gaming on linux overwll. For specific games:
Stellaris - space empire game, grow and manage your fledgling galactic empire with a large amount of flavour to change playthru to playthru. From being peace loving spacegoats to horrible all consuming bugs, its up to you.
Civilization series - similar idea to Stellaris but taking control of various famous world leaders to grow a nation state
Rimworld - its the Sims but you can commit warcrimes. Colony management game. Take control of 1 - 5 ‘pawns’ and try to survive in the harsh wilderness as long as you can
Factorio - build a factory. start as one person with a pickax and slowly build things to automate things so you can automate more things. The factory MUST grow.
Terraria - sandbox side scrolling adventure game. Hunt down monsters, ore and loot to craft better weapons and armor. invite local townsfolk into your well crafted box huts and create a little village
Counter strike 2 - premier clicking heads simulator. Very competitive fps game but even if your new just play a little death match to get used to shooting and moving, then jump right into competative. Tons of idiots but dw about toxic fucks. Mute them and have fun shooting people
Old school runescape - sandbox mmorpg. Start as a useless nobody, level skills by clicking till you have carpel tunnel syndrome and wonder where the last 1000hrs of your life went.
Kenshi - sandbox RTS/RPG game. Wander the desert, get attacked by a wandering pack of dogs and get patched up and captured by wandering slavers. Attempt a dramatic escape and lose an arm. Steal a prosthetic robot arm and run for the hills. Gather some followers and start a base. Then liberate the slaves from the slave colony you used to belong to
Deadcells - action side scrolling roguelike. You get one life to attempt to slay the hand of the king. 100s of different weapons and layout changes each attempt. Use a frying pan to smack the shit outta baddies or a giant broadsword to cleave them in half
Stardew valley - comfy relaxing farming Sim. take over your grandfather’s neglected farm. Grow crops, raise animals and become friends with the local towns folk. Argue with the broader stardew community about who the best person to marry is
Portal 1/2 - certified classic puzzle games. Shoot portals, solve puzzle and make the machine intelligence progressively angrier
Half life 1/2 - classic fps games that set the stage for story telling in modern fps game. Recommend black mesa for HL1 over the og version
BioShock 1 - fps story telling at its arguably peak form. Would you kindly play this game?
Disco elysium - unorthodox RPG game. Solve a murder mystery as a cop with no memory. Actually a novel in disguise with fantastic voice acting
Metro 2033/34 - another contender for fps storytelling at its finest. Can you save the people from the menace plaguing the Moscow metro stations?
Minecraft - THE sandbox survival game. Dig some tunnels, build a castle. Slay hordes of zombies, farm some pigs and wheat. Its been popular for a decade+ for good reason.
Dota2 - I dont play this myself but you said addictive and plenty of people have dumped 1000s of hours into this game. I’d say league of legends but that requires more effort to play on linux
All I can think of rn, besides dota all of these games have eaten 100+ hrs of my life at some point or another
I play dota 2, community can be toxic, but if you are not a snowflake or know how to use the mute button, its good.
I played this game way before dota 2, when it was a Warcraft 3 map, so I have been playing dota for about 18 years. Can confirm, it is addictive, and I believe it is one of the best competitive games out there.
Get MultiMC instead for playing Minecraft.
Prism launcher is even better it is multimc with a mod downloader
Team Fortress 2 has native support and is very addictive and has a large active community despite the game being over 15 years old now.
…just don’t play in casual servers. It’s filled with bots
Why not start with TuxRacer on Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tux_Racer
Rain World
Thats a very bad recommendation for a first time gamer.
The game tries to not break the immersion so there are nearly no explanations at all.
That means you have to be very game literate (know a lot of tropes and conventions to understans whata toing on and what to do).
I watched a very experienced gamer friend attempt the game after I played it, and the stereotypes from other games actually seemed to do harm. I think it also depends on your patience and problem solving approach.
it was kinda a joke lmao
i completely agree with you
Not really sure what would be your type of game but here’s some that I’ve played that I found addicting, from various genres. All of these are on Steam and I’ve played on Linux.
Definitely look at Portal 2. Great game that’s easy to get into.
If you played and liked Portal 2, also take a look at Portal, The Talos Principle, and Q.U.B.E. (I probably can’t go wrong recommending puzzle games)
Maybe also Mirror’s Edge (2008).
