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Save Point: A game deal roundup for the week of July 28
Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!
Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”
Rules:
- No grey market sales
- No affiliate links
If posting a sale, it is strongly encouraged that you share why you think the available game/games are worthwhile.
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The Jackbox Megapicker is here!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2828500/The_Jackbox_Megapicker/
You can get Drawful 2 for free if you get it in the next 30 days
The Jackbox Party Pack ("1") is at its all time low of $2.49
https://store.steampowered.com/app/331670/The_Jackbox_Party_Pack/
The rest are supposedly cheaper on GreenManGaming with 10 at its all time low at $18 (after SUMMER15 code), but they've showed better discounts than they actually applied recently.
Indiegala has a bunch of Annapura games on sale:
https://www.indiegala.com/store/publisher-sale/annapurna
Edit: check ITAD, there might be better deals on GameBillet!
If you've never played Journey, I highly suggest you pick it up at least once. It's probably one of the first games I ever played that really made me think of games as art, it also made me cry. The soundtrack is excellent too. Neon White is also an excellent speedrunning/grindy game that I enjoyed, it feels super fluid to play, just skip the sorta anime story if you're not into that.
I'd recommend AGAINST 12 minutes, it's.... not that great. I enjoyed going through the story initially, but it didn't take me too long and the story itself is very poor imo.
Also on sale that I enjoyed: Outer Wilds, Donut County, and What Remains of Edith Finch.
Oh baby, Neon White. I don't know what possessed me to buy a time trial precision FPS shooter, that's mainly about driving your speedrun times down, which has good-bad 00's anime character spoofs as an aesthetic, and which touts a band I didn't know about doing the entire soundtrack as its main feature? But I fuckin adored it and went for 100%. It has such a beautiful flow for making you feel cool for however you tackle the levels at first, but still gives you the itch to smooth over your times and naturally figure out the weird tech involved.
(...Actually I do remember why I tried it - I saw that Ben Esposito of Arcane Kids designed it. It's, uh, nothing like Sonic Dreams Collection or Bubsy 3D: Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective.)
Journey is fantastic. I put off playing it for ages, and thought I'd find the multiplayer aspect offputting (I'm a hardcore introvert, especially in gaming), but it wound up being the coolest part. That last stretch I outdistanced my partner at the time and it was just... warmfuzzy... waiting for them to catch up so we could finish together.
GameBillet seems 1-2% cheaper, but roughly the same deals and they haven't got a tidy sale page or easy way to search by publisher. This sale also puts many of these quite close to all time lows including Outer Wilds, Neon White, Sayonara Wild Hearts, Donut County... I stopped checking.
Good call! Yeah I didn't see that before but ITAD says you're right.
I have written so many complaints to friends about 12 Minutes. The story is so so bad, and the voice acting was noticeably phoned in in my opinion, particularly from Willem Defoe.
I was so hyped by the idea, I'm a bit of a sucker for time loop stories, but it was just.... so disappointing. :(
The "twist" just flat out didn't make any sense, either in my opinion
Steam Tower Defense Sale! Drop your recs below!
https://store.steampowered.com/category/tower_defense
I played maybe 100 TD games so far in my life, many from the Warcraft III days. Absolutely going to be diving into this sale!
Element TD 2 and Legion TD 2 are the direct sequels to the titans of Warcraft III's TD custom games, both are from their same mod developers. Both games were titans for a reason, but if you've played the originals it's a double-edged sword of nostalgia vs been-there-done-that. No Creeps Were Harmed TD is a spiritual successor to the Warcraft III custom game EntropyTD, albeit singleplayer only unfortunately. With loads of maps to play, the 4-stars are a breeze if you're an EntropyTD veteran, but most people aren't so it'll make you think hard about maximizing creep pathing design with tower types.
