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.
Against the Storm
It’s a pretty fun
rougelikerougelite 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!
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.
About the city-builder early game experience - you pretty much nailed my feelings about the game.
I think the weakness of the game is that one needs to experience other strategy games (I played very little of city builders, but a lot of grand strategies and 4X) and have some level of self reflection or meta thinking to be immediately attracted to this concept (without trying out the game first).
Most people who didn’t notice that micromanaging already won late game is the bad, tedious part, would be reluctant to accept the inevitable destruction of their cities.
I think that there’s an untapped potential in increased complexity of the central City. What I mean is that if there was some metagame city building it would attract a bit more players.
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.
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.
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 didn’t get far in it because the characters seemed very bland to me, and the story setup generic, but perhaps that could improve over time? I know some games leverage their length to pull off slow character development well, even if the basic character templates are straightforwardly tropey. But this one didn’t grab me enough at the beginning to justify investing my time in it, personally.
I’m glad it exists for the people who do like it, though!
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 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.
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’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 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.
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 {name} 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 {name} from doing xyz”.
This is fascinating and I would have never heard about it without you. Thanks!
You’re welcome! I’ve played 46 hours of it in the ten days since I bought it and I haven’t played more basically only because we’re on vacation now and I have to work to afford living lol.
🤓 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.
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
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
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.
How is the server population in GW2? I used to play that a lot and really enjoyed the WvW action too.
Seems very good. It’s wvw reset night right now. There’s a 16 person queue to get into the eternal battlegrounds map, and <10 on the other ones. Non reset nights the wvw maps are usually active with the occasional queue. I do a fair amount of wvw. The other night we had a wild ~40 v~40 v~40 fight in the garrison. Great stuff.
For PvE stuff, there’s almost always people doing the meta events. I never had trouble getting a group for fractals or strikes. Raids I see sometimes in the LFG tool, but I only do them with a training guild I joined.
Also, with PvE they added megaservers a while ago so it doesn’t matter what “server” you’re on. For WvW, they’re supposedly implementing guild-based matches instead, but that’s been in the works for a while.
That’s great to hear that everything is still going with a healthy population. WvW is definitely a ton of fun.
I remember one skirmish we had where we came upon an enemy “blob” by a small lumber mill (I think?) and they all jumped up and stacked on a tree stump. For what purpose, I’m not sure, but I like to think they thought they had the higher ground. We wiped them, of course.
The wife and I have really enjoyed playing Ravenswatch.
It’s an early-access rougelite that plays a bit like a Diablo/League (sans toxicity because it’s co-op, not competitive)
Farm efficiently and level your hero within the time limit and fight a boss at the end.
It’s a great time and 20% off on the sale
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)
I just want to say that the steam sale art is gorgeous as always.
They always pick fab artists for their sales honestly!
I want a moving desktop background done in the style of these sales pictures. That would be so cool
