it's the steam winter sales, what game did you enjoy playing and want to share?

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.

MustrumR, (edited )

Against the Storm

It's a pretty fun rougelike rougelite city builder in a world where it always rains and every few decades a malevolent eldritch storm destroys most of the civilization.

sbr32, (edited )

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!

LacklusterLicorice,

Also not to be pedantic, but it’s roguelite. Not rouge.

Lowbird,

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.

MustrumR, (edited )

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.

TheFloydist,

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.

Squiddles,

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.

Ultimatenab,

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.

Fizz,
@Fizz@lemmy.nz avatar

I just want to say that the steam sale art is gorgeous as always.

verysoft,

They always pick fab artists for their sales honestly!

Fizz,
@Fizz@lemmy.nz avatar

I want a moving desktop background done in the style of these sales pictures. That would be so cool

Fixbeat,

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. store.steampowered.com/app/692890/Roboquest/

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@kbin.social avatar

Does Roboquest have LAN? Searches in the forums lead to dead links for answers.

Fixbeat,

I fired it up and didn’t see any multi player options.

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@kbin.social avatar

Really? It advertises co-op on the store page.

Fixbeat, (edited )

edit: I see multi player after digging through the menu, but it appears to be steam friends.

TheFloydist,

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.

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@kbin.social avatar

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.

TheFloydist,

That’s fair. I’ll double check this week and let you know if it’s got direct LAN multiplayer.

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@kbin.social avatar

Thanks, I appreciate it. I feel like it's been a while since FPS games have been made for me.

TheFloydist,

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.

AceFuzzLord,

Brok The Investigator

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.

Altomes,

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

TowardsTheFuture,

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.

delitomatoes,

The start is painfully slow though

Altomes,

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

Lowbird,

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!

CarlsIII,

American/Euro Truck simulator are always on sale, and are rad

SaintWacko, (edited )

Against The Storm.

store.steampowered.com/app/…/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.

frog,

Spirit of the North

store.steampowered.com/…/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.

MJBrune,

I’ve bought this game because of you. This looks amazing, thank you for bringing it up!

frog,

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.

FlashMobOfOne,
@FlashMobOfOne@beehaw.org avatar

A few hidden gems I’ve played:

Dungeons of the Endless: store.steampowered.com/…/Dungeon_of_the_ENDLESS/

Solasta Crown of the Magister: …steampowered.com/…/Solasta_Crown_of_the_Magister…

Tower of Time: store.steampowered.com/app/617480/Tower_of_Time/

Detroit: Become Human: store.steampowered.com/…/Detroit_Become_Human/

The Dark Pictures Anthology - Man of Medan: …steampowered.com/…/The_Dark_Pictures_Anthology_M…

I hope you like them all as much as I did.

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@kbin.social avatar

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.

FlashMobOfOne,
@FlashMobOfOne@beehaw.org avatar

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.

mosiacmango,

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.

FlashMobOfOne,
@FlashMobOfOne@beehaw.org avatar

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.

l0st_scr1b3,

+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.

effingnerd,

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.

FlashMobOfOne, (edited )
@FlashMobOfOne@beehaw.org avatar

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.

Tosti,
@Tosti@feddit.nl avatar

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.

Tibert,

I finished Laika : Aged through blood. An indie metroidvania / 2d bike shooter / bullet time.

…steampowered.com/…/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.

Mythnubb,

That actually looks like a lot of fun, thanks for sharing!

TowardsTheFuture,

Tried this on a Next Fest and it was super cool, definitely something different and interesting if you’re into side scrollers.

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