- Old and hidden games that deserve more love
Ring Runner: Flight of the Sages, story that get better as you play, insane amount of ship/play style customization.
Masquerada: Songs and Shadows, good lore and excellent world building, “easy” and forgiving crpg.
Wirewalk()↳, a short and loving gameboy like rpg, less than 100 reviews.
- Well known
Mass Effect™ Legendary Edition, no comments need, new historic low
Psychonauts 2, good game although it’s “cheaper” on gamepass.
Hades is a steal at 5$, if you’re into more casual gameplay vampire survivors is also a steal at 3.50 (includes all the dlc), if you want something in between brotato has been a wonderful purchase for me. If you want more of the frantic play style, but shorter sessions and less RPG decision making elements, 1 finger death punch is only a buck.
All of the source games are on sale, I recommend portal> portal 2 /half life 2 > left 4 dead 1&2
Slay the spire for < 2$ is an absolute steal, if you think you might like deck builders that’s one of the o.g’s. another most excellent deck builder, monster train, is also less than 2$, I cannot recommend them both highly enough.
The room is an excellent puzzle game, especially for 75 cents, not personally sure about it’s sequels but I’ve heard they’re equally good.
Don’t starve for 2.50 is amazing, but if you’re at all multiplayer inclined, get ‘don’t starve together’ (I believe it comes with a second copy you can give to anyone)
Hexcells, hexcells 2, and lyne are great if you like puzzle games (everyday genius square logic is also great, but not on sale and no longer supported by devs) delete is also good, and on sale, but it’s much more once over it’s done game (like the room)
Doom (2016?) Is a great first person shooter at 4$, and fallout new Vegas is a great first person RPG at the same price.
FtL at 2.50 is amazing, and after you’ve sunk a hundred hours into it, download the ‘across the multiverse’ fan made expansion, and sink another thousand hours into the game.
And if you’re considering Diablo 4, I plead with you to give path of exile a fair shake first, it’s free to play, only cosmetic micro transactions, and so much more fleshed out of experience.
I stand by each of the above games, if you give any of them a fair shot and walk away considering it an actual bad game, hit me up, let me know what made it bad, and I’ll toss you a game key (of my choosing) of equal or greater value (than the sale price of the game you thought was bad)
Edit, not sure where the hell I got those prices from, I think it may have been showing me "complete the bundle"prices on games I already owned that had bundles with everything else I also owned? I’ll go through and change my reviews based on the prices I find, it’ll definitely change a couple of my “absolutely must have at this price”
Links for the games:
Hades is actually $12.49
Yeah I’m not sure if they’re in a different region or something but Slay the Spire is also definitely not < $2 for me - I wish it was!
Don’t Starve no longer gets updates since the studio only focuses on Don’t Starve Together now. So I would recommend Don’t Starve Together even if you don’t want to play multiplayer.
How did you find out about this ?
My friend who loves the game told me about it when they stopped adding content to DS a few years ago. You can see it on the steam updates. DST gets content updates all the time but DS only gets the occasional bug fix update.
Oh, this is important, i have “dont starve” and was planning to get the dlcs eventualy.
Seconding the FTL recco, it’s an absolute steal that cheap!
Regarding your comment on Diablo 4… Is that really the case? I played Diablo 2, skipped 3 and then played Diablo 4 a few weeks back during the free weekend on Steam. I’m admittedly a casual player, but I enjoyed it a lot. I didn’t love it, though I like it. It was familiar with clear improvements, and I was able to jump right into the game and had an enjoyable experience (I’m aware others could have a different experience especially end game). Gameplay was smooth, UI was simple to navigate while chilling on the couch with a controller, story was interesting, fights were satisfying, and the choices I made for skill progression and weapons all made for a decent experience in the 6-7 hours I played till the level 20 cap. I don’t care about character customization with cosmetics, and have never/will never spend money on mtx especially in a game with this hefty price tag. With all that in mind, the trial was enough to make me consider buying it on sale, and am now considering it again.
