I don’t think there’s any meta progression as far as I’m aware, but I find Shattered Pixel Dungeon (available on both android and ios) to be a low stress enough game. I suck at it, so I’ve never gotten much further than the first boss fight, but the game is about running through randomly generated dungeons, going down floor by floor as one of 4 different characters.

Golf on Mars and Desert Golfing. Super simple. No ads. Its just 2D golf that keeps on going with any gimmicks.

I used to play Unblock Me. Made it maybe 1000 levels in various difficulties before stopping.

Wuthering Waves is Hella good. Technically it’s an open world gacha game, but I played through all the storyline (the developers will be forever updating the story a la Genshin Impact), and I never spent a dime on it.

Also, I have spent money on Cooking Diary. However, I went about 3 months of daily play before I did, and it was more about me being impatient/telling myself “You got 3 months of daily play, you can drop the devs $4.99”. I’ve played that game just about daily since Memorial Day 2023, and I’ve dropped $5.00 quarterly. There are regularly moments of infinite lives that exceed an hour or two, that it genuinely isn’t necessary. I spend the money more as a “thanks for not making this ducking game contingent on microtransactions, making it good, and maintaining/update it.”

Blooms TD 6 - fun tower defense game with solid progression and everything can be earned by playing what I think is a reasonable amount.

Not sure what sort of length on play you’re looking for but wingspan and terraforming Mars are both really good board games that have good-to-quite-good mobile versions.

A Dance of Fire and Ice is an incredible rhythm game that you buy once and that’s it. I think there’s an expansion pack but it’s a single purchase. Whether that’s your idea of “casual” really depends on what you like. You can always play chill low difficulty levels when you need to zone out, and high difficulty levels when you want a challenge. It can get stupidly hard.

You can try a demo online at that link. It told me webgl wasn’t supported on mobile, but it worked pretty for me just now on firefox, even if it was a bit laggy. It should work fine on PC.

I pirated it on PC after my kids told me about it and ended up buying it Three times on Steam and twice on mobile. It’s just that good. I’ve built a custom digital drum to play it and I’m now making a custom MIDI controller, so we’ll see if that does better when connected to the game.

The game works as well on mobile, if not better because the touchscreen is so responsive.

desert golf and its follow up golf on mars are big hits at my house

Cell to Singularity is a great little mobile game that does have microtransactions but are easy to ignore/avoid. I played through it several times and may need to dust it off for another playthrough. Great music too.

You should download Mini Review

It is a currated version of the Play Store with many filters including paid/free, IAP, genres, …

The reviews are very thorough and always include a paragraph about the “presatoriness” of IAP if any

Monument Valley and Gorogoa are both excellent and free of nonsense.

Both are available on mobile and Steam. Gorogoa also on GOG currently 70% off.

Meant to link monument valley 2: https://www.monumentvalleygame.com/mv2

I have clocked a lot of hours in Slice & Dice both on mobile and on PC well worth the 8 bucks even though I’ve paid it three times now I think. Honorable mention to Suika(Watermelon game) about 3 bucks on the Play store.

Old school RuneScape, it has free “demo” version which you can easily put a 100+ hours in. And if you really love there is a subscription model that’s kinda expensive if you bill monthly, but no other micro transactions.

Pixel dungeon, but it’s not really low stress.

I have lately been enjoying Legends if runeterra’s Path of champions mode (PvE)