Minecraft but it's not a story-driven game.
this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2025
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Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
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CrossCode if the laptop is alright. Try the demo and see if you get any slowdown.
The Saboteur is a super fun game, I feel like i don't hear enough people talk about it
My fav games that havent been mentioned yet and should work for you:
OpenRCT2 (Roller Coaster Tycoon)
Sid Meier's Civilization III (and IV really but especially III)
Quake & Quake 2
Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon (and expansions)
Football Manager (only if you're into football/sports ofc)
Without knowing your exact APU I'd wager you can probably emulate lot of great classic games maybe up until Gamecube/PS2. My specific recommendations would be playing Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Zelda: Majora's Mask with the decompiled and rebuilt native C versions, can't remember the name of the project at the moment but it should be easy to find on google. The original N64 versions are also well worth playing but after playing the recompiled windows versions with free camera and other quality of life hacks I'm not sure I could go back.
Slay the Princess
I have a 13 year old laptop cpu with intel hd graphics 4000
Most games on dolphin run well, but when I play need for speed it overheats quickly and then everything starts lagging
Modded Minecraft with sodium and low render distance works kinda at like 40 fps (also, if you optimize the java args, limit the fps or the cpu overheats)
Mindustry (turn weather off)
BTD6 with lower resolution (but then it looks bad)
Path of Achra
Fields of Mistria (if you've played enough Stardew Valley)
Undertaledeltarune
Dwarf Fortress
Balatro (probably all you need for a while)
Factorio (on a more modern chip at least)
Slay the Spire
Terraria
FF 1-6 (emulated or the remakes)
Rim world, FTL
Played this on an old MacBook for the longest time and it was fine
Monster Train was a good time on my celeron chromebook running linux
Morrowind on OpenMW ran decently
I was able to emulate most things less demanding than Gamecube as well
Citizen Sleeper is really good and has basically no graphics.
Disco Elysium good.
Vampire Survivors, probably?
visual novels work very well on even toasters because they are basically slide shows.
old adventure games are also a blast and work very well, look into lucas arts and sierra online catalogues. a great starter could be sam and max or grim fandango.
you could also try N64 emulation. there's a lot of good games on it and not demanding at all.
if you need something more sandboxy, rollercoaster tycoon and transport tycoon deluxe (or opentdd for the modern open source version, has multiplayer too with mod support) are great. apart from that, old civilization games and simcity are also great.
old real time strategies are also great. command and conquer series, stronghold series, age of empires 2, age of mythology, warcraft etc etc.
(help me folks im running out of genres)
basically either look into blasts from the past, or the indie scene. i recommend the former since although there's a lot of great stuff in the indie scene, it all kinda gets samey due to the same tools being used and the limited resources available pushes people into certain genres. you can't certainly beat the olden but golden ones on variety.
you could also try N64 emulation. there's a lot of good games on it and not demanding at all.
Yeah, like mother fuckin Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber.
(help me folks im running out of genres)
Late 90s/ early 00s CRPGs - Baldur's Gate 1&2, Icewind Dale, Planescape: Torment, Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magic Obscura, Fallout 1&2
oh yeah that was the golden era of crpgs as well.
Yeah, like mother fuckin Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber.
i love these random ass classics people have. this one sounds like a real gem.
depends on how low you're willing to play, you can play TF2 on low settings I guess
Dwarf Fortress, CataclysmDDA, FTL, Convoy are all in my top games list and all run on a potato
Animal Well
Stardew Valley
Animal Well seems right up my alley but running on wine my cpu inexplicably struggles way more than games with similar graphics. The performance issues are preventing me from getting deep into it.
Is it only in some rooms?
There's a lighting effect (those shimmering ribbons in the egg room) that makes mine struggle too, but turning the graphics down to "good" gets rid of that effect and fixes the issue.
I don't think so, but it's been a while. I know when you hit "new game" it shows four sprites for colored flames on a totally black background and then they disappear one-by-one with a repeated sound effect for each, and I can't come up with a reason why that wouldn't be easier to render than any part of the gameplay but that's the one place where I was guaranteed to notice, the flame sprites start moving especially slowly and sometimes even lag behind the audio. Every so often I'll give it another go to see if any updates (wine or drivers) have improved that, and at one point it did get a decent bit better but still noticeable and still led to some latency in actual gameplay here and there, so I just use that as my test for if it's playable for me yet.
For so many games wine works amazingly well, just looking at the graphics I find it so weird it chooses to crap out on this one.
You should look up exactly what integrated graphics you have. Sometimes this can be difficult, because they'll list it as something vague like "AMD graphics"
But if you can find it that would help. Integrated graphics have come a long way in the last 5 or so years. Could be a big difference.
Yeah, I came here to post this, if it's an Intel APU from like 10 years ago you can forget about running most 3D games, but if it's a relatively recent AMD APU it could be on par with a midrange graphics card from 10-15 years ago. The Steam Deck is essentially a laptop, after all.
Of course, you can still play Balatro 
Yeah I got a little 400 dollar mini-PC to do some work a couple years ago, and it runs the original Oblivion on high settings at 60fps. I think I got a respectable 24-30fps on a 4k screen. The integrated graphics chip is called a AMD Radeon 680M.
That one launched in early 2022 and there are much better ones that came out since. I've seen videos of someone playing Cyberpunk 2077 on low settings and getting 30-50fps @1080p on the latest integrated graphics chips.
What chip do you have?
DOOM wads! Super easy to run GZDoom and some full-ass games made by people. Also, Caves of Qud! And I love Morrowind, Fallout, etc.
There are a LOT of absolutely incredible level packs out there. I recommend checking out Doomworld's Cacowards Archive (running annually since 2004) for a sampling of the absolute cream of the crop.
Thatcher's Techbase 
Stardew valley will run on a toaster
Deltarune
I wonder how much Noita you could get away with.
Otherwise, the roguelite genre has a lot of games to choose from. Spelunky, Gungeon, Hades, Balatro, FTL, One Step From Eden, etc. If you have a particularly old computer then more old school roguelikes like Caves of Qud, Crawl, Cogmind (very hard to get into).
Noita uses the GPU way less than I would have guessed given it's so heavy on the particle simulation, but it's hard enough on the CPU that that might be an issue
Trying to run this on integrated graphics and a laptop CPU 
god it's so good though that it's worth a try lmao
how does one even reach this level of noita 
It all started when I watched his stream, actually. But the sweatlord inside me took over and I started learning a lot from FuryForged and DunkOrSlam. Ended up going through a lot of wand building guides to learn how to abuse the crap out of Greek letter spells to make a wand that casts as many copies of Chaos Larpa modifiers attached to omega sawblade. Hilarity ensues.
amazing, that explains the apocalyptic flood of sawblades lmao
SIGH boots up Noita
least unpleasant fungus cave trip
Great suggestions, but FTL is Goated
Is this on a relatively new laptop? Would say most games with pixel art would be fine, there's thousands of games if you're dipping into emulators for older consoles and a lot of indie games will run on a potato.
I'm on a laptop's dedicated gpu but what I do is search my gpu name on youtube and watch gameplay demos from integrated cards.