9 Games I Want to Spread (during the Steam sales)
So the Steam sales are on shortly, and so is this thing doing rounds where people can recommend 9 games from the sales for anyone who cares to listen. There are no criteria or anything, it's just sharing what you love and hoping someone might be inspired to check it out while it's being discounted.
So (taking a leaf from Quailblog's page here are nine games I'd like to recommend while the sales are on. Specifically, these are nine games that might have fallen under people's radars for one reason or another but which I think deserve a little bit of a spotlight that is otherwise hogged by all the bigger, fancier games. In alphabetical order, not preference.
(click on the banners for Steam links)
Beyond the Edge of Owlsgaard
If you're into: old-school click 'n' point adventure romps.
One look at that interface in the screenshot and you know exactly what you're getting into. Young deerboy Finn's quest for answers in a world that seems to be facing its end is full of early 90s adventure game magic - but without the absolutely insane excuses of puzzles and cryptic instant deaths. The art is gorgeous, the writing engaging and ultimately rather surprising, and the puzzles are balanced greatly between being charmingly imaginative yet still following a sound logic. It genuinely feels like it could have come from the Golden Age of These Things, but with the hindsight of lessons learned when replaying those games decades later.
Chants of Sennaar
If you're into: puzzles and linguistics.
You're a wanderer who's found themselves in a towering city, the language of which you don't speak. The languages, specifically. And the denizens of the city's different floors can't understand each other either. Scaling the city means not only being able to decipher the different written forms and grammatical structures of each language out of the context clues, but to be able to convey messages between multiple languages when cross-floor collaboration is required. It's a puzzle game that delights the old, failed linguist in me - paired with a gorgeous visual design, this really is a bit of a treat.
Dogpile
If you like: wasting time. Also dogs.
Dogpile is your classic fruit combo game, except with dogs. Combine small dogs into bigger, then bigger dogs, then get the high score. Silly modifiers and passives add little twists, different game modes make you think differently about how you merge dogs, or just play it vanilla. Any way you play it, it's the perfect way to waste time when waiting for your delayed flight, staving off tiredness on a coach, idly hanging on a Discord call with friends, etc. Just a charming, stupid, addictive little thing.
Foretales
If you like: drawing cards and making decisions
I am cheating slightly here because I haven't actually completed Foretales - but I have every intent to once I find the time to restart it (it's been too long since circumstances interrupted my initial playthrough attempts), because it's such a neatly done little thing. Small time nobody of a thief Volepain accidentally ends up with a prophetic sight that warns of the impending end of the world, and you act as his guiding hand as you gather allies and try to influence events to prevent the apocalypse - you will probably face doom more than once, but armed with the knowledge of what's ahead you can make your very impactful choices more slyly the next time around and pull the plot twists in your favour. Each story scenario is played out as a miniature deck builder game, where the cards you play, the allies (and their decks) you bring and how you use those different cards can each impact how the scenario ultimately ends. It's a really compelling turn-based card game with a very unique approach to your average deck-a-thon.
Laika: Aged Through Blood
If you like: Treating combat like a puzzle, metroidvanias
An immortal mother seeks to find a desperate end to a hopeless war while trying to keep her daughter safe, armed with a trusty gun and a motorised steed. Aged Through Blood is a metroidvania in its core, but how it plays is more like a puzzle game built entirely on doing tricks. Your motorcycle must always be on the move as all your mechanics from reloading to blocking enemy bullets is tied to its momentum: fending off a horde of enemies means utilising ramps, angles and sharp eyes to your best ability until combat becomes an artful dance of loops and fast turns. Set to an incredible soundtrack and set in a truly, oppressively atmospheric world that radiates mood, Aged Through Blood is another excellent title from Brainwash Gang.
The Longest Road on Earth
If you like: Short slice of life narratives.
