For my part, I haven't gotten anything new yet, so if you've read my recommendations before, I apologize for any repeats. Roguelike Edition, apparently.
PlateUp! is my favorite couch coop game on Steam. You and up to three friends work together to run a restaurant. It's a little like Overcooked, but instead of having different wacky levels to get through, you choose a menu (starting with one dish), and build up your restaurant day after day. Every few days you will have to choose a new complication (like another dish or reduced customer patience). The goal is to get through 15 days of service without a single dissatisfied customer, so it's like a restaurant roguelike. It's currently 70% off and 94% Positive all time.
Dead Cells is a very fun sidescrolling roguelike that feels a bit like a Metroidvania. Collect weapons, kill monsters, die, repeat. It's currently 50% off and Overwhelmingly Positive all time.
FTL: Faster Than Light is a classic roguelike at this point. You must traverse the different sectors of the galaxy to reach and destroy the Rebel Flagship. You can order crew members around in real time, while the ship weapons take time to recharge, giving a turn-based feel. It's 70% off and Overwhelmingly Positive all time.
Noita is an amazing roguelike as well. You play a wizard attempting to explore down into the earth for treasure. Every pixel in the game is made out of a material, from plain old Dirt to flammable Oil to useful Water. Find treasure and new magic wands. Mix and match the spells on your wands to make new effects -- and even utterly broken bullshit. It's 60% off and Overwhelmingly Positive all time.
What about you? What do you recommend?
I bought my older children copies of FTL, Noita, Necrodancer, and the Phoenix Wright trilogy.
These dudes were all-in on the Sarkeesian train. Don't give them money.
Necrodancer looks really fun, but I was very disappointed to see rave quotes from Ben Kuchera and Adam Sessler in the two trailers I saw. Just for everybody's information.
I'm sure it's a decent game, just like TowerFall and Celeste.
But the developers hate you, so don't give them money.
Necrodancer is fun and I bought it before I knew the developers hate me.
Nothing. I'm too busy with irl stuff, plus I've got an absurdly massive backlog.
Honestly the prices are too high to justify buying. I might just pirate then buy later.
I always try to buy games that I pirated but enjoyed so much that I want to make sure the developers get my money. Even if I know I won't play them again. One of them I would like to purchase is Stellaris, but on sale with all the DLC's its $140. For a 10 year old game. And some of those DLC's were very necessary to improve an initially weak 4x space game if I remember correctly. .
All the DLCs are cracked if you go on the high seas.
I played them all pirated of course. Just trying to give the company some money to say thanks for a great game without dropping 140 bucks.
Some DLCs are "worth" getting, others are not.
Utopia more or less always gets recommended, as do a few like Apocalypse, Federations, Machine Age, Leviathans, Distant Stars, and possibly Ancient Relics.
The others are a mix of "adds some fun stuff" like Grand Archive, Nemesis, and some of the species packs, to "outright avoid" such as Cosmic Storms which is so disliked it's the polar opposite to Utopia in terms of recommendations.
That all said if you know where to look you can play them all for free anyway, often the same day new expansions are released, so you don't end up paying to the complete mess that is post expansion patches, broken mods, and wasted time when you keep having to restart because something either wipes out a core part of your empire in a change, stops working, or simply bricks your saves.
I know where to look and have played them all which is why just buying the original game without the dlcs, all of them, isnt good enough for me.
Stellaris is 100% worth it though. They are constantly updating the game and aren’t afraid to change entire mechanics if they’re messing up the game too much.
The ongoing shitshow that is 4.0 would say otherwise. It's now on patch 21 in 2 months since release, multiple older and new features flat out don't work, there have been kneejerk reactions to OP builds nerfing the absolute shit out of mechanics that only worked when paired with other things leaving them now even worse than they were before, certain mechanics have been changed to no longer match what they were originally designed to do, and because Paradox is in based in Stockholm all the devs are currently on mandatory summer holiday so the current state of the game is stuck like that for at least another month after already several weeks or similar holiday related hiatus.
Second what you said about so much being broken. The potential here is huge, and I can see it clearly if I play a basic-bitch empire. The new growth and civilian mechanics have interesting implications. But, 4.0 needed like three more months in the oven minimum.
That said, it is a terrible time for a new player to enter the game. We'll probably lose most who try right now.
Paradox makes the best emperor games, but yes. Their DLC policies are absolutely ridiculous. I give them a little bit of leeway because this genre is kind of niche, but it's still rough. I would absolutely recommend Stellaris, CK3, and HOI4 to anyone interested, but I would always give that caveat.
If you're patient, they occasionally show up in dirt cheap bundles on humble bundle. That's how I ended up with most of the CK2 and EU4 DLC for very little.
