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.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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
🤓 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/
Can anyone recommend a hunting or fishing game? I’ve been into watching outdoors videos and activities, but never been on any of those activities and pretty much can only do it virtually right now lol.
For fishing, Dave the Diver and Dredge are awesome.
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.
edit: I see multi player after digging through the menu, but it appears to be steam friends.
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
You should try Halls of Torment for a Diablo-looking rogue-like. I adored it!
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
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
Against The Storm.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1336490/Against_the_Storm/
It just came out of early access, but it’s been in a better state than many released games for a long time. It’s a fascinating roguelite city builder. You build up small settlements to a certain goal before moving on to the next one, earning you meta resources to give yourself more options on future settlements.
The best part is there are so many variables that go into the location and your goals that no two settlements feel alike, and 20+ difficulty levels so you can find just the right spot for you. The devs are very good at listening to the community and constantly updating the game.
It’s also on sale for $20 right now! I can’t recommend it enough. They’ve somehow found the perfect combination of chill without being boring.
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 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.
