45
votes
The 2025 Steam Winter Sale is live (runs Dec 18 - Jan 5)
Quick links:
Share noteworthy deals!
Ask for recommendations!
Discuss what you bought!
Quick links:
Share noteworthy deals!
Ask for recommendations!
Discuss what you bought!
Ahem, 1000xResist is 33% off yay! Its also part of a Feel Good bundle which I'm not entirely sure about coming away feeling exactly good is the right adjective.
Anyway if you like fully voice acted
yurigood story telling this is a good one to grab. I promise I'll stop the rampant shillingsoonone day96% of 3867 reviews positive is an achievement for a small studio's first entry.
Seconding that it's a fantastic experience. I was impressed with how much weight they managed to pack into a pretty short game and with how human and relatable this high concept science fiction story was. Over a year later and it's still jostling around in my brain.
:) agreed, glad to see high concept SciFi that doesn't just trail off into "woohoo spooky guess we'll never know"
Reminder, as with previous years, during the Steam Winter Sale, Epic has a similar one, but more importantly for what most people use Epic for, they give away a free game each day instead of just once a week. Today's is Jotunnslayer: Hordes of Hel
Perhaps a worthwhile mention is that Is There Any Deal has a browser plugin that will automatically show deals on the Steam Store website. It's a good way to immediately see if there's a better deal if someone links you a game on Tildes.
Has anyone played Ranch Simulator? It seems like a smaller scale, more hands-on take on Farming Simulator. Geared toward homesteading/ranching rather than massive farms. The price is low and the review are good, so I may just grab it and see how it goes. But thought I'd ask here first :)
I have ~18 hours in it, all playing online co-op with some friends, and all before some of the latest major updates. It's janky and rough around the edges. Many things are a bit tedious until you get enough upgrades. The systems have some decent depth to them and it's definitely fun to goof around in for a while at the very least. The normal $25 price point is probably a bit high unless you're extremely in to the style of game, but it's completely worth the sale price of $2.50, IMO.
Agree with the other comment. It's a bit janky but there's plenty to do and they keep adding to it.
I played with my partner and we have fond memories of setting up a pig farm which grew exponentially until it crashed our computers.
I'd recommend on sale as a fun little game to mess around in, especially with some friends.
The following three games are getting delisted from Steam in January, so this is your last chance to get them:
I’ve played both the Lost Phone games and liked both. They’re short narrative adventures where you, as the title says, find a lost phone and start going through its contents in order to learn about its owner.
I’d definitely recommend them at this price.
Why are they being delisted?
Studio closing
Perhaps unsurprising to none, A Normal Lost Phone plays best on mobile -- it makes for a more immersive experience. It is already off the Play Store, but their itch io posting includes an apk. They were included with the huge Racial Justice Bundle and I think the more recent Palestine Support Bundle as well.
https://dearvillagers.itch.io/a-normal-lost-phone
https://dearvillagers.itch.io/another-lost-phone-lauras-story
My weekly multiplayer group (4 people) is currently looking for our next game.
Our toxic trait is that each of us is one of those "I'll do whatever's good for the group" kind of people, so nobody actually wants to make a decision and just wants to go along with other people want.
Which is where y'all come in! Help us decide. Feel free to lobby for what we should play next (or what we should avoid). Here's what's currently on our consideration list:
Since a number of the others have been talked about, I figured I'd share my thoughts on Astroneer.
I'd say it's a fun and novel but sometimes janky addition to the survival crafting genre.
The bit that I appreciated is that almost everything is very tactile and in-the-world without a lot of UI elements. Your space suit has little lights to show you your oxygen, power, etc. and you can check out your inventory by what is physically plugged into your backpack. Base-building is very modular, build some foundations and then plug components into it kind of like Lego. Build a chassis of a rover and then plug whatever accessories, seating, etc. you want into the available slots.
The game did get a bit grindy at times looking for the right materials and while there was some fun tech tree stuff to unlock it largely felt like you were travelling to new planets to do more of the same with slightly different materials available. I did also die to weird physics glitches multiple times, probably due to being in someone else's hosted multiplayer game. And I've heard they released a big update to coincide with a paid expansion which has been panned as being buggy and unpolished, so it might be a rough time to pick up the game until the worst of that gets sorted.
I've only ever played it solo, but based on my experience, I'd wager some of the grindy feeling of the mid-game would be alleviated by a division of labor between players. A lot of the grind has to do with limited carrying capacity and the necessity to personally shuttle materials from the source to point of use, and I expect having some players devote themselves to logistics, some to prospecting and exploration, and some to processing would not only reduce the grindy feel, but lead to big productivity gains.
