Well, GOG sells a lot of commercial games and doesn’t require online connectivity for anything marked as “DRM free”. Tend to be older. Once you download it, no link to the service required.

I think that all the – be they free or commercial – games on itch.io don’t require signing up for a service, unless the game itself has some sort of service. I don’t have specific recommendations there, though.

Games bundled in a Linux distro won’t require a service.

There are open-source games.

I personally like Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, which is a very deep open-world roguelike set in a post-apocalyptic world with zombies. Steep learning curve, as a warning, but you can do all sorts of stuff. NPCs, build bases and set up electrical power, build ground vehicles, boats, and rotary-wing craft. Vehicles can carry other vehicles, can have video cameras, turrets, armor, various sorts of lights, rams and other melee weaponry. Bionics, mutations, skills, farming, crafting, quests, music and sound packs, graphical tiles. Martial arts. Contains probably more real-world firearms than any other game I know of, does stuff like multiple optics, various stock and handle modifications, powder fouling. Moddable melee weapons. Artifacts. Mods to add spells, psionics, and various magic items. Traps and static defenses. Cooking, brewing, drugs, alcohol, various types of clothing. Explosives. Waifu body pillows. Regional weather simulation. Heating and cooling. Lovecraftian stuff. Radiation. Remote-controlled vehicles. Senses including smell, hearing with temporary and permanent impairment modeling, infrared, vision to see magnetic fields, light-amplification optics, eye dilation simulation when entering different light levels. Vehicle-mounted battery chargers, kitchenettes, water tanks, rainwater collection systems, water purification systems. Radios. Various factions of enemies, some of which fight each other. Bandits. Lockpicking, teleportation, various types of diseases, parasitic and fungal infections, various types of poisoning. Hacking. Furniture. Various types of psychological conditions. Gasses, gills, skates, broken limbs, stances, folding bicycles, body part level encumbrance, container size maximums (including modeling things like mesh bags that can’t contain small items and waterproof containers that protect things that are destroyed by immersion in liquid), pockets in clothing, various types of holsters and sheaths that can be worn on various places on the body. Pain, guilt, cannibalism, music. It’s got a lot of stuff. There’s a build on Steam now pre-set up with graphics and sound if you want to donate, but you can also just download the builds from the dev site for free. Has mobile builds, but I think that it really benefits from the computational power of a PC, as well as a keyboard.

Dwarf Fortress also has a steep learning curve, is a colony simulator. Not open source, but free, also deep, many hours you can spend there.

Shattered Pixel Dungeon is an open source roguelike, relatively shallow learning curve. Really aimed at touchscreen devices like smartphones, but has computer builds, has support for keys and stuff. See !pixeldungeon@lemmy.world.

Mindustry is an open-source factory automation game in the vein of Factorio. Works on mobile or PC platforms.

I’ve only played Unciv on smartphone, but apparently it also has PC builds. It’s an open-source reimplementation of Civilization V, sans all the pretty graphics and animation and music and such. One of the deeper games I think you can get on a phone.

Someone else mentioned Minecraft. I think that that requires an account with the service these days, though Luanti – until recently known as Minetest – is a similar, open-source project that does not.

Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup is a tough roguelike known for being well-balanced, with the devs stripping out unnecessary stuff and streamlining it. I don’t play it much these days, but I’ve enjoyed it in the past.

Endless Sky is an open-source clone of Escape Velocity for the classic Mac, a 2D space exploration, fighting, and trading game. I don’t play it much, but I think that it’s worth a look if you’ve never played it.

Battle for Wesnoth is an open-source tactical hex-grid game. Characters can level up and gain abilities. Can be played on mobile OSes, though I think that it really benefits from a mouse.

I am not personally all that into OpenTTD, an open-source game based on Transport Tycoon Deluxe, but I have played it and have seen many people who are super-into-it.

I’ve played and enjoyed the open-source 0 A.D., some time back, but last I played it, it had a bunch of work still to be done. An Age of Empires clone.

There are a handful of open-source RTS Total Annihilation-inspired games based on the open-source Spring engine, like Beyond All Reason.

If you’re worried about DRM then look at GOG.com - they sell DRM free games, and you can download the installers direct from their website if you don’t want to use their client and want permanent backups. The installers are not online either. I have a large library of classics and new games from them.

Minecraft

Starsector is amazing, even though buying it on the website made me wonder if the storefront was made in the 90s.

Beyond all reason. Pretty sure it’s open source too. Or partly? I looked it up a while ago and can’t remember the details.

beyondallreason.info/

Pirate em. Then you don’t gotta sign up for anything

Desktop Dungeons

Dwarf Fortress

a bunch of roguelikes

emulated SNES games

I enjoy all the games I bought from GOG (3?)—in case you are wondering they are DRM free so you can keep using them forever (in theory).

But honestly I don’t get people who have a big hang-up about digital stores. Regardless of ownership/ license-ship—these are all pieces of software designed to run on specific software and WILL eventually be unplayable regardless of how they were acquired.

Unless you’re going back to platforms from the 90s or early 2000s, everything needs updates from the internet / downloads to work so even if you have a physical copy of a lot of games on a console, they’re gonna stop working eventually.

Just pay the marginal fee and enjoy. Its a low amount of money to pay for hours of entertainment in like 99% of the cases.

Probably a bit of an extreme example, but the “X” series would be a great sci-fi option. X4 Foundations and it’s associated DLCs is too much content to fully grasp honestly. I played 50 hours of that game and only understood a miniscule amount of the scale and stuff you could do in it. They built it as sandbox as possible from the ground up so pretty much anything you could think of doing in space you can. All the while the universe is evolving around you whether you influence it or not.

Numpty Physics (solve puzzles by drawing lines, physics Sim)

Powder Toy (falling sand game)

Box Stacker (add Tetris pieces to solve physics puzzles)

And I’ve been getting into the Glitch mini-game in luanti(minetest)

I think itch.io might allow game purchases without any account, depending in the game, but even getting drm-free games is almost always going to require some kind of account somewhere. There’s always the “high seas”, but that’s not something everyone is comfortable with.

GOG is probably your best option for completely DRM free games, and fwiw, a lot of Steam games don’t require you to use Steam to launch them. A fairly thorough list is kept here: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam

• Warzone 2100
• OpenTTD
• 0 A.D.
• OpenRCT2

Chess, now and then. Was a fairly active player many years ago, though never became good.

Steam game that you would probably love(but you could technically pirate it though the devs don’t deserve it): Stormworks

It’s available for android, ios, and free on itch(dot)io if you want it free, but Mindustry. Maybe not as free and creative as Scrap Mechanic (still have absolutely NO clue where to even find it for purchase), but it at least has a mode where you can build your own levels if you get bored of the official levels.

For more creative ventures, you could, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, go with minecraft (or luanti with a bunch of different mods/games from the content store if you’re looking for something free).

Edit: don’t know what I was thinking. Found Scrap Mechanic on Steam almost immediately. Must have been thinking another game or something else.