Stardew Valley would be my vote. Some others that come to mind are Slay the Spire or Skyrim. My adhd wife plays cracked sims 4 with every mod known to mankind. She doesn't even play the game. Just creates characters and builds houses.

https://store.steampowered.com/recommended/morelike/app/960090/

Some games that flip that focus switch and suck me in without heavy gameplay :

-Stardew Valley (honestly, probably the most fitting recommendation here)

-Factorio (turn off the bugs for a more casual experience), alternatively there's Satsfactory

-OpenTTD or Transport Fever 2

Diverging from the top-down style:

-Oddly enough, Farming Simulator 22 (there's always that next thing to do so you can build up)

-Space Engineers

-Minecraft

Started Valley, for sure.

If she wants a grundy, but casual game, get her playing a MMO like Guild Wars 2. It's horizontal progression so you are not competing to get better gear all the time. It's just casual grind to get fashion, new titles, achievements etc. I am sure she will be addicted.

Slay the Spire and Monster Train get my votes. She likes strategy like BTD so I think she'll like these ones too. I think both are free on Game Pass.

Also Monster Sanctuary is a great Pokemon -like

Vampire Survivors, Minecraft, Terraria, Elder Scrolls Online, Guild Wars 2, Monster Hunter World

Every few years I download a windows 98 emulator and install my copy of the 90s Blade Runner game, and see if I can replay it. But it always crashes at the same point early on (using the "enhance!" thingy) and is unplayable. When I search it up there's all kinds of posts of people stuck at the same point and somehow nobody has been able to find a way to fix it.

It's too bad, that game was a lot of fun. The branching plot and randomization of who turns out to be a replicant made each playthrough unique.

Okay this is weird. This post was about a new Blade Runner game when I started typing it but it turned into someone asking about grindy games for his wife? Is Lemmy like hogwarts staircases?

My suggestion, since you mentioned classic Pokemon and RPG Maker, is Pokemon Infinite Fusion, a fan made Pokemon game.

It is mostly a remake of the plot of the first games (Red/Blue/Yellow) but with a twist that you can now fuse any two Pokemon into one. For example, you could fuse your Bulbasaur and a Pidgey to make a new single Pokemon called Bulbagey, a flying grass type that has all the moves of both Pokemon, and can even evolve!

It is available for free and runs on PC, or with some effort it can run on Mac or Android.

If she likes old-school and RPGs, check out Another Eden, by Masato Kato the scenario screen-writer for the beloved cult classic Chrono Trigger. The latter is one of if not THE best RPG games of all time (the art was pixellated but it was in the 90s and also a stylistic choice even at that time), while the former is a mobile game (there's a Steam version but it... is not as easy to work with). A warning that the installer craps out most of the time but maybe try to not download everything at once to begin with anyway if you aren't sure about it, and once you get past that, it's a GREAT game!:-P

It offers a gorgeous graphics & sountrack especially: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mx-WenrEI-8.

Edit: I just looked it up, and there is a PC version of Chrono Trigger! Do NOT get it though - it apparently sucks really bad. Anyway CT is a short game, while AE constantly has content being added to it.

Shin Megami Tensei / Persona are like a dark themed Pokemon.

If she liked Vampire Survivors, check out Brotato. It just released version 1.0 and is quite fantastic both in theme and gameplay.

Might take a look at Temtem and Cassette Beasts to get that Pokemon fix.

The Creeper World series, or Kingdom Rush for tower defense a la Bloons... possibly Mindustry or Factorio as well. Start with Mindustry and if it does it for her then you can grab Factorio as well.

She might also vibe with roguelikes considering she liked Vampire Survivors so Enter the Gungeon, Binding of Isaac, Realm of the Mad God, Slay the Spire, or 20xx/30xx might be up her alley as well.

Maybe it's too out of the box but cities skylines is pretty accessible but you can get lost in details when you get into it and add some mods.

