Saturday Morning Gaming: The Steam Christmas Sale is Upon Us!
First things first: Dave the Diver is on sale for 20% off. Get it. You’ll be delighted. It’s a charming, funny, relaxing game. Well, the restaurant sim part is a little bit stressful. Some of the shark attacks are too. But, mostly, it’s relaxing on top of being charming and funny. (Read my review here.)
Pinball FX3 has all of its tables on sale for 70% off. Pinball FX (the currently supported table platform) has almost all of its tables on sale for 66% off. (Read my review here.)
The game that I have put the most hours into this year (and last year, and the year before that) is a boardgame called Gremlins, Inc. It’s on sale for 75% off. (How have I not reviewed this? Seriously, it’s the game that I have played more than any other.)
Return of the Obra Dinn is on sale for 33% off. Play an insurance adjuster figuring out what happened to this ghost ship, who died on it, in what order, and what the heck happened. An absolutely *AMAZING* gaming experience unlike anything else I’ve ever played. (Read the review here.)
Gloomhaven is a computer game version of a board game that tries to capture the joys of dungeon crawling computer games. In real life, it’ll take you 20 minutes to set up any given dungeon. In here, it’ll take less than 20 seconds. It’s on sale for 50% off. (Read the review here.)
Heck, watch my Youtube tutorial on how to play:
Glass Masquerade is a digital jigsaw puzzle where you put stained glass visuals together. Absolutely relaxing and a great game to play when you’re unwinding at the end of a long day. Get it for 65% off. (I never reviewed it but, seriously, if the idea of jigsaw puzzles on computer monitor is appealing to you, you need to get this game.)
Hades is probably the best Rogue-lite that I’ve played in the last five years. Escape Hell. Then escape it again. Escape it for 50% off. (Read the review here.)
Invisible, Inc. is Klei’s take on the XCom games. Instead of giving you percentage chance to hit (that *NEVER* are accurate), it gives you either 0% or 100%. Oh, and you’re sneaking rather than shooting. If you like tactical sneakers, you *NEED* to get this game. And it’s 75% off! (And I haven’t reviewed this? How have I not reviewed this? It’s a treat of a game!)
Opus Magnum is a game about alchemy where you put together molecules using your alchemist skills. It mostly involves writing a computer program telling your alchemy box how to manipulate its arms around the various atoms you place in there. It’s on sale for 50% off. Warning: It will make you feel dumb. (Read the review here.)
Pentiment is a game set in the late Medieval era where you start out as a young artist working at a monastery and a murder happens. Then time passes and you are an old artist. Then more time passes. It’s a story game that is about how time passes, I guess, set at a monastery. A sad, moving, narrative that will stick in your craw at the same time that you’ll be delighted by the little touches like the ink drying on the script as it is written before you. It’s on sale for 33% off. (Read the review here.)
And last but not least: Ye Olde Cribbage Club. The game has some irritating flaws (the game has you cut for high card rather than low card) and some baffling design choices (your opponents are in an old age home and one suffers from Alzheimer’s) but if you want to play cribbage on your computer, this game will let you play cribbage. It’s on sale for 40% off. (Read the review here.)
So… what have I overlooked? What are *YOU* playing?
(Featured image is a screenshot of the Steam Christmas Sale Splash. Taken by the author.)
I picked up Jedi: Fallen Order for six of your American dollars. The boys and are are conspiring to get some multi-player Baldur’s Gate 3 going over the holidays as well, around bouts of Magic and other nonsense.Report
I got bored and downloaded an older game on my kid’s Switch. It’s called Sinking City? It’s a Lovecraftian horror adventure game. Currently frustrating the crap out of me but I like it.Report
HOLY CRAP I’M PLAYING THAT
I love it. I can even tell you exactly where I am in the game: I just got the bends.Report
What a coincidence, eh? I’m in the Fathers and Sons quest, just avoided the fight with Fecund Mother, and then chose the evil son over the evil father.
Idk what you’re playing on but it’s maddening on the Switch. But too interesting to give up, and it was only like $8.Report
Yeah, they had it on sale on Steam for a similar amount and I thought “Huh… *I* like Lovecraft… and it has decent reviews… what the heck.”
It does a *GREAT* job with dread.Report
Ghostwire: Tokyo is Epic Store’s free game today. $60 usually and the ratings seem to be pretty good. Metacritic has it in the mid-8s based on User Reviews.Report
And their Christmas Day giveaway is The Outer Worlds.
I loved the idea of it, it had an amazing first third and… well…
Kinda petered out.
But if you’d never played it, pick it up. The first third is pretty good.Report
More Baldur’s Gate 3: On this latest playthrough, I’ve decided to add Shadowheart back to my party at the expense of Karlach, who is without doubt my party muscle. To counteract that loss of melee power, I’ve turned Shadowheart into a War domain cleric and given her a higher strength score using the Ability Score improvement feat (16, 10, 12, 8, 17, 10), so she’s Strong, Wise, and Dumb, as all clerics should be. We’ll see how it goes. I remember being frustrated by the Gauntlet the first time because I dislike puzzles but once I sat back and looked at what I was being asked to do it was EZ.Report
Today’s free game from the Epic store is Human Resource Machine. It’s a programming game (reviewed here).
If you enjoy programming so much that you want to play math games in your off time, check it out.Report
If I want to do math things in my spare time, I have a paper tucked away in a drawer here that proves a useful result about existence and uniqueness of a solution in a 2-D situation. I would like to expand it to 3-D. It appears to be one of those things that is straightforward in two dimensions, much harder in three.Report
This is just stuff like “using the add function only, octuple this number”.Report
“Octuple”?
All right, the dictionary says it can be a verb. Back in my paper-editing days, though, I would have stopped right there and sent the paper back with a giant red X through the word.Report