The Steam winter sales are here, up to the 4rth of January.
What game did you enjoy playing and want to share with the community, and why?
It’s like a mini (or a bit larger) review for the people in the community to discover your loved game, and get it for a smaller price. Also remember to share a link to the store page to help people find the game.
The game must be on sale currently and must not be a free to play game, or what would be point of this post.
The release date doesn’t matter. Neither the sale amount. If you enjoyed the game, it should be shared.
You can put the game type/tags at the beginning of your comment if you wish so, it may help other people.
Please a single game per comment if you post a review.
I’ll start in the comments.
I just want to say that the steam sale art is gorgeous as always.
They always pick fab artists for their sales honestly!
American/Euro Truck simulator are always on sale, and are rad
I tend to play co-op with a friend and enjoyed playing V-Rising on a private server. We built up our vampire lair and roamed the lands collecting resources and expanding the lair. The bosses are challenging, and the map is varied. It is also fun to play with friends as the game accommodates this very well.
A few hidden gems I’ve played:
Dungeons of the Endless: https://store.steampowered.com/app/249050/Dungeon_of_the_ENDLESS/
Solasta Crown of the Magister: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1096530/Solasta_Crown_of_the_Magister/
Tower of Time: https://store.steampowered.com/app/617480/Tower_of_Time/
Detroit: Become Human: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1222140/Detroit_Become_Human/
The Dark Pictures Anthology - Man of Medan: https://store.steampowered.com/app/939850/The_Dark_Pictures_Anthology_Man_of_Medan/
I hope you like them all as much as I did.
I’ve definitely been eyeing Solasta since BG3. Is it combat heavy enough that it could be a podcast game? It’s unclear how story focused the base game is, and I get the sense that player made content is the draw.
There’s plenty of combat. If you’ve played BG3 I imagine you’ll enjoy it.
The caveat is that it’s made by an indie studio, so the cutscenes aren’t AAA, but I think the game is amazing regardless, and that includes the expansion packs.
Dungeons of the endless is beutiful. A unique roguelike thats more strategic than action based, but gives your choices real weight. You will have to lose people and you will make mistakes to complete the missions, but every one of them leaves you with a sense of impact.
I get the same vibes from it as FTL, the sense of weighty choices. A great buy at $2.50
There is a new “action focused” sequel to dungeon of the endless whose name i forget because its an entirely forgetable game. It fully eliminates meaningful gameplay in trade for mediocre combat. It can be skipped entirely.
I think Dungeons of the Endless also has one of the best soundtracks in recent years. I like to have it on shuffle when I’m doing yoga.
I know this game has gotten a lot of attention but Sea of Stars was my favorite game of the year, the story and art was charming and well done, and the gameplay was great and about the perfect length IMO. Its only been out 4 months and I’m already itching to do a replay
Reminds me I need to get around to playing more. Got to the like first real city and then got busy with a lot of things but it’s cool for sure.
The start is painfully slow though
Fair enough, I think it helped that I’d been awaiting the game for so long that I was willing to forgive a slow start
I finished Laika : Aged through blood. An indie metroidvania / 2d bike shooter / bullet time.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1796220/Laika_Aged_Through_Blood/
It’s the story of a mother in a post-apocalyptic environment having to care for her daughter and village while doing the war outside.
Everything, art, music, is a masterpiece. The music is just extremely good.
Outside of special zones, there are 20 you have to find, and it cycles between them. All 20 are voiced, with words or humming.
The story is good, and is extremely anti-war.
The gameplay feels amazing. It can be hard at first, but I quickly learned how to control the bike and and to do backflips and frontflips at the right time to reload guns and the pary.
The main character laika is one-shot, but the game isn’t very punishing. The respawn points aren’t too far away from each other, and they are optional. When you die, you loose a pouch with the currency, and can get it back.
There are some little issues with the game tho. The ending seems to be a bit rushed. The ending boss isn’t that difficult, and there were some cuts it seems.
But overall these little issues aren’t that bad, and the game is still amazing for an indie.
That actually looks like a lot of fun, thanks for sharing!
Tried this on a Next Fest and it was super cool, definitely something different and interesting if you’re into side scrollers.
Spirit of the North
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1213700/Spirit_of_the_North/
An indie adventure/exploration/puzzle game. There is no combat in this game. You explore, solve puzzles, and take in the vibes of a story told without any dialogue at all. It’s all in the visuals, music, and mood. This is Abzu with foxes.
The gameplay is fairly simple, but also pretty forgiving - there are very few places where you need fast reactions or precise timing, and if you fall off a platform you only have to redo the last few jumps, not the entire level. It’s the kind of puzzle game where you have plenty of time to think things through and even more time to just enjoy the journey. Definitely a game for the casual gamer who wants to look at pretty landscapes, listen to beautiful music, and bark at things.
If you stick exclusively to following the story, it’s maybe 2-3 hours long, and getting 100% completion on all achievements, collectibles, and alternate skins took me 16 hours. So it’s not a huge game - which means the best time to buy it is when it’s heavily discounted, like right now.
