solution to play online safely with a friend far away (alternative to hamachi or similar) and if so, how best to set the firewall to stay safe

me and a friend of mine would like to play online old pc games like supreme commander, postal 2 or others that don’t have active servers, in the past we used hamachi to create lan, but we had security problems and i’ve heard around that it’s not safe, in doubt we are not thrilled at the idea of reinstalling it.

now i ask you, is it necessary to create a whole lan to play with a distant friend? (we are in the same country) i don’t know much about vpn and routers, but i’ve heard that it’s also possible to create just one host instead of a whole LAN.

I mean, we would be only 2 people and we have no intention to make party, is it possible that it is so risky to use these programs and that there is not a simple but safe solution, maybe creating a connection through windows or something like that? of course i would like it to be free (if it exists)

​

about what i’ve heard around Hamachi seems to change something in the drivers, and that an attacker could see the ip of hamachi and exploit it to enter, and that remains active even when it is off (unless they meant hamachi in the background i do not understand how this is possible sincerely)

​

do you think if we install it and when we don’t use it we block it with the firewall or using some other setting we could avoid these dangers? are they all exaggerations or is there some truth in it?

Thank you in advance for your interest and help, THANK YOU!