Age of Darkness and Diplomacy Is Not An Option have a similar feel to They Are Billions: your defenses against a horde. Very satisfying to see the bodies fall, but this sub-genre usually falls into the same trap of one dominating strategy. Still fun when you get the "oh s***, that's a lot of enemies coming in" moment in the later games. Going to wishlist Cataclismo, looks to be very very young EA in the same sub-TD-genre.
Infinitode 2 and Mindustry are similar with meta-progressions tech trees. When you get around to revisiting a map in Infinitode and destroy your previous PB is a great loop, and the game usually has you think outside of the first obvious choice for some maps. The best tower choices and positions also change as you progress, which keeps things continually fresh. Great amount of strategy/depth and replayability.
For unique games: Tower Tactics: Liberation mixes in roguelike + deck-building + TD in a good way, solid fun game but nothing too outstanding. Rise to Ruins is Rimworld/Dwarf Fortress-like colony sim + TD. Different game loop than most other tower defenses, it definitely is indisputably a "TD" but it doesn't feel like one, which is refreshing.
As for not recommended: Isle of Arrows and Dome Keeper. Being a TD veteran, these 2 dumb down the genre too much, provide minimal strategic thinking, and got boring very quickly. Dome Keeper being especially egregious.
Yeah, I picked up Dome Keeper and... it's alright?? I don't think it's that fun so I ended up refunding it. Have you played Thronefall? That was the other one I thought would be interesting to pick up in this sale.
The other one I saw someone playing was Emberward which I really thought was cool but hasn't been on sale yet.
I have not played either. Thronefall to me looks like I'd destroy it in an hour; like a really short variant of that horde-TD genre like AoD, DiNaO, and Cataclismo I recommended above. Not worth it for $10 on a minimal sale when there's a seemingly-endless sea to choose from. Like Cataclismo, Emberward also appears to be very new and in EA. I'd let it cook as many reviews have my EA red flag of "good game, lack of content."
An hour is a strong exaggeration. The game has a decent amount of content with challenge runs. If you've played Hades you'll recognize that the challenges work similarly, you select one or more multipliers or conditions that apply to the map and make it tougher with those.
No argument against the early access thing though. That's up to you personally.
I don't see any curse/heat/prestige/difficulty system mentioned at all on the store page, including screenshots/video. Damn that's a huge blunder to not mention the game has replayability when majority of the reviews are "~2 hours played." I'll add it to my wishlist too :)
You're right, I checked the store page and they have nothing. They're called Mutators in Thronefall. They make the game more difficult in return for more experience and points (for high score hunts!).
Past the tutorial, you can select as many as you want and for the first mission I could easily win with the first four enabled -you unlock them piecemeal-, but it quickly turned around at later missions where just having two Mutators enabled made the mission incredibly difficult. These Mutators can be "enemies have 60% more health", or "the first three waves spawn double the size and quicker", to things like "your units are more expensive" and "your buildings take an extra day to repair".
To help you out, you have a couple of weapons you can choose and a broad selection of Perks you can select that can significantly change your own game style. You can choose up to 5 Perks ranging from "speed up the nearest tower" to "lower your own damage to massively buff your units", to things like "houses now shoot arrows" or "your horse tramples enemies and deals damage".
Here's what that looks like: https://imgur.com/a/qJtT5PE
You could enable all of those Mutators at once. Not sure you'd want to, but it's possible.
The game also features a seasonal "endless" mode that it doesn't mention anywhere on the store page as far as I can tell.
The game is surprisingly in depth in spite of the simple presentation. It also plays and runs really well on anything including the Steam Deck.
Launch will see two more maps and then the two devs will hang up their hats. In terms of content it's already rather complete, but you could wait it out. Definitely one to watch if you like TDs. It's actually great.
Saw a overview-ish review and decided to get it. So far the highest win is with 7 Mutators active, can't seem to unlock them fast enough.
There's some bad design like not being able to plan anything out the first time you discover a map, but it's a solid strategy game where you have to perfect a build order to get the win. With 1/2 of the Perks unlocked so far, there's definitely a single blatantly obvious winning strat thus far. Maybe it'll hold up like Bad North where even with stale strats it's still fun to play in a small ~10 hr package, time will tell.
