Shattered Pixel Dungeon is a great Rouge-like.

• Slay the Spire
• Slice and Dice
• Balatro
• Vampire Survivors
• Retro Bowl/Retro Bowl College/Retro Goal
• Hoplite

Depends on your willingness to pay. Balatro, Slay the Spire, Dead Cells are all really good but cost around 10 bucks each but are among the best mobile games you could want, all offering different styles of gameplay

Just to start off, there was a thread about this some time ago.

Balatro. I only own it on Android. I don't think the experience is significantly reduced on Android as opposed to PC/other platforms.

• Sokoban
• Atomas
• Magic Survival
• Mindustry
• Terraria

Balatro is super good

Slice and Dice. Turn based RPG dungeon fighter where your party are all unique dice that you can modify with items and such. The interface is super slick and well done.

I've put in hundreds of hours and I'm going to likely be putting in hundreds more. Well worth the price!

Which handheld do you have? The games depends on the screen size and buttons available. Without that information, !Balatro@lemm.ee is the only safe bet I have.

Stardew Valley is popular

If you're into simple games, there's one called Lato from F-droid. It's just a snowboarding game where you click to jump over boulders and cliffs with a changing atmosphere and relaxing music. It helps me ease my mind.

https://f-droid.org/packages/ardash.lato/

Super Hexagon

In the end I just settled with the logic based ones like minesweeper and sudoku. F-droid has a good version each (and more than one maybe).

PlanetCon is a decent strategy game on its basic settings. I haven't customised it but have had a fair amount of fun in it. But it is nothing perfect, do not expect too much out of it. If you learn how to not attract the ire of all AI opponents simultaneously though, you can have short bursts of decent strategy enjoyment.

Pokemon TCGP if you're into that sort of thing. It starts with just collecting, but after a while you'll be able to battle.

• Magic Survival (Bullet Heaven)
• Eternium (Action RPG)
• Bombsquad (Idk what genre this would fit in lol) 🟢
• I Love Hue and it's sequel (Color based puzzles)
• Heroism and Impossible Dungeon (Idle/incremental) first one is singleplayer, second one is mostly singleplayer but has pvp tournaments were you compete to be the first on a leaderboard.
• Slipstream (Multiplayer idle?) best played if you're watching the stream of the person who's the captain.
• Dungeon Faster (Dungeon crawler, deck builder)
• Apocalypse Heroes (Top-down shooter)
• Vampire Survivors (Bullet Heaven) 🟢
• Brotato (Bullet Heaven) 🟢
• 20 Minutes Till Dawn (Bullet Heaven) 🟢
• Halls of Torment (Bullet Heaven) 🟢
• Dungeon Quest (Action RPG) 🟢
• Death Road to Canada (Roguelite, survival) 🟢
• Infinitode 2 (Tower Defense)
• Meteorfall: Journeys (Deck builder, roguelite)
• Meteorfall: Kurmit's Tale (Deck builder, roguelite)
• Super Auto Pets (Auto-chess, asynchronous pvp)
• SAS 4 (Coop top-down shooter)
• Outfire (Top-down battle royale)

Edit: added a green emoji for the games that have controller support.

Sky: Children of Light is a delightful game from the creators of Journey, and plays sort of like a Journey MMO

It has a splendid soundtrack featuring vocals from the ever talented AURORA, and beautiful visuals. It is also a great social experience, putting a focus on fostering connections and community. It gets regular content updates and its just super cozy!

I don't know much about android handhelds or anything, but I feel like Mindustry on F-droid could be a fun game. No idea if the device is touchscreen, nor if there are physical controls whether they'll work natively.

Xcom, Dragon Quest 4-8, Loop Hero

Angry Birds Epic All Stars

Cards and tankards is a social deck builder, it’s mostly on PC and VR but they released to android recently

Animal crossing pocket camp just became buy to play. It's currently on a reduced price right now, and it's pretty fun. I enjoy it because it's played vertically, and now that there's no micro transactions, I can earn all the items just by playing. It had a 7 year life cycle, so there's a lot of content to check out.

The gameplay loop is fairly limited, and I wouldn't say it's the most fun. But once you get enough items to start decorating things, it makes it fun to spruce to your campsite and personal spaces.

• Imperium Galactica 2: Alliances
• Knights of the Old Republic

Both are excellent PC games with native Android ports.

What about Guardian Tales ?(if you are into Zelda like RPG)

• OpenTTD: Open Source and available for free.
• Settlers 2 via some DosBOX version. Back when I still used Android I used Dosbox Turbo, but it seems to have been removed from the Play Store. No clue which DosBOX build for Anrdoid is good nowadays...
• 2048: Open Source and free puzzle game
• Threes: Puzzle game similar to 2048
• Cogs: Puzzle game. No clue how to find it on the play store, but it's available at humblebundle.
• Slay the Spire: Deck Builder roguelike.
• Space Chem: Zachlike puzzle game. (Actually not only zachlike - it's form zachtronics)

and basically any Android game that ever was part of a Humble Mobile Bundle. Those happened before Humble Bundle was sold and consequently became boring.

Night of the Full Moon is excellent.

What kind of handheld, what genre, open source or anything goes...?

There are many decent games, as in "none or optional ads, not pay to win". Some P2W can be played up to a certain point before they become obnoxious.

Recently I've been playing casual/idle ones:

• Rush Royale
• Raid Rush
• Pocket Champs
• Capybara Go

Before that, I went through a phase of RTS:

• Last War
• Top Heroes
• Million Lords

Before that... don't remember anymore, I keep switching genres every few months 🤷

I am not really into racing games but I tried super tux cart and it was fun. It has an android version.