Games for a Low End PC
One in five of the games we have measured downloads less than three megabytes. Here are the good ones.
24 games · hand-picked, then filled from the catalogue
Somebody with a slow machine is usually told to lower the settings. Here you can just pick a smaller game.
How this list is put together
We have opened 9,898 of the games in this catalogue in a real browser and counted the bytes that actually arrive — not the number the server claims, which many of these games do not even publish, but the real weight of the thing. 1,972 of them download between 100 KB and 3 MB. About one in five. Inside that band the median is 1.3 MB, against 7.8 MB for the catalogue as a whole.
The floor of 100 KB is not arbitrary and it is worth explaining, because it is the kind of thing a page like this usually hides. 581 of our measurements came back under fifty kilobytes. No game is fifty kilobytes. Those are pages that bounced our measurement somewhere it could not follow, and if we counted them this page would claim a quarter of the catalogue runs on an old laptop instead of a fifth. We would rather have the smaller, true number.
Three megabytes is a photograph. It is less than one second on a decent connection and about twenty on a bad one, and it is the difference between a game that opens and a game you give up on.
Where the small games are, and why
Small is not the same as thin. The lightest things in this catalogue are frequently the most played, and there is a reason for that shape.
2D arcade games are cheap because sprites repeat. One drawing of a character used four hundred times costs the same as one drawing.
Flat-shaded 3D — the low-poly look, the stickman physics, the toy cars — is cheap because a model with no texture is a list of numbers. Several of the 3D games on this page are smaller than a single photograph of a menu.
Puzzle and logic games are cheap because the content is rules rather than art.
What is expensive is exactly what you would expect: photographic textures, an orchestral soundtrack, hundreds of hand-drawn wardrobe items, an open city. Those are the games this page exists to route you around.
Size is not frame rate, and we are not going to pretend it is
One honest caveat, because it is the thing most likely to disappoint you.
A small download means your connection is not the problem. It does not guarantee your graphics chip is not. A 1 MB 3D game with real-time lighting can still crawl on an integrated card from 2013, while a 15 MB hidden-object game with no 3D at all will run perfectly on the same machine.
Most of this page is 2D or very light 3D, which is the combination that actually works on old hardware. If something here stutters, it will be one of the 3D ones, and switching to a flat one is usually the whole fix.
Old laptops, school machines, hotel wifi
The three situations this page is for are the same situation: a connection or a computer that somebody else chose for you.
Our page for schools publishes these measurements in full, because thirty children opening thirty different games at once is a real number on a real line, and games for a school Chromebook is the hand-picked version of this list. For the very fastest end — things that finish before you have taken your coat off — three minute games is the shelf.
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How do you know how big these are?
We open each game in a real browser and count the bytes that actually arrive. That is not the same as the number a server declares — many of these games declare nothing at all — and it is the only figure that tells you what your connection has to carry. We have measured 9,898 games this way so far.
What counts as low end here?
Between 100 KB and 3 MB, downloaded. 1,972 of the 9,898 games we have measured land in that band — about one in five — with a median of 1.3 MB inside it, against 7.8 MB for the catalogue as a whole. The floor is there on purpose: 581 of our measurements came back under 50 KB, and no game is that small. Those are pages that redirected somewhere our measurement could not follow, and counting them would flatter this page.
Does a small download mean it will run smoothly?
Mostly, and not always. Size is what your connection carries; frame rate is what your graphics chip does. A 1 MB 3D game can still stutter on a ten-year-old integrated card. But nothing on this page will keep an old laptop waiting on the download, and almost all of it is 2D or very light 3D.
Will these work on a school Chromebook?
That is exactly what the collection for school Chromebooks is for, and it is picked on the same measurement. This page is the wider version of it: no install, no plugin, no account, and a download most connections finish before you have read this sentence.
Do I need to download or install anything?
No. Everything here runs inside the browser tab you already have open. There is nothing to install and no account to make.