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 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.
Please a single game per comment.
I’ll start in the comments.
Removed by mod
DayZ just had it’s 10th anniversary! It is just a great game, complicated and unwieldy but man you can do pretty much anything.
Obviously there’s the zombies, that’s a given, but everyone I meet is playing a different game. PvP can be bonkers… or you can live as a woodland hermit; foraging mushrooms and fruit, hunting animals and fashioning outfits from their pelts. The possibilities are endless!
An active modding community and regular developer updates means it never gets stale. Fantastic platform, I think it’s neat.
I’ve been playing Bomb Rush Cyberfunk and Automation/Beam.ng mostly but I’ve been severely addicted to the free demo for Half Sword. It’s the most brutal, jankiest medieval combat simulator I’ve ever played and it’s as frustrating as it is fun. I can’t stop playing it.
Should I get RoboCop: Rogue City or Star Trek: Resurgence now while they’re on sale or wait to see if they go lower?
It’ll probably be 3-6 months before I get around to playing either
Star Trek Resurgence won’t be on Steam until next year so maybe RoboCop would be the better pick.
Ohhh good call. I saw ads on Facebook saying it was on sale and didn’t realize it was on Epic not Steam. Yeah, screw Epic.
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!
No problem! I hope you enjoy it as much as I have! :)
The sequel is being released sometime next year, too. It may be the one game where I break my usual rule of not buying a new game at launch.
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.
Bought the game when it came to Steam a couple of years back and put 100 or so hours and uninstalled it feeling that it needs way more content.
Re-installed last week just because without reading the latest update news and boy oh boy was I genuinely surprised to see the combat and new QoS stuff been added. Highly recommend to anyone that has enjoyed Factories and/satisfactory. The build is somewhere in between both.
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.
Eco. It’s incredibly fun.
The premise is that the planet starts about (with default settings) thirty days away from beibg destroyed by a meteor. You and the other couple dozen or hundred people on the server have the obvious goal of stopping that meteor. But nobody actually makes you do it and since you all start with stone tools and wheelbarrows, none of you even have the means to do it in the beginning.
The idea is that you band together with other like-minded players and form a settlement and each of you specializes into a different set of professions (for example, I am a shipwright and logger mainly but also have a small pottery workshop going. In time, you find new ressources or ways to utilise already discovered ressources to eventually build cars, boats, larger settlements and stuff. While that is happening, you can (and probably want to) set some rules for what is allowed and forbidden in your settlements radius (you widen that radius by increasing culture, mostly via decorative items). The rules you set (and players actually have to vote for and come to agreements with) almost always follow a simple “If x then y (else z)” programming logic and can be incredibly creative. Once voted for, those rules are law and can’t be broken by the subset of people affected by that rule. Seriously, one town on my current server basically gutted themselves accidentally by miswording a law. They intended a specific player to be forbidden of doing anything in their town but the wording was "If is resident then prevent ". But since, yes, that player on the server was a resident of something (another town or their own homestead, doesn’t matter), so condition true, every citizen in town was banned from doing anything meaningful, since it wasn’t worded as “prevent from doing xyz”.
This is fascinating and I would have never heard about it without you. Thanks!
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
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
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.
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
🤓 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/
Loved this game! Got completely consumed by it.
If I had been the one to decide what features this sequel should have, I never would have considered including a playable New Jerusalem or having NPC companions or any of the new stuff. And if you had asked me what I thought about those features before the game came out, I would have said it sounds like they don’t understand what people liked about the first game.
But this game surprised me in numerous ways and I honestly loved every hour of my playthrough.
Lately I’ve been playing Spark the Electric Jester 3, Freedom Planet 2, Sonic Superstars, Vampire Survivors, and Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade. I think all of these are on sale!
I’m a platformer gal, especially fast-paced Sonicy ones, so Spark the Electric Jester, Freedom Planet, and of course Sonic Superstars are right up my alley. Sonic Superstars really isn’t a $60 game but I’d say it’s $36 sale price is all right. Freedom Planet 2 absolutely nails fluid 2D level design with insane levels of polish. And Spark 3 may be one of the finest 3D platformers ever made, with a tight control system and a incredibly high skill ceiling.
Vampire Survivors, however, is not a platformer. It’s a bite-sized RPG where your control of your character is exclusively directional and what upgrades to their skillset they get. It is incredibly addictive and while each session can last a maximum(ish) of 30 minutes I find myself wanting just one more try all the time. If you’re not sure about it, the mobile version is free with ads, but it’s really best played on PC.
And I don’t think I have words for FFVIIR. Say what you want about Square Enix (such as “fuck those guys”), they make a solid JRPG, and this enhanced remake of the first… like, quarter of the first disc of Final Fantasy VII? is excellently done and takes enough liberties with the storyline to feel fresh without feeling so different that it’s unrecognizable. (and the fact that they took liberties is actually a story point in and of itself but I’ll just leave it at that)
If you liked vampire survivors and retro graphics you might want to check out Halls of Torment. It looks like old school Diablo but it’s a vampire survivors like game.
Thanks for the recommendation! Diablo II was one of my favorite games when I was a kid so this is way, way up my alley.
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.
I’ve been eyeing Solasta for a while, but I’m curious, does the base game have enough meat to it, or is this a case where the base game is a bit lacking and really starts to shine in the dlc? I’ve read some reviews to this effect and would like to hear another opinion before I purchase it.
I loved all of it, personally. Is there anything in particular you’re looking for that I can comment on, in terms of RPG’s?
My only two complaints with Solasta was that I felt the random encounters with traveling got annoyingly frequent and the cutscenes are definitely indie, but I enjoyed the game as a whole so much I stopped caring about either.
But I can confirm that the DLC’s have a ton of meat too.
+1 for Solasta. I was playing it on Xbox with friends and loved it. There’s also the option for user made adventures I believe, which opens up so many possibilities.
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.
Picked up Dave the Diver because everyone keeps saying it’s amazing. Sure enough, it’s addictive and definitely worth the $13. It hits the Stardew Valley type of gameplay loop and has been perfect on Steam Deck. I’ve got about 6 hours into it in 2 days.
I may still grab Marble It Up because I loved Marble Blast Ultra on the 360 back in the day.
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!
Also not to be pedantic, but it’s roguelite. Not rouge.
This is a great game, especially if you’re the type who thinks the beginning hours of a civ game (before you get bogged down in micromanagement and unit orders) are the best hours. It basically gives you that kind of early-game experience over and over, with plenty of variation. It’s so much better paced than most comparable games as a result. I’m surprised it doesn’t get more buzz.
I just want to say that the steam sale art is gorgeous as always.
They always pick fab artists for their sales honestly!
