I don't know if you have any interest in emulation, but I've found the Super Bomberman titles for the SNES to be keyboard-friendly due to their play-style and pacing, so they might work out for this endeavour (I've been playing them on a palmtop with a tiny clicky thumb-keyboard, so hopefully they would also be suitable for learning a new setup too). The genre is arcade strategy, and the third game is particularly good.

I admit that I'm a bit biased here as Bomberman is my favourite game series, but it was the first thing that I thought of when you mentioned top-down titles!

I don’t have game recommendations, but if it helps, you could always rebind your keys while playing whatever game you like. I don’t know about Arch, but some systems make that easier than others. Maybe this will help: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Linux_console/Keyboard_configuration