Monster Hunter Rise might be good. It's more simplified compared to other Monster Hunters, so it's perfect for someone new to the series. The basic gameplay loop is pick a monster to hunt, go find it, fight it, loot it, go back to town, upgrade gear, repeat. But it's single player or 4 player co-op, so you're completely free to enjoy at your own pace. No need to worry about grinding for the best gear or anything like that, but you can spend hours getting the meta armor too if that's your thing. Plus, jumping around like a ninja is pretty cool

My time at Portia has that hook, I bet she will like that, I've seen slay the spire suggested too that took 500hours from me, my most played casual game is the Battlegrounds on hearthstone, it's free too

Kingdom Two Crowns. Deceptively simple controls but highly addictive gameplay with self discovery of the mechanics

I can recommend backpack hero

of course, if you wanna maximize grindiness and low intensity, oldschool runescape will top the chart. Just mouse clicking.

Lots of great suggestions but one that I haven't seen is rimworld. It's difficult to explain but it's sort of like a mix between a base builder and a story generator. It's incredibly addictive once you get going though.

I played Astroneer with my wife, who's not really a gamer. She had a blast and got so into it.

Ffxiv has a free trial that allows you to play up to level 60 and includes the first expansion. Story is fantastic and you can easily spend hundreds of hours just in the free trial.

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Stardew Valley, Terraria, Graveyard Keeper come to mind.

Try Graveyard Keeper https://store.steampowered.com/app/599140/Graveyard_Keeper/ and it’s only $7 right now

Might not quite be the grind she's looking for but I can't enough of stardew valley lately.

Bought DiabloIV played for a week, my gf convinced me to go StardewValley and I haven't touched Diablo since... 70€ well spent.

Vampire Survivors? Each game is no longer than 30 min, but you'll be playing for hours..

Incredibly biased suggestions, but...

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1584090/Touhou_Mystias_Izakaya/ - A cozy little management similar to Cook/Serve/Delicious and those old... Diner Dash??? flash games.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1637730/Crystal_Project/ - Takes a lot of cues from the older Final Fantasy games and has a super enjoyable world to explore (at least in my opinion). The recent addition of mod support means you can maybe??? help tailor it to her liking.

edit: You might also want to look into some of the better RPG Maker games that were around before the genre(??) started popping up on Steam! A lot of them were hobby projects and totally free.

As someone with ADHD Pokemon fan games have been my thing, especially side loading them to my phone.

Pokemon Infinite Fusions has by far been the stand out, filled with endless "ooh, but what about this?!" Moments. It's a new, fun twist on the classic Kanto story, and even features Johto as an absolutely massive post game. It's the only one I have to play on my PC though.

Pokemon XenoVerse is great as well, unique designs, a compelling story and a surprisingly well balanced new type. This one works very well on phones except for Pokemon centers becoming T H E V O I D.

Pokemon insurgence has been the latest to join my collection. It's far and away the most maturely themed Pokemon game I've played (though I've heard uranium is more mature) I'm not finished yet so I can't comment on quality. In lieu of fakemon they opted to instead create a massive number of Delta species, a take on regional variants which have all been interesting at the very least. It's the one that runs best natively on my phone, with only the occasional glitched text

I can't recommend Disgaea enough. 5 was the one that I played and I feel like has the right balance of nearly infinite grinding vs interesting content vs reason to actually grind, with also having a relatively achievable and observable ending. All the games follow the same basic gameplay premise so pick the one you like, I think D2 has a lot of old school fans and 6 was poorly received. Disgaea 5 as far as I know is the fan favorite "modern" Disgaea game.

It even has a demo if I recall so you can try it before committing to it. Just know that the demo can only go into the very basic gameplay loop because an awful lot of things are locked behind the first 10 or so hours of story gameplay. But if you like the loop (and the general gist of how the gameplay works, that will remain) then it's totally worth it. It's a game that one could easily sink 2,000+ hours into if it catches their fancy. It's also a game that's easy to pick up and put down because they're always some bit of something that you can do. An hour spent anywhere doing anything will get you a bit of an upgrade, and you just pick the things you like and craft them into the most obscenely overpowered bullshit you could ever conceive of. Stat points regularly reach into the quadrillions. By endgame you're expected to have spells that destroy the entire battlefield being spammed multiple times per turn. It's loads of fun.

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