My favorite games to play during summer are chill as heck, straightforward yet addictive, and you can play most of them while keeping your attention turned toward the people you’re spending your free time with. These games are perfect summer pastimes.
Dave the Diver was one of the best games I played in 2023 and that’s saying something, considering what a banger 2023 was for gaming. I love so much about this game, especially its meticulously designed and oh-so-addictive gameplay loop. This involves fishing, tending the restaurant two times per day to earn cash, unlocking new equipment, and recipes, exploring underwater areas, completing activities on the surface, and earning new swag for the restaurant.
On top of that, there’s an exciting story, goofy characters, and quality humor. You’ll encounter a number of unique boss battles and the game packs in so much content that you can have dozens of hours of fun before seeing the end credits.
Best of all is the fact that, aside from those nerve-wracking moments during your restaurant shifts and a couple of boss battles, Dave the Diver is a game where you can sit back, relax, and play the game in second gear.
Charming 3D pixel art visuals, a tiny island to explore, lots of stuff to collect and stories to hear, and a not-so-short hike to tackle are A Short Hike’s main building blocks. This is a super chill game where you play as Claire, a teenage bird with a quest to reach Hawk Peak and get a cellphone signal to make an important call.
I finished the game over a couple of sittings in just one afternoon, and the game was a ton of fun. I recommend taking your time to explore Hawk Peak Provincial Park in full, meeting as many quirky NPCs as you can, and trying to perform as many optional activities as possible. These activities include cool mini-games to play and intriguing story tidbits to unfold.
A Short Hike was so successful it kickstarted a whole new “cozy adventure” micro-genre that gave birth to other neat experiences such as Lil Gator Game, Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip, and Haven Park. If you end up liking A Short Hike, you ought to play them all. These are super chill summer games that you will finish in a jiffy, but remember for years to come.
Here’s yet another cozy underwater adventure. Unlike Dave the Diver, Loddlenaut is a game you can finish in a couple of hours, during which you don’t have to worry about tending the bar or fighting giant underwater creatures. Here, all you’ve got to do is clean the ocean on a faraway planet.
The best part about Loddlenaut is the fact that, as you pick up trash and make the planet GUP-14’s ocean a better place for everyone, you also discover its adorable natives, axolotl-like Loddles that look as cute as their name suggests.
I love Unpacking because of its simple yet engaging puzzles and its brilliant environmental storytelling, capable of conveying the game’s story via simple actions of unpacking your stuff and creating a new home each time you embark on a new unpacking escapade.
The game is so good at calming you down after a stressful day at work, allowing you to organize your perfect home time and time again. And as the story progresses and in-game years march on, you’ll create a personal relationship with a person you’ve never met, a relationship built solely through possessions you need to find a new place for, in a new home, over and over again.
What if The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild didn’t focus on combat and took place in a Pacific archipelago instead of Hyrule? Well, the final product would most likely look similar to Tchia, but not too much. While the game’s elevator pitch is that it’s something of a BOTW clone, Tchia is far from being a carbon copy of the Switch classic.
In Tchia, you can explore the islands as any creature or object you stumble upon on your journey. Instead of exploring the world to find new and more powerful gear, meet new characters, and unfold new stories, world exploration in Tchia is driven by the desire to see every arresting vista the dreamy world has to offer.
The in-game world is based on the New Caledonia archipelago, located halfway between Australia’s east coast and Fiji. Pet every single animal you meet (seriously, you can pet every animal in the game), and discover every side-quest the game has in store because these activities are fundamental to the game’s enjoyment.
I recommend just forgetting about the main story and focusing on the side content, which mostly rocks (aside from too many music mini-games). If you stumble upon a particularly difficult platformer section, don’t forget you can skip those parts. If you’re looking for more chill exploration games, I recommend Sable if you’re down for some sandy vibes or Abzu if you’d rather embark upon an underwater adventure.
In Alba: A Wildlife Adventure, you play as Alba, a young girl who plans to spend her summer with her grandparents on a small island located in the Mediterranean, filled with animals to discover and photograph, but also to help.
The island’s mayor is trying to make the idyllic Mediterranean paradise more attractive to tourists, which means they will do anything to build a new and ugly resort that will destroy the island’s biodiversity.