It should be said that most of my experience with Astroneers was from before the 1.0 launch, and they've done a fair bit of reworking to automation since then. It's possible my analysis is outdated.
I liked the game enough to put a sizable amount of time into it though, and I think it might be a fun multiplayer experience, though I doubt I'll find out since it's not the type of game most of my friends are interested in.
I found V rising really fun, but I also played the hell out of battlerite (rip). Personally one of the most enjoyable aspects of it is a very clear "gear treadmill" with skill still mattering and not a lot of grinding so much as just getting better at executing your build and doing the combat right.
Keep in mind though that goes both ways as my buddy who's more used to WoW would often think he'd need to grind up because he'd die too quickly, and get stuck in these major grinding cycles until I showed him some stuff. You're really not supposed to be getting hit a lot. There's no "tank" or "healer" roll like a traditional MMO so learning the fight and the mechanics is more important than build or gear maxing.
I'll second V Rising, but I only play solo. That being said, I've hit a wall and cannot defeat any V-bloods to increase my abilities/stats, so it's been shelved since last month.
With others though, I presume that shouldn't be a problem.
Hammerwatch with my group was a lot of fun; If you play Heroes of Hammerwatch, please let me know how it goes!
I played HoH2 with my daughter and we had a blast!
I love State of Decay 2.
I've only played it solo, but it's a game that forces you to make choices, so someone would have to decide what the next upgrade for your building is.
Also, it would probably encourage people to go out and explore on their own, bringing back supplies, because it seems like it might be difficult to go out as a group, because everyone has to dodge the zombies then. Though it would make some special zombie encounters a little easier and you'd probably want to do that to kill hearts around the map.
V rising is good as people suggested and should give you the most playtime IMHO. State of decay 2 is also great for the opening hours, but it falls off a cliff and starts to feel very repetitive. Still the opening hours are very fun and make it worth trying regardless of longevity.
It probably depends heavily on how much grind you can tolerate, and how much you like survival games, but I game with a group (between 4 and 7 depending on the game) that have played a lot of survival crafters and I detest Ark. If you play with default settings it is an intolerable grind, and even with most of the gathering/taming turned way up in the server settings the second time we played I still found it excruciating.
Now, this was near the end of a very long streak of survival games for this group (Conan finally broke me, personally) so I might have just been burned out on them, but I really didn't enjoy any step of our last Ark playthrough at all. IMO the only recent survival game that respects your time and feels good to play is Abiotic Factor.
The GTA 4 complete edition is on sale for $6US if anyone else wants it! I enjoyed GTA 5 more than I expected myself to so I've been wanting to play GTA 4 for a while. Finally made time to play it now that it's the holidays and I'm enjoying it. I played GTA San Andreas for a little bit and it's cool seeing how the technology advanced between GTA 3, 4 and 5.
A friend bought Nubby's Number Factory for me and I'm excited to try that out!
I also convinced myself that Half Life 3 is totally coming out this year, so I bought Black Mesa for myself. I've played most of HL1 but never beat it. HL2 and the episodes are some of my favorite games, so I'm looking to play through the series again this year before HL3 totally releases.
I have enough of a backlog where I really don't need any additional games, but I've had my eye on Space Marine 2 for a while and that's down to $24...
I still have 15€ to spend on my account, and nothing overly exciting in my wishlist.
Contenders are
If anyone has recommendations: my most played recent games are ARPGs (PoE2, Diablo 4, Last Epoch, Minecraft Dungeons) and casual extraction shooters (Arc Raiders, Duckov). I like exploration, loot, procedural generation, usually prefer real-time over turn-based.
Animal Well is a very clever game, and will reward both exploration and good reflexes. I enjoyed it greatly.
It really nails puzzle design in that there's almost always something you feel like you can figure out or do, and that is just the right level of "huh wait....oh I CAN DO THAT"
I've only played it a bit, but for my partner and myself, Hero Siege felt really simplistic and clunky, and half-paying-attention to it over the years, it really seems like the devs are just kinda doing whatever, not like they have a great plan or vision... On the other hand, they seem to be transitioning to a model where the existing class DLC nonsense will just be skin DLCs, and the classes will be included as part of the game, so the base game's future value is likely much higher than its current price... at least unless they change their minds again.
Suggest studying some play videos too see what it really looks like in action, and make sure it'll be worth playing, not just pushing numbers around. Unless pushing numbers is your thing, of course :)
Maybe consider Chronicon ($5 or $11 with DLC--one a class, one an endgamey pets thingy), if you don't have it.