But I’m frugal, and have heard from sources online and friends that Path of Exile is Diablo but much better, so I tried it. I gave it 2 hours, and I was personally lost. Not sure if it was the UI which felt clunky and unfamiliar, or the story that didn’t draw me in, or the fact that it felt almost expected to read through wikis to be able to get a decent build, but after two hours I didn’t have fun and uninstalled it. Is it worth it to try again and see if it will scratch the arpg itch?
Path of exile is a love letter to diablo 2. It also has materia from ff7 and the sphere grid from ff10 turned up to 11.
It is also deep as fuck, and thus easy to get lost in. There’s tons of side projects in the game (mining, heists, hunting, just to name three I remember). The skill grid is huge. The in game economy is complicated.The core game is huge and then there’s a huge end game about exploring maps that has its own skill grid. It’s like a decade of content.
You can play it casually. Just go and click on monsters , pick good sounding stuff on level up, and have fun.
You can also look up a guide for your build. You’ll probably do better, but then you’re following a guide.
If you want a game that has a lot of depth, it’s fantastic. If you want something shallow but fun, it can still work but it’s possible you’ll hit parts where your character is built poorly and struggles.
That’s cool, yeah I can see that it can be as deep as you want it to be.
I gave it a shot again last night, and enjoyed it more. Watched a short beginner video that clarified some of the clunkiness I felt with the UI, and my controller worked this time. It crashed 7 times in 2 hours, which is 7 times more than Diablo 4, but it’s a free game so not complaining. Each time the UI would stop responding for 4-5 seconds while the game kept going, then it would show a frozen start of the GGG intro, then crash to desktop. Last time I played it didn’t do that. Meh.
I do find the economy very complicated, and am finding it a little hard to identify the worthwhile loot so that I’m not going to Nessa to sell a few random pieces every 5 mins.
I do also find the fights somewhat repetitive, but that could just be my uneducated witch/necro build. Minions do the tank duties, while I sit back with chain lighting, lobbing fireballs at everything moving. Pretty satisfying, though I feel it could get tired soon. I think I only used a health potion 4x and mana 3x while playing last night, getting up to level 10, doing the main and side quests up to “The Way Forward”.
That’s weird that it crashed so often for you. I don’t think it’s crashed 7 times in the 300 hours I’ve played. Did you do the usual “update your drivers and os” stuff?
You can get a loot filter that will make it more obvious what items to pick up. https://www.pathofexile.com/item-filter/ladder/follower . Some items sell for more valuable currency (like an item with all 3 color sockets linked together, or one with six sockets, etc).
The game does pick up as you go farther. You get more sockets on your equipment so you can add more support gems and skills. The beginning is pretty easy, though.
There are also other potions you can slot in for like more speed, resistances, and such.
There’s a lot of depth. More than I really know in detail.
Now I’m thinking of downloading it again :thinking:
I loved diablo 2 and 3 but 4 was very meh for me. Path of exile was very confusing to me so I dropped it. You should give grim dawn a chance. It’s so good.
Oh nice, grim dawn looks neat, and very inexpensive for the base game. I’ll check it out.
Game often goes on sale along with the dlc. If you decide to give it a chance, check out grimtools for fun builds, calculators, and many more tools. The game is actively being developed after so long, and it’s just so fun to play. It’s what diablo 4 should have been.
Thanks for the tip, much appreciated. I picked it up while it’s on sale, and will check it out in the coming weeks!
The storyline and level design on those games is amazing. They were a ton of fun the first time through and I find myself picking them up again every few years and I still enjoy them.
Agreed! I love how different you can play each level as well. Although I generally end up murdering everyone after I mistakenly alert a guard …
It’s also one of only a few games I spent the time to read all the fun “flavor text” notes and books. That and “Control” - both have solid extras that actually add to the story and make you feel immersed in the world.
Hah, I also failed many times and alerted the guards and ended up having to kill everyone. Getting through some of the levels while maintaining stealth can be really tricky.
I still need to check out Control. I agree that the readings in Dishonored were pretty interesting.
I’ll throw in a recommendation for Sanctum 2. It drops to $2.99 every sale and has been hundreds of hours of fun.
Picked this up based off this comment – enjoying myself so far – appreciated.
I am once again here to recommend Prey 2017.
