PlzGivHugs

Generally, the best options are ports of PC games. Things like Slay the Spire, Balatro, Mini Metro, Terraria, BaBa is You, or Stardew Valley. Not as cheap, but worth the price tag.

A couple of my favorite free options:

Unciv - Its an attempt at recreating Civ. It's got a lot of issues, such as lacking a lot of the more in-depth mechanics and having terrible world-gen, but its also free.

Vampire Survivors - a fairly simple but content-rich arcade game, reminiscent of old flash games.

Super Auto Pets - an autobattler like autochess but stripped down to its fundamentals making it easy to get in to, and easy to play in short bursts

It has been a little while since I last played it, but I found that scale-wise, it felt small (I'm guessing this is what you mean) with major locations too close together, but content-wise, it felt sparse, empty and ultimately pretty boring, which was the much bigger issue in my enjoyment.

Basically, how much of the world is interesting/fun.

For example, Fallout 3 doesn't do a great job of this, as much of the world is baren with no story or gameplay. Half of the world feels like it could be cut out without much loss. The Yakuza games on the other hand, have smaller worlds but they feel massive and fun because there's always something to do moments away.

The work-around is to make travel fun, so the "empty-space" is just more gameplay. The Just Cause games are the perfect example of this. All the movement mechanics are quick and satisfying, from the grapple and parachute, to the driving, to the OP wingsuit.

Yep. The post was removed, but I can still see the comment on my profile from two weeks ago:

The whole website seems to be just AI nonsense, and AI nonsense running at 2fps at that.

Edit: Also, the formatting on mobile is horrid

My game last night was more like a couple minutes of lag. Luckily, Dota has an in-built system to detect it, so the game wasn't recorded and those of us who didn't leave spent the remainder of the game messing around.

I do.

Edit: Just tried it again, and now its working, so I have no idea what it is.

Probably at least some form of staged rollout. Its broken for me too, but I'm in NA.

My settings are mostly default, and from a quick skim, there isn't much to change for that in settings, so probably a staged rollout. Thats how they usually do it anyway.

Seems pretty broken to me. Nothing is loading now.

Edit: Although NewPipe does seem to be working fine for me, even without an update.

The whole website seems to be just AI nonsense, and AI nonsense running at 2fps at that.

Edit: Also, the formatting on mobile is horrid

The last graph is total posts across Lemmy, so its only about 300,000 posts a month, although notably, about 250,000 of those are on a bot server no one is federated with.

So far as I know, there aren't a lot of 8-player local multiplayer games. The only obvious answer is the Jackbox games, using your phones as controllers.

Beyond that, I did find this Steam curator, who seems to specialize in 8-player games. From thier list, I recognize Gang Beasts, and Pico Park: Classic Edition. Party Golf, Screen Cheat, and Cobalt also all looked interesting, but I've never seen anyone play them.