ranzware
The winter sales are upon us once more: that yearly festival wherein we all unite in the warmth and splendor of substantial discounts. As always, we’ve put together our roundup of the best Steam Winter Sale deals, but I’m here to provide for a different sort of salesgoer—the kind of dealseeker who wants the absolute most game for the absolute minimum cost. Like, say, a dollar or less.
For those of you seeking to stuff your game library’s stockings while spending as little as possible, I’ve assembled a list of excellent games currently on sale for up to—but no more than—$0.99 USD.
My goal here was to offer a broad sampler platter of gameplay flavors from different genres and eras: from puzzles to hack-and-slash RPGs to unsettling walking simulators. If you’re craving a specific kind of game but want the cheapest possible scratch for that itch, or if you just want to try something new with a very low entry cost, you’ll hopefully find something below.
Steam
- Super Hexagon — Developer Terry Cavanagh—who also created VVVVVV and the excellent Dicey Dungeons—calls Super Hexagon “a minimal action game.” That’s not inaccurate, but I might be more inclined to call it “a prolonged, rhythm-based panic attack.” But like, in a good way.
- Shapez — All the optimizational thrills of a factory automation game without any superfluous luxuries like “sprites” or “3D models.” Just you, your assembly lines, and an infinitely-expanding map to work with.
- Downwell — You are falling down a procedurally-generated well in search of treasure, and your boots are guns.
- Super Bit Blaster XL — If Asteroids had a few more decades in the oven. A bucket of upgrades and unlockables dumped over a classic arcade space shooter.
- Hylics — Psychedelic turn-based RPG with digitized claymation graphics. Upsetting. Inscrutable. Pretty neat.
- Superflight — You can fly through procedural mountainscapes in a wingsuit for less than sixty cents. That should say enough.
- Deus Ex: Game of the Year Edition — It’s unclear whether we’ll ever get a new Deus Ex, so why not go in the other direction? To quote a Steam reviewer: “Incredible how well this game has held up over time. It’s not a game, it’s a prophecy.”
- Thief Gold — While we’re talking classic immersive sims, we can’t forget our old friend Garrett. Thief’s unscripted stealth gameplay felt like a revelation in 1998, and it still hasn’t quite been equalled more than 25 years later.
- Bridge Constructor Portal — Physics-based bridge assembly meets pseudophysics portal puzzles. An unexpected pairing back in 2017, but one that’s proven so perfect that it should’ve been obvious.
- Men of War: Assault Squad — Take my advice. Convince a friend to drop a dollar on this, and spend a few hours playing some of the best coop RTS skirmishes the two of you could share.
- Divine Divinity — Before Baldur’s Gate 3, there was Divinity: Original Sin. Before Divinity: Original Sin, there was Divine Divinity. Trace Swen Vincke’s endless journey to recapture his love of Ultima 7 with Larian’s inaugural hack-and-slash RPG.
- Mainframe Defenders — A turn-based, loot-heavy mech tactics roguelike with a huge variety of viable builds and strategies. The lovely terminal-inspired interface is just a bonus.
- Everspace — Arcadey space shooter with a roguelike spin. An affordable place to act out your TIE pilot and X-Wing fighter fantasies in procedurally-generated levels.
Itch.io
- Windowkill — An experimental twin-stick shooter taking place in multiple windows on your screen. Shoot the edges of your own shrinking window to resize it while enemies attack from windows of their own.
- Long Live the Axe — A 2D brawler/platformer encouraging you to rip the legbones from skeletons as improvised weaponry.
- This Is Not Your House — A monochrome choose-your-own psychological horror adventure. Listed features include “crush someone’s skull, suffer from hypothermia, transcend your mortal frame.”
- 10S — Imagine tennis. Now imagine that tennis was a bullet hell action game.
- Zones — A surreal walking sim in two acts, in which you’ll roam procedural dreamscapes: through purple glades, beneath unfathomable spires of industry, and across a gentle hillside.
GOG
- FEAR Platinum — The 2005 shooter that was brave enough to ask, “What if a spec ops shooter was kinda spooky?” Includes both expansion packs.
- Worms United — Compilation of the original Worms and its Reinforcements expansion. Delicately aim your arsenal of weapons, only to accidentally obliterate yourself and a sizable chunk of the map.
- Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior — Even if you’ve played plenty of 40K, you might’ve missed the 2003 FPS putting you into the digitigrade hooves of Tau fire warrior Shas’la Kais. Not exactly a classic, but maybe worth playing if only for the novelty of being on the receiving end of bolter fire for once.
- Her Story — Sam Barlow’s police footage FMV murder mystery.
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Kurt Indovina
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