Try searching on https://www.darkpattern.games It seems like a vast collection with reviews aimed at finding and naming healthy and unhealthy games

Mindustry is amazing, and free somehow

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

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

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.

Any of the PAID games from Kairosoft. Dungeon Village, Grand Prix Story, Game Dev Story. He has since re-released all his games as f2p microtransaction junk, but the full price versions are generally really good.

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.”

In my experience the relatively small selection of the F-droid store is full of these type of games.

Troll patrol

Sudoku

Unciv

Shattered Pixel Dungeon

Pirate Solitare

…just to name a few All full versions, no ads or premuim options. Love F-droid, its a shame the selection is quite small.

I had nearly given up looking for good mobile games when I remembered that emulators exist. Nintendo DS games map pretty well to a smart phone, there are some games that use entirely touch controls. I’m using the MelonDS emulator and I’ve mostly been playing advanced wars: days of ruin and puzzle quest 2. Puzzle quest is pretty excellent and chill by the way.

2048

A couple that I like:

• 80 Days - it’s not free but I think it’s worth it. It’s a sort of steampunk version of Around the World in 80 Days where you have to plan your routes, and buy and sell things in different cities to make money. The main gameplay is sort of choose-your-own-adventure events that happen during travel and in different cities.

• Card Thief - I just started playing this recently. It does technically have a microtransaction but it’s more like, they let you play for free if you don’t mind waiting for chests to unlock, or you can buy the game to bypass this. The main gameplay is sneaking through dungeons represented by a 3x3 grid of cards randomly drawn from the deck; collecting treasures and avoiding getting caught.

Not sure if it fits your criteria but the only mobile game I play is pinball deluxe. If you like real pinball, then you’ll love it, it tries to stay as true to real pinball as possible on some/most tables, it does have small transaction stuff you can buy but I still haven’t bought any including all the additional tables etc after playing it 6 months + and if you did, then it’s just an 8€ one time buy to get all the content and remove the ads, I’m gonna get that once I actually get bored of the “free” tables.

If you like the older Pokemon games and can get the ROMs on your phone, PokeMMO is really cool. It’s an emulator that turns the first 5 generations of games into an MMO where you can take the same character across each region.

There’s a handful of changes to the base game, but most are small: Berry farming is changed, there’s an Exp Share for EVs now, Sweet Scent is used to summon a 1v5 against wild Pokemon… There’s character customization… There’s some QoL stuff like shiny encounters having a sound effect and adding a confirmation box so you don’t accidentally flee, and the stats page for your Pokemon is way more detailed.

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

I liked egg inc for a while, if you’re looking for clicker type games.

Other than that I can recommend

• Stardew Valley
• Peglin
• Sudoku
• Nanograms
• Dungeon Village 1 & 2

Multiple of these are paid, but I’m 100% on board with paying a small amount for an app rather than paying a multiple of that for in-game Battlepasses and whatevers.

It annoys me a lot to say this, but Netflix has some excellent games in their roster. So if you have a Netflix subscription, check those out. I personally very much enjoyed

• Storyteller
• Into the Breach

But they also have ports of some very good PC games like Spiritfarer, Terra Nil or World of Goo.