$2.99 USD for a banger triple A Immersive Sim, it’s so cheap it’s like you’re mugging Todd HowardGreat recommendation here. I really enjoyed Prey.
it’s like immersive sim is cursed, excellent games but poor sales.
Prey was a great game but it’s endgame killed the experience for a lot of people, just a lot of backtracking if I recall
Everyone loves Baldur’s gate3 and with good reason. But if you want a different love letter to the originals, I highly recommend pillars of eternity: https://store.steampowered.com/app/560130/Pillars_of_Eternity_II_Deadfire/
It’s a big party based RPG with an original setting and system. Good story. Great characters. Many interesting classes. Sheds a lot of dnd-isms, but you can still see the heritage.
I like the second more than the first, but they’re both good. The second switched to per-encounter powers instead of per-rest, so you don’t need to camp or hit the inn nearly so often.
Also I really want them to make a third game. Maybe if more people buy it they will!
Pillars hit a steam sale when I got into Critical Role and there were additional sales during the pandemic (maybe in response to new customer volume) that convinced me to get the sequel. However, I’m sitting on ten durable 1060s (2/6 in use desktop, 3/4 laptop(m)) and just have them running video along with wutevs. Got one watering plants that can also give me a decent video stream under its own power, which is handy.
My personal highlight in addition to the great games listed below is Divinity Original Sin 2. Such a great game, and super cheap ($13.50 for the base game).
When BG3 came out and was getting a lot of great reviews I hadn’t yet realized that it was made by Larian. I was talking to a friend about it and was like “Wait, the guys who made Divinity made a D&D game?”
Divinity is a lot of fun and is a great tactical in depth RPG. I particularly love the animals in it. Larian does a great job of giving them all big personalities and deep stories.
My OS2 character has animal comms and I swear some of those little fuckers have the best stories.
The Riftbreaker love this game
Love this game as well, but they recently raise regional prices in steam 😔
Picked up Terra Nil and I’m really enjoying it. One of those games you can play to relax and calm down after a long day.
It’s a somewhat beautiful game, but the recycling gets sooo tedious.
Loved that game
Superflight has been my favorite game to unwind and listen to music too for years, and now its less than a dollar, total steal
I’m getting this one, looks relaxing and I bet it’d be wonderful on my ultra wide monitor I got myself for Christmas.
I noticed control and death stranding are cheaper on fanatical in case anyone was after them. I’m disappointed in this sale to be honest. I only picked up gta4 this time round. I had it before on the ps3 and even now its not at the lowest it ever was.
Lumines Remastered, really fun tetris-like with trippy music and visuals. The guy who made it would later go on to make Tetris Effect.
Loved it on my psp back in the day. Highly recommended.
Warhammer 40k : Boltgun is an absolute blast if you like your doom-esq shooters. Showing as 80% off, but I don’t know how that’s going to show in other regions
TORMENT: PLANESCAPE
Can confirm that it’s an awesome boomer shooter. In my region it’s only 32% off.
A Short Hike is an excellent and short game. Super fun, very chill, great music, the whole package.
How does the DRM free situation work on steam exactly? For those of with steam decks, how does that work? Games can still be taken down.
If the game doesn’t have DRM, you can download it through steam, keep a copy of the files and it will work without steam. AFAIK, Steam doesn’t remove things from people’s libraries, only from the store. I have a few games that aren’t sold anymore, but you I can still download and play them just fine. It’s the same on the Steam Deck, but playing a game through Steam is more convenient.
Can you take that game out of steam and just launch the game that way?
Yes, drm free games don’t need to launch through steam
How can I make this happen on the steam deck?
You have to use the desktop mode for that and use it as a pc that executes games. Find the game files and execute them. I’m not certain about support for all the controls (I think as long as stram is running it just works)
I’ve still got games in my inventory that’s no longer on the store, so I guess they’re always available if you bought them.
So if you uninstall or delete the game, you can reinstall them at a later time? Can you take the game out of steam? Can you launch the game without steam?
So if you uninstall or delete the game, you can reinstall them at a later time?
Yes
Can you take the game out of steam? Can you launch the game without steam?
No
Hellblade is like 5 bucks. Get.it.now.
Nice recommendation. Purchased!
