Half Life 2

RimWorld, I guess? It should work and has infinite stories to tell.

Doom and Quake! When I used a potato PC as a daily driver the thing I played the most were boomer shooters. The source ports for both games are pretty amazing nowadays!

So first off if you cant afford games, just pirate em. Dbzer0 Lemmy instance has lots of good info for doing this. Though you'll have to learn how to set up wine n stuff via lutris to install windows games on linux. If youre concerned about legal implications around piracy, I'll get hate for this, but just limit seeding speeds to 0. Seeding is the illegal part for torrents as its the sharing of the files to others

Most of the oldschool crpgs like baulders gate 1 & 2, Icewind dale and plane scape torment should run more then fine

Factorio and rimworld should play well enough until you get into late game bases

All of the older valve titles are a good time half-life 1 & 2, portal 1 & 2 and they arnt overly demanding on hardware

For a sorta free game, old school runescape is a fun time waster and its possible to get membership via in game gold farming in f2p

Dusk and Amid evil are two very fun boomershooters that should run well enough I would think

Terraria is very fun and isn't very demanding on hardware

Could also download an nes/SNES/n64 emulator and pirate Roms for all the og Nintendo games but I'd only recommend those if you have a controller of some kind

Dwarf fortress is free but the free version is a little bit of a nightmare to understand visually, the forums have info on how to download tilesets and stuff to make it more user friendly. Though this is another game that will suffer from late game slowdown

I can't think of any other games I'd recommend atm but hoist the sails high my friend. Its how I got 99% of my games growing up

If you're into zombies, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. Has a bit of a learning curve though.

I'm sad I've scrolled through more than a page and no one suggested Tuxracer.

Want one of the best crpg of all time, still standing the test? Get Ultima VII. There should be a bunch of ways to play it, I believe, even if it's from 1991 or so.

Minetest, Mindustry

I've had a similar setup for quite some time, but you didn't mention what GPU you're running, also since you're running Mint, are you comfortable with Windows games (through wine/proton) and emulation?

If he likes RTS, Project Celeste is a revival of Age of Empires Online by the open-source community. And you can install it on Linux with Lutris.

Undertale / Delta Rune Sorry, missed that this is the freehames community.

Suggest some explicit content free game ideas.

I'm sure there's plenty of free porn games....
Oh right, you probably meant games without explicit content

Looks like Factorio should run on those specs if the graphics card supports DX11

Half-Life, you can run the original with the Xash3D engine so that it may run natively and with better features. Hell, thanks to Xash3D and the work of some random guy, I've gotten it to work on goddamn OpenBSD. Worked great.

Half-Life 2, can also work great whether you use Proton or try to setup Wine yourself.

Another great series are the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, good stuff. Make sure to play on the hardest difficulty. The scaling works on both you and the enemies taking more damage. And don't get me started on the mods for those games.

I've been playing all of those on a Thinkpad X61, so they should run just fine with whatever you've got.

There's lots of small gems in the old flashpoint archive (old flashgames), but I had trouble on linux with the last version I downloaded. https://flashpointarchive.org/downloads give it a run..

Solitaire?