Yeah. I'd follow up and say that you definitely don't need to get most of the DLCs. A ton of them are cosmetic stuff like flag or portrait packs. And then you can pick and choose from the substantive ones that you feel would enhance your game. So it doesn't have to be so bad, especially with sales.
Already picked up the entire Arkham series minus Shadow for $20. I played them on Xbox back in the day, but never on PC before.
I remember, way back in the forgotten days of 2015, Arkham Knight being so broken on PC that Steam removed the game from the store. Encouraging to see that Rockstead actually fixed their game.
I checked my calendar for the next 6 months and decided to get Factorio's expansion: Space Age.
Not on sale, of course, but I can't say I'm excited for much after getting being massively disappointed over all that Kingdom Come 2 stuff came out and shit over the idea that there are based developers out there.
Picked up Songs of Conquest (Have a friend who is a huge HoMM3 fan)
Also got Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, sort of a Gothic/Oblivion mix. Act 3 is apparently rough, but having gone through both D:OS 1 and 2 I feel like I am prepared for that.
I beat Tainted Grail and Act 3 is rough but fun. Ending was just flat rushed. Love the aesthetics and lore, though. Money well spent.
I backed the boardgame and got the game for free. Seems like I should play it...
I haven't played songs of conquest yet, HOMM3 I still play weekly at least. I installed it a couple days ago, just haven't cracked it open yet.
After enjoying Bendy and the Dark Revival even more, than I thought I would, I have picked up its predecessor Bendy and the Ink Machine. It definitely shows its age, compared to its sequel, but I still enjoy it. Dark Revival is definitely a recommend, great aesthetic (apart from the short intro) everything looks like it is made of old, yellowed paper, the monsters are made of ink, there is also a bit of a Bioshock feel to the game. Worth at least taking a look.
I stoped giving steam money a couple of years back after they started breaking consumer laws in my country. I pirate everything now so it’s like a non-stop summer sale.
Just got Expedition 33 on sale. First hour is insanely well done. If the rest of the game is like this I can see game of the year in its future
I don't remember if it was on a discount but I got :
Chains of Freedom
one of the DLCs for Total War: Warhammer
Intravenous 2
the great rebellion
Chains of Freedom is 20% off, Intravenous 2 is 35% off and Overwhelmingly Positive all time, and The Great Rebellion is 60% off and 97% Positive all time, with too few reviews to give them their Overwhelmingly Positive. Great Rebellion is also hyping their Stonetoss crossover in their trailer(!!) which is based beyond all human comprehension. Going to have to pick that one up.
Great rebellion has positive reviews because it's anti-woke, but outside of that it's pretty forgettable gameplay wise. It's fun to trigger people on your steam friends with, but I never bothered finishing it.
As I said in a thread on Gaming,
Honestly the only two things on my radar at the moment are:
Dungeons of Dreadrock 2, because the original was such a high quality bite sized dungeon puzzle experience.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, because everyone keeps telling me it's the best turn based RPG to show up in almost 20 years.
Other than that I've just been derping around in Grim Dawn because it's nice and mindless when I want to listen to youtube news gremlins.
Looks like Dungeons of Dreadrock 2 is cheaper if you buy the 1 & 2 bundle instead of 2 by itself. Will give it a shot.
Edit: First one by itself is 59 cents on GoG right now. https://www.gog.com/en/game/dungeons_of_dreadrock
Any good low spec (old or new, don’t care) games on steam that are worth getting? Still working through my Xbox 369 backlog and would like to know if there’s anything worth pausing that to play.
Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun should run on fairly modest rigs and is very cheap atm. Good stealth strategy homage to games like the Commandos series and some people seem to say it's better than Desperados 3, which followed it.
Downwell could run on a casio watch and is available for pennies, if you're talking really low spec. Great little shooter, especially once you figure out how to keep the combo going (the knack is that you're supposed to try to never touch a surface, just bounce on enemy heads and breakables while buying float time with the recoil).
Nubby's Number factory or Clock Tower Rewind, perhaps? Maybe Dawnsbury Days too.
I see The Last Spell on sale for $10 ( roguelike fantasy hero city defender, fun mechanics, cool theme, cool music, runs on integrated graphics ).
I tried the dwarves DLC on the High Seas and it is not worth buying. There is another Elven DLC I haven't tried.
Had a blast on the base game. You can costumize all your heroes to remove divershitty. Advice : use Boundless mode. You grinded for those bonuses, use as many as you want.
Frostpunk : all DLC bundled in for $10. No divershitty. Post-apocalypse frozen hellscape city management survival. ( One of the DLC is mid-apocalypse. )
Timberborn get the GoG version because you get the entire install file to keep. No divershitty. Manage and grow a beaver settlement, build dams and store water to survive droughts.
