Light hearted easy games that I would play would be things like:

• Overcooked
• Stardew Valley
• Castle Crashers
• Fall Guys
• Crystal Crisis

My reasoning would be that they’re mostly (other than Stardew Valley) are quick and easy games. Not knowing what the other person is really into any more, it might be just an easy way to dip toes into the water.

Mobile games wise, while I don’t play many, I would recommend:

• Kitty Letter
• Exploding Kittens

if you grew up during the era of scorched earth, shell shock live is good for this.

Me and some of my friends from college wanted to reconnect and we wound up wanting to play since online games too, but two of us only had Macs (which don’t have many supported games) and one of us didn’t have any console.

This meant that our options were limited, but we came up with a couple of solid (in my opinion) options:

• Play an online MOBA that supports phones. We wound up picking Pokemon Unite. It’s far from the best game I’ve played, but we can chat on Discord while we play, and it’s fun enough
• Play a game on Tabletop Simulator. It supports Mac and isn’t graphically intensive. We like playing Uno with it, but my understanding is it can basically be used for almost any game.

Speedrunners

Lovers In A Dangerous Spacetime

Tricky Towers

Almost all the Jackbox party packs (favorites for my friends are 2, 3, and 5 I think). Best thing about this is someone can centrally stream the main game and other people can join in remotely with their cell phone.

Hidden In Plain Sight

The Yawgh

Crawl

For The King

I’ve always enjoyed left 4 dead as a casual co-op, and Back 4 Blood is a great revamp of the originals. Idk about others, but I’ve always had a hard time getting competitive in these games. Though if you want a little friendly competition, versus still exists with a lot of fun new special zombies.

I’m in the same range, and have moved from Canada to the UK. So basically multiplayer games and the Internet are the only way for me to reconnect with buddies back home.
One game we’ve been rocking pretty hard when we all have time is Deeprock Galactic. It’s good fun, team based mission shooter-looter. Don’t really need super tight controller skills, spray and pray is a viable strat. And rounds are usually like 15-30mins which is great for some of my friends back home with kids.

I’d agree with the others who said to go for games that can be played as co-op, rather than competitive with each other.

Some good ones include: Don’t Starve Together, Valheim, Deep Rock Galactic, Minecraft, Portal 2 (main co-op campaign, and the somewhat hidden co-op free dlc campaign that also exists and is imo even better).

Most survival games that have multiplayer have a co-op/no friendly fire option, and they have adjustable difficulty oftentimes, so you can set it up to be as easy or hard as you want.

Or you could go fully the other way and try the old classic Magica (not Magica 2, the first game is much better) and kill each other in ridiculous ways

My top recommendation for you though is Divinity Original Sin 2, and Divinity Original Sin 1 as well. The second game especially is the king of co-op RPG’s, and both have an incredibly fun combat system, to the point that part of the game would be fun even without the rest of it. And each player in the 2nd game can play a pre-made character with their own story, or they can make a custom character.

Edit: actually I’m not sure of the system requirements for the divinity games, so my top recommendation is now Minecraft and other survival games. They can be really good for hang-out games partly because you can usually wander off and do your own thing while you talk if you want, or you can collaborate, and they leave a lot of room for talking about stuff besides the game.

I’d also suggest trying synchronized movie/tv watching, if ya’ll are the sort to enjoy talking over movies or tv like that. Just pick one, set up voice chat, and press play at the same time. Bonus points for “so bad it’s good” movies like birdemic etc.