Fallout Shelter

This one is specifically good for the situations where you have fifteen minutes and no reliable connection. Fallout Shelter works fully offline, looks sharp on the Steam Deck screen, and plays naturally with the controls in a way that management games on PC rarely do. I have the Fallout games in my history going back to the PS2 era, so the vault aesthetic is already comfortable territory. The honest caveat is that the depth ceiling is lower than anything else in the top five. You will see most of what it has to offer in twenty or thirty hours. For short bursts and zero friction, though, it is the most consistently pleasant thing you can download for free today.

Fallout Shelter is a Vault management sim—you assign dwellers to rooms, balance power, food, and water, and defend against raider attacks. The survival concerns are real but happen at one remove: you're making decisions on a planning screen rather than personally navigating a hostile world. Completely free, with microtransactions that stay optional. It's here because it fit the F2P and survival-theme criteria on paper, but the direct survival experience isn't what this list is built around. Best suited to players who are Fallout fans first and only casually interested in the survival angle.