Baldur’s Gate 3 is one I’ve put a lot of time into recently.
Chill exploration game that I couldn’t put down and am still obsessed with: INFRA
If you think you could like base builder games: RimWorld, Factorio, Satisfactory
And then some absolute PC classics: Half-Life (1998, or you can also play the remake Black Mesa), System Shock (play the 2023 remake), Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines.
if you liked portal, have you ever played superliminal or viewfinder?
I think other peoples suggestions are great already, so I want to contrast them.
I’ll suggest some of the good old free software games that got me into Linux way back before steam even ran on it:
- Cave Story
- Super Tux Kart
- Battle for Wesnoth
- 0 A.D.
Outer Wilds
Stellaris on Steam has a fully-native Linux executable.
Don’t miss this entire genre: classic LucasArts point-and-click adventure games! Sam & Max Hit the Road, Full Throttle and Monkey Island are a few of the stand-outs for me, and they all run on Linux via the amazing ScummVM.
Grimm Fandango (one of the best games ever made) along with Myst and Riven also run on Scummvm!
That’s awesome, I didn’t realize that ResidualVM had merged with ScummVM.
Grim Fandango, Full Throttle and Normality all have vivid memories in my brain.
for someone totally new?
i guess it depends on what you mean by “addicting,” so i’ll try to put in “potential hours” as a reference. regardless i think all of these are quite fun and consuming for me for a while.The Binding of Isaac Rebirth.
its difficulty sort of “scales” with how well you do in your runs: if you never beat mom, the next boss, the next boss etc, it’ll stay “easier” for as long as that takes. (and if it gets too hard when you start beating stuff, you can always wipe your save and start over, or start a new save, hah!)
the control scheme is extremely simple and it’s fine to not be completely perfect at it if you’re just going for basic runs and okay with relying more on “lucking” into victory. you really don’t have to take on mega-satan or whatever.
up to you if the horror-to-horror-adjacent visuals appeal or not. you do also have to be okay with the idea of dying, it’s a roguelike.
you can play this for literally thousands of hours.Slime Rancher 1.
just a fun time shlorping up slimes. very low stakes and silly and cute. meant to be pretty accessible. if you’re brand new i could see it taking up some time, and it’s a good way to learn “video game logic.” i’ve spent 80 hours in SR1, playtimes can be a bit varied.Plants vs Zombies (the original GOTY edition, and definitely not the ad-ridden mobile port)
old 2000’s popcap games in general were onboarding for many a gamer back in the day. i’ve spent 60 hours of it on steam, no idea how much back in the 2000’s. playtimes overall can be a bit all over the map on this one.Garden Paws,
if you like cutesy and the idea of gathering stuff for villagers, with farming / animal raising mechanics. it’s slightly jank but it’s very endearing. no fail condition. (it’s somewhat similar to stardew valley with some differences!) this can be played almost infinitely, if you really like the loop, decorating, or have a few people to play with. playtimes tend to be 40-200 hours roughly.Wobbledogs,
if you like the idea of raising cute pets with a genome and don’t mind the very subtle horror/bizarre aspects (they can die, eat each other’s bodies, and they pupate like caterpillars lol.) pretty sandbox game, and you can turn death off if you want. (or “clone” dogs you want to keep with the export/import tool in the menu.) this is a newer one for me so i’ve only put in 35 hours, but i fully intend to go back and try for some Huge Dogs TM. average seems about 20 hours but you can spend a lot if you like raising weirdo pets.Surprised no one has said it, but Minecraft. I love it as much now as I did when I was 12. It can be as simple or as complex as you want it, especially if you start playing with mods. Then there’s servers such as Hypixel which for all intents and purposes are an entirely separate game in and of themselves.
I’m sure part of it is nostalgia, some of my fondest gaming memories were playing Minecraft with friends, but I still find it to be an excellent way to relax.
(Tangentially related, anyone else remember when waiting 3 months for 1.2.5 > 1.3 was an absurdly long update time for the game? Different times.)
The best game of all time: dungeon crawl stone soup. Open source dungeon crawler that has been developed for 20 years. It is free and you can play in your browser. And since deaths are permanent, it is an easy game to walk away from since game sessions tend to be short (because it is easy to die).
Another classic is Dwarf Fortress.