The real challenge starts when you customize Hard difficulty to be harder.
You can also take it Easy and focus on colony with small drought instead of survival in your crisp and dry custom 100 days+ droughts apocalypse world.
Summer Memories.
Dead cells is great. If you haven't played it and like fast paced rogue like action platformers its a strong buy. Definitely echo op on the recc
I got Banished Vault (been waiting YEARS for this to go on sale). Also grabbed project silverfish and Grunn.
Indies only. Fuck all triple a games and the people who flock to them.
FTL and Noita are two games I highly recommend. Both are fun as-is, but FTL in particular has some mods that soften the difficulty curve a bit and vastly increase replayability.
What I'm looking at buying at the moment is the Star Control series, Fallen Enchantress, Mindustry, and the Crash Bandicoot trilogy. I might grab some of the Galactic Civilizations games, but based on the reviews I might enjoy other space 4x games more.
I also bought Master of Orion I & II on GoG (need to check if a couple of the above games are comparably priced there) because they were more or les the same price, and GoG tends to do better on making old games work on modern hardware, along with allowing you to download DRM free versions.
Likely getting Outer Wilds. Been on my list for a while
A strange but very interesting game if obscure puzzle exploration games are your jam
They very much are. The Witness and Blue Prince are some of my faves, and a shoutout to filament
Nothing I want that's cheap appeals to me enough to want to actually get it and the things I actually want to buy, like Rimworld, are still too much for me to care about. I grabbed some penny DLC for some random games but that's about it. I'm still happily sailing the high seas and don't see a reason to stop.
Rimworld is excellent (one of the best games on Steam in my opinion), and for years it never went on sale at all. For anybody who is interested in buying it, I believe I saw it's 20% off right now.
Dawnsbury Days. It's a pretty fun deep dive into Pathfinder mechanics, even if some might find the fact that the mechanics of the game are a part of the setting and spoken about by the characters a little grating. It's very cheap, as well. Definitely worth a look to fans of CRPGs, and it has a demo called Quest for the Golden Candleabra if you want to see what it's like.
That's the only thing I have bought thus far. I might ask if people know anything about Prehistoric Kingdom, Stormworks: Build and Rescue or Clickteam Fusion 2.5+, among others. I've had those in my wishlist for a while now.
Been playing Look Outside. Game reminds me of Persona 4 (OG, not the remake) with how easily early enemies and bosses kick your ass. You absolutely cannot be stingy with resources and spam attack every turn.
Battlefront 2. First time in decades that I bought a multiplayer-only game and an EA game.
I did not appreciate the many steps I needed to do to get the game going, nor did I appreciate getting blue screened for downloading origin.
that said, I am glad to be taking advantage of the resurgence of people playing while it lasts. Worth the 4 dollars.
I grabbed God of Weapons because I had an itch for an inventory-manager, and it offers some quick games to jump in and out of as I have time.
Pick a class, which has 3 'Aspects,' and various stat changes, load your inventory with weapons and things that can affect other things around them, and survive against waves of mobs. The Endless mode is a bit broken atm, but it's "being worked on." Mob damage just scales past what you can reasonably survive, and your damage is capped, but I've enjoyed it quite a bit. Very cheap price!
Partisans 1941 real time tactics game in WW2
Unavowed adventure game that I heard a ton of praise about and I wanted to buy an adventure .
Bannerlord and Pathfinder Wrath of thr Righteous
Grabbed Nitro Express, Automobilista 2, and something else, but I can't remember what it was.
Picked up Pictoquest for like 60 cents and if you enjoy Picross its basically the perfect game for that. Its got actual punishments though and many puzzles have a timer, so if you aren't seasoned at it its probably a bad place to start.
Also picked up Cauldron, which is probably the perfect idle/incremental game ever made. The systems run surprisingly well into each other and gradually build and then synergize when they stop building, leading to the game actually evolving into other games as it goes (like the apple catch minigame turning into a full on schmup). It also just literally has Vampire Survivors inside it.
And while its a game I already had, I recommend everyone look at Siralum Ultimate. Its one of those games you can basically play for the rest of your life and never probably fully complete. Its a "creature collector" but the depth the combat goes to means its barely like any other you've ever played.
I built my team for debuffs, which means at the start of every fight I give them almost every debuff in the game which thanks to my talents means they also basically lose half their stats and take a huge chunk of damage for each debuff applied, to which I then cast my spell of "give every enemy 3 random debuffs" which I enchanted to cast twice and then I've won by simply doing nothing. And that's just one out of like 50 classes and something around 1200 unique monsters that you can build to do just about anything. If I ever get bored I can just build a team that actually attacks or does suicide bombs or heals themselves to do damage, and its a new game.
Well, I just got fantasy life for the wife. Nothing atm for me