10 Best Low-Impact Games to Play When You're Sick

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of sick days. There are mild sick days, when you maybe have a light fever and some soreness and just have to take it easy, and there are severe sick days, where you’re completely down for the count and can’t leave your bed or couch. While the former is a great excuse for catching up on some games, the latter isn’t so great for that. Even if you have a bunch of top-shelf, high-impact games locked and loaded on your Switch, Xbox, PlayStation, or PC, you just don’t have the energy or mental capacity to handle something like that.

While it would probably be best to just sleep through the day if you’re really sick, that gets boring pretty quickly, so you want to find something at least mildly stimulating to pass the time. This is why it’s good to have some low-impact games on standby. If high-impact, action-packed games are like rich food, low-impact games are like oatmeal, something you can just passively experience with little-to-no effort or exertion. These are some of the games I’ve personally gone to when I’m having a sick day, but can’t just spend the whole day in a semi-conscious haze.

10 Vampire Survivors

Let the Game Play Itself

It’s annoying wanting a little bit of action and excitement in your entertainment, but not having the physical or mental energy to process all of it. The best middle ground for getting that kind of entertainment would probably be an action game that, for the most part, just plays itself. Well, assuming you’re decent at it, Vampire Survivors basically plays itself.

Part of what made Vampire Survivors so popular in the first place was its exceptionally simple core gameplay loop and controls. The only part of your character you manually control is their movement, which you can easily do under your bed covers with one finger. Just maneuver yourself around the map, let all your weapons autofire, and occasionally use a second finger to press the A button when you want to pick an upgrade. It’s all the flashy action you could want without any complicated button inputs or stat min-maxing.

9 Balatro

Ha Ha Number Go Up

When you’re sick in bed, you need to seek out things to be happy about. That’s the whole reason you usually keep a TV in front of you when you’re sick, you want to experience something fun and uplifting to counteract the lurgy blues. You know what makes me really happy? Watching numbers go up exponentially. You know what game has a lot of numbers going up exponentially? Balatro.

In the same vein as Vampire Survivors, it’s Balatro’s devious simplicity that makes it so fiendishly addicting. As long as you know your Poker hands, and the game will tell you if you don’t, you’ve got all the building blocks you need to start watching those numbers fly up, accompanied by those satisfying little ding noises. Yeah, if you’re in an addled state of mind due to illness or medication, you probably won’t be winning any runs or getting very far in endless mode, but Balatro is plenty of fun to just play for its own sake, winning or not.

8 Poker Night at the Inventory

Focus Your Frustrations on Tycho

Rather understandably, I tend to be in a bad mood when I’m sick. It’d be great to have a singular entity or individual to focus that enmity on, but as we’ve established, head-to-head action games and sick days don’t mix. Still, you don’t need fast-paced action to find someone to project your hatred onto, you just need a single schmuck at a poker table. Poker Night at the Inventory gives you four perfectly good schmucks.

All you need to play this game is a working knowledge of Texas Hold ‘Em, no particular strats or impulsive maneuvers required. Just pick any of your four opponents, most likely Tycho, and focus all of your betting plays around making their day specifically miserable. Nothing better for a bad mood than spreading it around, and if you can do so without actually hurting any real people, it’s a universal good. Tycho has it coming anyway.

7 Sam & Max Save the World

Easy Puzzles, Good Laughs

Speaking of revamped Telltale Games, playing Sam & Max Save the World when I’m not feeling 100% has a big nostalgia factor, as it’s the same kind of game I played frequently while sick at home from school as a little kid. Actually, I think I literally played the original version of this game when I was sick from middle school once. Life is oddly circular sometimes, but it’s still a great pick.

As far as point-and-click adventure games go, Sam & Max is a good low-impact choice for two reasons: first, barring a few outliers, none of the puzzles are timed, so you don’t need to frantically click around the screen, burning up your precious fever-ridden brainpower. Secondly, it’s a really funny game, and laughter is the best medicine. You don’t even have to focus on solving the puzzles if you don’t have the muster for it, you can just have Sam bum around the neighborhood and any other available locales, poking stuff and bothering people to see what he’ll say.

6 Coffee Talk

Everyone Loves a Hot Drink on a Bad Day

Whenever I’m having a sick day, the first thing I do after dragging myself out of bed and brushing my teeth is make a big cup of my favorite piping-hot herbal tea. Not only does it soothe your throat and nerves, but a hot drink is great for your state of mind, which is probably not doing so great if you’re currently sick. If you’ve already got a hot drink in hand, you might as well play a game about hot drinks as well, like Coffee Talk.

