It depends. What kind of game are you looking to create?

I'll join the chorus recommending Godot. A lot lighter than Unity or Unreal, it's open source, well documented and quite capable. It's got a lot of features, in a lot of ways it isn't "dead simple."

I might recommend starting off using Python's Pygame library. Do something like create Flappy Bird in it, that will give you a pretty good idea of how a video game works under the hood, and it'll run on a potato.

For pixel art you might go with LibreSprite or Pixelorama. These will allow you to create tile sets for backgrounds as well as character sprites.

If you're looking to get into 3D art, you've basically got to go with Blender.

If you know a bit of Python then Godot is a good place. It's GDScript is very similar.

Godot is an open source game engine that is rising after Unity keeps shooting themselves in the foot with price changes and pricing structure changes.

Probably not what you are looking for, but I think a great place to start is Pico-8, there is an education version, but it only costs $15 to start making games in Lua with the real version on your machine. Although it's very limited (think like Game Boy color games) you will learn a lot of the basics, there's 1000's of games you can look at the code of, and a good community and learning resources.

It's a quick easy way to get started in game creation, and if you're new to programming it will be a while before you run out of challenges.

Like a number of commenters have said, it depends on what type of games you want to make - Pico-8 is limited, deliberately.

If you're looking for SUPER simple: https://scratch.mit.edu/

Consider Defold: https://defold.com/

Love 2d dawg

godot, though there are some others specialized for specific types of games if you have a genre in mind

I'm not a game dev but have created games for fun with LÖVE2d. Its simple and fun.

Just to toss this in: If all you need is to draw stuff to the screen, play audio, and handle input, you might have a good experience with using SDL or raylib. Those are "just" libraries and not fully featured engines, so they don't come with advanced features like asset management or a ready-to-use level-editor.

I am not saying that those are a better option than a fully featured engine, just that, depending on what you are trying to achieve, they might be.

Godot. You could try to see if Godot 3 will work better than Godot 4.

Godot 3 is a bit older but still is getting fixes and some new features. (long term support driven by community)

I dabbled a bit with Godot 4 recently and the experience was pretty nice. Gdscript is easy enough to learn and the engine feels very flexible once you learn to use each building block. Guides on YouTube are good and the docs have guides also for creating a 2d top down shooter bullet.

Pretty good all in all IMO.

Maybe a Briggs 10 hp would be a good starter.

Like many others, I'd recommend godot. While it is potentially complex. It is only as complex as you make it, based on what kind of projects you are making.

GDScript is actually pretty easy to learn and is very python-like. And in case that doesn't work out for you, there are many community made extensions that add other languages to godot. It is also really lightweight. Capable of running on even low end laptops. If you don't need all the bells and whistles of modern rendering, you can set it to "Compatibility" renderer mode. That runs on OpenGL instead of Vulkan and doesn't require RenderingDevice support.

You can try pico-8 for free just missing some features https://www.pico-8-edu.com/

Great way to have a play around and develop some simple games, and you get to get your feet wet with spriting, programming, level making, music. Lots of good tutorials available online too.

since you haven't said anything about type of game, if you want to start at the dead simple side and visual novels sound interesting maybe look at Ren'py?

visual novels have less going on than a big 3d game, so if you want an easy start from 0 it should be as close as you can get. python is straightforward if you don't have programming experience, but otherwise is really commonly used so gives a nice basis for whatever else you want to do.

ren'py also has gotten plenty of commercial use if you wanted to go further in that direction. most big name vn games use it.

Making your own engine is always free. But not very easy.

What kind of game are you trying to make?