Enter Alba, who will help the island and its denizens by starting a mini-revolution and doing a ton of good deeds. While you’re making the world a better place, you can also photograph and document every animal species living on Pinar del Mar. Doing that is a joy because the game’s open world is contained yet super dense, with almost every nook and cranny offering either a new animal to document, a story bit to unfold, lively new characters to talk to, or a new area to explore.
I loved every second of Alba: A Wildlife Adventure, and I recommend everyone to take their time, explore the island at their leisure, and remember that this is a chillectathon: there’s no reward for finishing the game as soon as possible.
After chilling a bit too hard and falling from a highrise cat’s cradle, it’s time for this little kitty to find its way back home. But not before causing some mayhem, meeting some peppy new friends, playing a ton of mini-games, and exploring the city to your heart’s content.
Little Kitty, Big City has nailed the cat movement mechanic, and when you combine that with a genuinely fun world to explore, a ton of different ways to cause havoc, cool hats to collect, and a game that doesn’t overstay its welcome, the end product is a perfect summer title you can leisurely play while waiting for the sweet embrace of darkness to come and take the scorching heat away.
Stray is another feline adventure I recommend playing, but I think you’d be better off with Untitled Goose Game if you want to play something more in the vein of Little Kitty, Big City.
FAR: Changing Tides is a slow-burning casual 2D adventure that allows you a ton of time for introspection or, if you’re playing the game while having fun with friends, a ton of time to do other stuff while your slow-like-molasses ship advances through the post-apocalyptic scenery, taking you home, wherever that is.
If you end up liking FAR: Changing Tides, you should definitely play its prequel, FAR: Lone Sails. It’s quite similar but takes place in a desert instead of in (and below) the sea.
Jusant’s climbing mechanics thread the perfect line between engaging and complicated. The end result is a game that packs hours of captivating gameplay that shouldn’t frustrate the player even for a second. You can climb without worrying about having enough rope to reach the next part of a level, and you won’t need to spend more time planning your next route than actually climbing it.
Aside from the best climbing mechanics I’ve ever seen, Jusant also features breathtaking visuals (the game is filled with otherworldly vistas that look so alien yet so familiar), an unpretentious yet emotional story, and a number of collectibles that give you a glimpse into the events that took place before the game. It is a brilliant, cozy climbing game and, at least to me, the best game from DON’T NOD to date.
The Touryst was one of the first games I beat on my Nintendo Switch Lite and I loved it. I still do. This is a lightweight action-adventure that doesn’t take itself too seriously, offering a good number of fairly compact levels to explore. Each level contains collectibles, secrets, and puzzles that won’t try to squeeze the last ounce of your brain juice but instead focus on being fun to solve, which is way better in my opinion.
It’s a brilliant game that’s now also available on just about every platform, with 120Hz support on consoles like PS5 and Xbox Series X.
If you’re looking for a similar, relatively lightweight adventure with cute visuals and contained levels that don’t require a map to keep your bearings, The Last Campfire fits that bill perfectly.
What The Golf is all about the unknown. In the context of this game, the unknown is finding out what you’ll try to putt next. The game features 500 levels, and most of those levels are hilarious courses that somehow always manage to subvert your expectations and one up the levels you’ve already beaten.
It looks great, plays even better, and is chock-full of goofy humor. Also, considering its lightweight nature, What The Golf is a perfect summer game; a title where you can let your brain rest while trying to putt a brain into a head-shaped hole (this level may or may not be in the actual game). In fact, the game’s so good that I’ll probably download and replay it on my ROG Ally once I finish writing this list.
While Dorfromantik has high scores and the game does include a healthy dose of challenge, you can play it with the sole goal of creating a perfect countryside. Once you run out of tiles to place, you can just continue the game in Create mode and build a whole provinz instead of limiting yourself to dorfs.
But even if you try finishing quests and beating your high score, the level of chill found in Dorfromantik is pretty darn high. The game has no time limit for turns, allowing you to spend as much time as you want before deciding where the next tile belongs.
You’ll always unlock a new tile design or some achievement no matter how poor your tile placing skills are, and you don’t have to strictly follow the game’s tile-lying rules unless you’re a tryhard with the sole goal of beating your current high score. A definite summer recommendation.
Looking for even more relaxed gaming experiences? Check out more chill games that are perfect for unwinding, and our list of video games you can play forever.