Coffee Talk is a very laid-back visual novel about making teas and coffee for various fantasy folk in contemporary San Francisco. There are some dramatic beats, but it’s mostly a low-key story, peppered with very relaxing ambient music. The only part of it that’s really “gameplay” is figuring out the right drinks to make for your customers, which is a nice way to keep your neurons firing, though you can also just play the game with a walkthrough open if you’re too tired and want to just focus on the story.

5 Later Alligator

Like Your Favorite Sick Day Cartoons

I watched a lot of cartoons during childhood sick days. It was always interesting to see which reruns would be on Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon during the down hours between the early morning and after school. If you want to relive those years yourself, you can play Later Alligator for a similar flavor of slightly-off-kilter late morning cartoons.

Later Alligator is basically a collection of mini-games, with the framing device of meeting Pat the Alligator’s family and trying to figure out who among them wants to kill him. There’s no actual mystery to solve, mind you, it’s just mini-games and silly cartoon shenanigans. Some of the mini-games have a bare minimum of reflexes required, but nothing more elaborate than clicking your mouse at the right time or paying attention to a brief pattern. If you were able to stay conscious long enough to boot up your PC and open Steam, you’re probably fine.

4 Dorfromantik

Like Getting a Sibling to Play a Board Game with You

For about as long as they’ve existed, board games have gone hand-in-hand with unexpected days spent at home, from sick days to snow days to rainouts. You can’t play most board games if you don’t have someone to play with, though, and you probably don’t want to get a friend or family member sick. In lieu of that, just play Dorfromantik, which is basically a board game you can play solo.

Dorfromantik is a strategy puzzle game where you place different tiles down on a large board to gradually build up a village and surrounding landscapes, building up points and clearing quests as you go. It’s straightforward and objective-focused, a mildly-stimulating task you can use to keep yourself alert and attentive if you don’t feel like falling asleep. Though, if the regular gameplay is a little too intensive for you, the game also has a creative mode where you can place tiles freely and build your own little world for the fun of it. It’s like building a LEGO set, but without the risk of stepping on a brick.

3 Pokémon Pokopia

Cute ‘Mons, Low Pressure

Like many children of the 90s, the love of Pokémon is hard-baked into my DNA. I just have to catch a glimpse of one of my favorite ‘Mons, and I get a tangible improvement in mood. This can be effectively turned into a strong sick day contender, but rather than stress over winning Pokémon battles, it may be better to focus more on the good vibes with Pokémon Pokopia.

Pokopia gives you ample opportunity and excuse to spend comfy times with your favorite Pokémon in a laid-back setting, all while also giving you ample tools to both occupy your mind with straightforward, practical tasks and while the day away with assorted silly construction projects and shenanigans. Plus, unlike Animal Crossing, which gates off its activities based on the real-life time of day, you can more or less play Pokopia for as long as you want. If you’re going to be in bed all day anyway, you might as well get a lot of work done.

2 Stardew Valley

If You Can’t Do Your Real Chores…

The annoying thing about sick days as an adult is that, even if you’re not working, you probably had some other stuff you wanted to do that day, like running errands or cooking. Obviously, none of that is getting done now, and leaving your chores undone is frustrating. If you’re not feeling well enough to get any of your real-life chores done, the least you could do is get some simulated chores done in Stardew Valley.

The vast majority of activities in Stardew Valley are rote and simple, whether it’s tending to your crops, chatting with the locals, going fishing, or whatever else, nothing that requires a surplus of brain power. The only part of the game that’s even remotely fast-paced is fighting monsters in the dungeon areas, but you don’t have to do any of that stuff if you’re playing on a sick day. That’s what’s fun about Stardew Valley: in spite of the in-game day/night cycle, there’s very little time constraints, so just spend your sick day doing easier tasks and save the sword and shield stuff for another time.

1 PowerWash Simulator 2

Does Anyone Else Get the Urge to Clean on Days Off?

Even though you probably shouldn’t be doing household chores like cleaning when you’re sick, I can’t help but get the distinct urge to do so. I think it’s because, when you’re stuck in bed all day, you start to notice all the miscellaneous specks and dust bunnies you’re usually moving around too much to catch. Even if you do see them, though, you still shouldn’t be doing strenuous work while sick, so instead, you can satisfy your urge for cleanliness with PowerWash Simulator 2.

PowerWash Simulator 2 is the perfect time-passing game, something procedural and constructive you can lose yourself in, maybe while listening to music or a podcast. Plus, returning to what I was talking about earlier with finding things to be happy about, there are few things as distinctly satisfying as seeing a massive, dirty room object become squeaky clean. You’ll be so chuffed about all that water spraying, you’ll probably want to give your living room that cleanup once you’re feeling better.