Monster Train was a good time on my celeron chromebook running linux

Morrowind on OpenMW ran decently

I was able to emulate most things less demanding than Gamecube as well

The Saboteur is a super fun game, I feel like i don’t hear enough people talk about it

My fav games that havent been mentioned yet and should work for you:

OpenRCT2 (Roller Coaster Tycoon)

Sid Meier’s Civilization III (and IV really but especially III)

Quake & Quake 2

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon (and expansions)

Football Manager (only if you’re into football/sports ofc)

Without knowing your exact APU I’d wager you can probably emulate lot of great classic games maybe up until Gamecube/PS2. My specific recommendations would be playing Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Zelda: Majora’s Mask with the decompiled and rebuilt native C versions, can’t remember the name of the project at the moment but it should be easy to find on google. The original N64 versions are also well worth playing but after playing the recompiled windows versions with free camera and other quality of life hacks I’m not sure I could go back.

Slay the Princess

visual novels work very well on even toasters because they are basically slide shows.

old adventure games are also a blast and work very well, look into lucas arts and sierra online catalogues. a great starter could be sam and max or grim fandango.

you could also try N64 emulation. there’s a lot of good games on it and not demanding at all.

if you need something more sandboxy, rollercoaster tycoon and transport tycoon deluxe (or opentdd for the modern open source version, has multiplayer too with mod support) are great. apart from that, old civilization games and simcity are also great.

old real time strategies are also great. command and conquer series, stronghold series, age of empires 2, age of mythology, warcraft etc etc.

(help me folks im running out of genres)

basically either look into blasts from the past, or the indie scene. i recommend the former since although there’s a lot of great stuff in the indie scene, it all kinda gets samey due to the same tools being used and the limited resources available pushes people into certain genres. you can’t certainly beat the olden but golden ones on variety.

Path of Achra

Fields of Mistria (if you’ve played enough Stardew Valley)

Undertaledeltarune

Dwarf Fortress

Balatro (probably all you need for a while)

Factorio (on a more modern chip at least)

Slay the Spire

Terraria

FF 1-6 (emulated or the remakes)

CrossCode if the laptop is alright. Try the demo and see if you get any slowdown.

Rim world, FTL

FTL has got me addicted recently, it’s also on sale on steam (or was 2 days ago at least)

Minecraft but it’s not a story-driven game.

Citizen Sleeper is really good and has basically no graphics.

Disco Elysium good.

Vampire Survivors, probably?

depends on how low you’re willing to play, you can play TF2 on low settings I guess

Carrion is probably only like ten hours worth of gameplay, but it’s absolutely spectacular and if it had been significantly longer I think it might have started to get stale rather than being truly memorable. You play as an amorphous monster and start the game by escaping from your containment tank at a research facility. The core mechanics are barely explained to the player, if at all, so each new game mechanic is introduced alongside a puzzle that more or less amounts to understanding how to apply it in-game. I’m aware there are console versions of this game too, but the fluid feel of how your creature moves is such a huge part of enjoying the game that I have a lot of trouble imagining a gamepad could get that down anywhere near as well as using the mouse+keyboard. I love the touch that you grow with higher hp and movement becomes much more cumbersome, but you can get back to the more fluid movement by shedding hp. Also the map design is great, it’s highly nonlinear and very easy to get lost. The only actual complaint I have is I didn’t like hearing all the terrified screams from the researchers, but it’s hard for me to picture a way around that without breaking the immersion.

Eastward is pixel graphics but when I tried it with wine I had some minor framerate issues, it can handle integrated graphics but how well will depend on how good your pc is. I played it on switch originally. I think the gameplay is enjoyable and done well, but it’s not the reason you play the game and is not a game for someone who skips past dialogue whenever possible. I am not that someone though, and Eastward is one of my absolute favorite games I’ve ever played. The pixel art is gorgeous, characters and npcs have personalities you get attached to, soundtrack is both great music and matches the atmosphere, it’s something special. The writing and dialogue are just wonderful, and combined with the pixel art there’s so much emotion packed into it. At times it is uplifting and heartwarming, at other times unsettling and creepy. The change in tone when stumbling upon the factory in Greenberg caught me completely off-guard, just amazing. Only complaint was I spent most of the game excited to find out how they would tie all the loose-ends together and that never happened, there was a lot more left up to interpretation than I was expecting, which made the ending a massive disappointment for me.

Fallow is another short game that I personally really liked even though I didn’t really understand it. There’s not even a lot of gameplay in it, it creates a beautifully creepy atmosphere and the game is more or less that you sit in that and absorb it. It was an experience of observing a different world and trying to comprehend how that world works. I can’t even tell if it was intentional that I didn’t get it or if I’m just bad at media interpretation, but there’s emotion in it either way.

Monster Sanctuary is a monster-taming game with a wholly uninspired story and mediocre pixel art, and both those issues made me give up on it after just a couple hours initially, but when I eventually gave it a second chance the gameplay itself is really engaging and well-designed. It’s something I’ve come back to a few times since then just because of that. There’s a lot of depth to it and it’s fun to experiment with.

kentucky route zero

Balatro or stardewvally

Dead Cells!