I love this game so much. I like a lot of games, but it’s rare that I absolutely adore one. In fact, I might just go and play it again tomorrow.
I’ve bought this game because of you. This looks amazing, thank you for bringing it up!
In this game you play as an alligator who is an investigator (they rolled with that pun) who throughout the game does various puzzles and gets into fights. It’s not egregiously long and has multiple endings that change depending on your actions, all of which allow you to unlock the true ending, I guess. I have only gotten a single ending, so I don’t know what all the endings are.
It has an easy, normal, and hard difficulty which change the fight difficulty. It says relaxed (easy) difficulty is for those who are just there for the story and puzzles, so I’d assume it might either make the fights ridiculously easy or skip them. No clue since I jumped in straight away on hardcore.
I personally found most of the characters besides one certain robot to be enjoyable. The characters are also fully voiced (English only as of now), but there are 10 other languages for the text. Everything said will pop up in a dialogue box you have to click through, so you can’t miss any dialogue unless you purposefully skip through all of them. Even if you do, afterwards you can open the pause menu and find a transcript of all the dialogue, too.
The game also has a demo for the first chapter, so you can play that and see if it’s a game you would actually buy. Currently it’s $13.99 for the base game or $19.05 for the game alongside the official soundtrack and an artbook. If nothing else, I at least recommend looking up the soundtrack piece Brok and Graff, which is my personal favorite song in the whole entire game.
I’ve been playing Roboquest the last few days and have to say it’s the most fun I’ve had playing a shooter in a long time. https://store.steampowered.com/app/692890/Roboquest/
Does Roboquest have LAN? Searches in the forums lead to dead links for answers.
I don’t know if it has a LAN specific option. but If you are both playing on Steam or Epic, it supports multiplayer/crossplay between the two platforms. Though you don’t access it directly from the home screen. Play through the beginning tutorial section till you reach your home base, then one of the buildings you can interact with is the multiplayer menu.
No LAN is a no-go for me lately, for multiplayer games. I’m tired of games being designed with forced obsolescence. Sometimes you get lucky and the game has LAN but doesn’t list it on the features, so I figured I’d ask.
That’s fair. I’ll double check this week and let you know if it’s got direct LAN multiplayer.
Thanks, I appreciate it. I feel like it’s been a while since FPS games have been made for me.
sorry to get back to you super late on this. Roboquest doesn’t seem to have a traditional LAN setup without some sort of modding. I did find out recently that Lethal Company does have LAN multiplayer if that isn’t already on your radar. Good luck.
I fired it up and didn’t see any multi player options.
Really? It advertises co-op on the store page.
Against the Storm
It’s a pretty fun rougelike city builder in a world where it always rains and every few decades a malevolent eldritch storm destroys most of the civilization.
Yes, this is what I came in to recommend.
It’s a bit pedantic, but I’d call it a rougelite since it has meta-progression. Still they found a way to make a no combat rougelite city builder an amazing game!
I haven’t seen anything new and exciting on sale. Some stuff I already have is on sale, though. BG3 is great. Pillars of Eternity is also great.
I’ve been playing Guild Wars 2 a lot. It’s on sale. New expansion came out recently. It’s the only MMO that doesn’t piss me off. Feels like an actual video game.
Anyone who’s waiting on BG3 to be cheaper or GOTY edition or whatever, try Divinity: Original Sin 2. It’s amazing, and the definitive edition is only $13.50 USD right now. No need to have played the first one - I never did and D:OS2 is probably one of my favourite games of all time now.
Dyson Sphere Program just got a pretty substantial update adding combat mechanics. If you like other production/logistics games like factorio/mindustry/satisfactory I highly recommend it. The amount of control they give you over sorting/distribution/etc combined with the ability to create blueprints can make for some rapid scalability to your manufacturing operation, and the same mechanics can be leveraged to now wage a competent and scalable offence against the new enemy.
Definitely second Dyson Sphere Program! I’m not at all interested in the combat (it’s optional), but now that they have that completed they’ll be updating other features too. I’m hundreds of hours in and still come back to it.
Warframe is very gender. You play as a biomechanical super ninja slaughtering capitalists, monarchists, noncon hiveminds, and genocidalists. Also there are spoiler things that make it the transest game I’ve ever played
🤓 The Talos Principle 2 is taking up my tiny slices of gaming time. Tons of puzzles to solve, a really engaging story to unfold and the music is just beautiful. If you played the first edition (from 2009) it’s totally like that and more. I’m, only halg-way through it but yeah, it’s great and I can’t wait to see what comes next.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/835960/The_Talos_Principle_2/
risk of rain 2, game is sooo good just pickes up the dlc survivors of the void and it adds so much new stuff, def recommend if you like third person shooters and rougelites, it’s quite hard tooo which makes wining all that more satisfying as well as endless mode as an option
