19 Games like Dinkum that you should try

A farming sim that is really a schedule-management game: every in-game day forces a choice between crops, mining, fishing and the villagers, and the calendar never gives you enough hours. The first year is the hook. Fishing is the wall most players hit — the minigame is fiddly and unforgiving early, and several quests gate behind it.

A 2D sandbox that is far more combat-driven than its look suggests: progression runs through boss fights, and each one unlocks a tier of materials. Building is deep but optional. It explains almost nothing — crafting chains, boss summons and biome requirements are opaque enough that most players keep a wiki open throughout.

A 2D space sandbox with a stronger sense of place than most: hand-written quests, distinct alien races and villages that feel authored rather than generated. Building is flexible. The combat is thin — most encounters resolve by mashing one weapon — and the mid-game settles into repeating the same planet-scan-and-loot loop.

A building sandbox where the physics are the point: vehicles you assemble actually flex, tip and fall apart under load, and getting a working machine is a genuine engineering problem. Creative mode is the strong half. The survival campaign has been in early access for years and remains unfinished, with long gaps between updates.

A voxel engineering sandbox with real physics: ships flex, break apart along stress lines and drift, and building something that survives its own thrust is the actual game. Deeply satisfying when it clicks. It is heavy on performance and light on direction — large builds tank the framerate, and there is essentially no guidance on what to do.

Potion Craft is an alchemist simulator where you physically interact with your tools and ingredients to brew potions. You're in full control of the whole shop: invent new recipes, attract customers and experiment to your heart's content. Just remember: the whole town is counting on you.

Unturned is a low-poly survival game providing single or multiplayer experience. The main action takes place on 6 different maps (Prince Edward Island, Yukon, Washington, Germany and Russia) flooded with zombies. The story begins in the random location of the chosen map and lasts till the death.

Years of free updates turned it into a genuinely broad survival-exploration game: base building, freighters, settlements, multiplayer. The scale is unmatched. The core loop is still the criticism — planets are procedurally varied rather than designed, so after twenty of them the discoveries start to rhyme, and the inventory management never stops being fiddly.

Loddlenaut is an ocean cleanup adventure set on a vibrant alien planet. Play as an interstellar custodian who is tasked with cleaning up the pollution left behind by spacefaring mega-corporation.

A physics kitchen where every ingredient is an object you grab, cut and throw, which makes cooking chaotic in a way that is either the joke or the frustration depending on the day. Career mode adds pressure. Controls are deliberately unwieldy, and the difficulty comes from fighting the interface rather than from the cooking itself.

Description Kitchen simulator The game that turns you into the chef.