What did you figure out? I find I can change what type of game I want to play through the Perks and many seem at least decent.
And the lack of foresight is a bit shoddy, but you can use the wiki for that. It's just two devs so I'll cut them some slack on this point, but I can understand it.
The Mutators unlock per level so you could, in theory, rush the missions and then do them all over with whatever combination of Mutators. It unlocks at a pace of three or four per mission so it'll grow steadily.
Mindustry is neat. It's a factory building tower defense RTS. So each level you mine resources, distribute them, build turrets to fend off invaders all while the clock ticks for the next wave. There's several modes, including sandbox and PvP plus mod support.
I prefer this sort of game on mobile, and it's free in the android app store. They've also got name your price on itch. So $4 on steam is the most expensive platform.
https://anuke.itch.io/mindustry
2 bucks on iOS https://apps.apple.com/de/app/mindustry/id1385258906?l=en-GB
Just bought it on your recommendation
Fallout GOTY for 75% off on GOG. No rollback required for Fallout London if you want to grab the mod for free from GOG. Skyrim is also similarly discounted, so if you want it DRM-free, get it.
World of Goo 2 is out now across the Epic Store, Nintendo Switch, and their own website for DRM free PC, Max and Linux versions.
https://worldofgoo2.com/
Has there been any word on whether it will eventually release on Steam?
Between my Deck and Proton, I’m pretty bought in to Steam and would rather get it there than on Epic or DRM-free (yes, I know this is a sin).
https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/features/epic-first-run-program
Epic's First Run program calls for six month exclusivity, so that's probably what I would go with. I've had good luck with Heroic for Epic Games, but I understand the value of waiting since the Steam Release will probably come with native touch controls and a price cut.
A bunch of Lego games on Humble Bundle:
https://www.humblebundle.com/games/lego-worlds-collide-ultimate-assembly
$15 for everything
Lumbearjack free on EGS today:
https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/lumbearjack-b5bedf
A bunch of Resident evil games are on sale in bundle right now:
https://www.fanatical.com/en/pick-and-mix/build-your-own-resident-evil-bundle
I had a blast with 5 growing up, 7 is really good though I haven't been able to get through it yet because of time. 4 is one of the best games of all time, I still think it's worth playing even when 4 Remake was one of my favorite games that came out last year.
A bunch of multiplayer switch games on sale on the Nintendo store:
https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/games/nintendo-switch-games/#topLevelFilters=Deals&f=topLevelFilters&sort=df&p=0
THQ Nordic is doing a sale on steam, which includes Destroy All Humans! at a new all time low of $3. I played this when it first came out and remember having fun with it. Like a 3D Rampage with physics and an alien with a variety of tools set in the 50s. It knows what it is and leans into that cheesy camp. It probably gets repetitive towards the end as I don't recall a plot to speak of or big changes to the whole mass chaos formula. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the humor didn't age so well either.
Skybound has a sale on steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/curator/9036111/sale/skyboundsale2024
The very excellent Walking Dead Season 1 is on sale for $1.50, very worth it for a great story! I remember crying to it over 10 years ago lol. There's some other great games here too but that's the one I resonated with the most.
Humble has a Digital Board Game bundle:
https://www.humblebundle.com/games/board-game-night-with-dire-wolf-digital-friends
I feel like this might be an easy way to learn popular games right now such as Wingspan, Terraforming Mars, Dune Imperium and Scythe. Just know that Munchkin is pretty much universally hated by everyone I play with. $18 for the full bundle
Fanatical has posted their August bundle starting at 3 for $10. I'm thinking I'll pick up Everspace, Remember Me, and Ara Fell, though curious to y'all's opinions as well. Thinking I'll pull Children of Morta from this pixel Humble Bundle, otherwise I'd snatch it from the Fanatical bundle.