Speaking of Brainwash Gang, here's the game that pulled them on my radar. The Longest Road on Earth is a very short game - about 1-2 hours max - and it offers little gameplay besides moving around and occasionally pressing the interact button. But it immediately became a close favourite and its short length has only meant that replaying it - re-experiencing it - is that much easier. It's a collection of independent though briefly interconnected stories all taking place in the same city, observing the daily lives of a few of its denizens: the maintenance man starting his day, the sailor arriving home after time at sea, the dock admin doing his 9-to-5, etc. There are no real plot beats or twists. But the atmosphere is immaculate. The whole game is soundtracked to a beautiful, fully-sung soundtrack where each song brings the colour to the game's black and white palette, and these mundane situations end up feeling like great stories on their own - when two of the characters briefly meet (and do not exchange a single word), it genuinely feels like a fist-pump moment. The final scene that begins a little before and then plays in-between the credits absolutely destroys me every time - again, simply because of how special a normal life can be. This isn't for everybody, but if any of this sounds intriguing it's a beautiful short film of a game.
Pentiment
If you like: Murder mysteries, playing a detective, ye olden times.
The majority of the games on this list are from small, independent studios and that's an intentional choice. Pentiment is the exception - it's by Obsidian, who you know as the big RPG studio and at the very least as the guys who made Fallout: New Vegas. But Pentiment is the one that always slips past when people talk about Obsidian's legacy, which is perhaps apt for a game that was intentionally a smaller internal passion project, but that's still very unfortunate because of how great it is. As an illustrator in 16th century Germany who ends up having the misfortune of being the only truly independent party around when a murder shocks the local church village, you become the de facto detective. Time is limited, clues are plentiful and you won't have the opportunity to dig through them all - make sure you are comfortable with your choices, because they're going to have an impact for the future chapters. Pentiment is full of Obsidian's trademark quality writing and characterisation - you genuinely feel like you get to know these people through the chapters - and it's wrapped up with a fantastic, period-inspired presentation. You know a lot of love went into the design when just the fonts that appear in people's dialogue are meant to indicate something about them (and you actually see the text get rewritten in a new font when you discover something new about those people).
Rivals
If you like: the idea of investigative music journalism. And if you love Wilco.
If this list is meant to be a bit of a sales scoop, then I am likely going to mislead you here because I've never seen Rivals go on sale. But it is also about a fiver and as such, basically a mad sale price in its own right. It's another short, mostly narrative experience: taking the role of a music journalist, your goal is to shift through random bits of interviews, newspaper clippings, music reviews and other miscellanea and through them, form an accurate timeline of what exactly happened between two musicians who started a band and recorded a cult classic before going their separate ways, one finding indie success through experimenting with his sound and the other alienating every audience he could find (there are a lot of very obvious Uncle Tupelo/Wilco parallels here, is what I'm saying). It's a simple and short game, but the story of these artists and band is genuinely interesting, especially if you were a bit of an indie nerd yourself back in the early 00s peak Pitchfork days. The cherry on top is all the original music written and recorded for the game, acting as short samples of each of the albums featured in the story - and it's also the most frustrating aspect of Rivals, because some of it is legitimately so good that I desperately wish Powderhorn were a real band whose discography I could binge through.
Small Saga
If you like: classic console RPGs but you're not too fond of all that grinding business.
I feel like Small Saga had a bit of an underground buzz while it was still in development and there was a burst of excitement for a flash when it was released, but then it got oddly buried - it took me a good time to get around to it as well (and I had to be gifted it to begin with). But it is such a genuine delight that it deserves to be highlighted here. The premise in itself is fantastic: set in modern London, but out of sight under the ground where the rodents and other small animals live out their fantasy-styled life (scalpels for spears, lighters in lieu of fire magic), one mouse begins his journey of revenge to take the "yellow god", an exterminator who killed his brother. The writing is superb and so full of personality, with genuine laughter-inducing comedy as well, and together with the loving visual design and an excellent soundtrack this version of London is so easy to get hooked into. The gameplay itself is a classic console style RPG but decidedly a very forgiving one - there's no grinding and the combat sequences give the player plenty of breathing space, with the true skill-testing mettles left to the optional side bosses. I personally really love the "easiness" of it all - the game still gives you plenty of food for thought when it comes to combat so it's not a complete mindless button-masher, and its relative sparseness means each fight feels like an important part of the story. A real small (heh) gem - and it just had a big update that added a whole bunch of new content in it, so no better time to jump in.
Honourable mention: I was going to include Cobalt Core as one of nine games of this list, but I did it under the presumption that You have already played Cobalt Core. If you haven't - hey, you should play Cobalt Core.
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