ranzware
It feels like no time at all has passed since my last (and expansive) Summer Sale roundup. But the nights already grow long, the days short, and chunky, questionably-patterned knitwear increasingly tempting. Despite some high-profile AAA missteps, 2024 was an absurdly packed year for games. Not just in terms of quantity, but quality too: Even working within the rules listed below, I had a shortlist of over 250 possible picks for this latest Steam sale roundup.
Boiling it down to just 20 primo picks was full of hard decisions, tough calls, tearful farewells and calculated sacrifices, but I did it. This year’s list skews towards the weird and the underlooked, some of 2024’s best that you quite possibly haven’t even heard of, because sometimes you just need to expand your mind a little. Here’s the rules I stuck to while picking the 20 best hidden gems in the 2024 Steam Winter sale:
- Launched, graduated from early access or otherwise ‘completed’ in 2024
- Something I’ve personally played and can vouch for the worthiness of
- Genuine underdogs—most below 500 user reviews, so it’s new for you
- Quirky, distinctive, offbeat and under-covered—we like those deep cuts
- 25% discount at minimum—We’re going deeper on the savings this time
- As broad a range of genres as possible. A little something for everyone
While the rules are slightly flexible, most games check off all the above.
As always, I hope you find something fresh and special. Let’s get started, and spread the word!
Price: $12.99 / £10.06 (35% off) | Developer: Sam Atlas
Let’s kick things off with a really weird one, but one of my favourites this year. Is it a Biblically Accurate Monkey Ball? Some kind of Metroidvania for Cruelty Squad sensory burnouts? Whatever Extreme Evolution: Drive to Divinity is, it’s great. A massive and nonlinear 3D platform collectathon where you’ll be collecting dozens of new bodies to inhabit. From abstract geometry to cars, humanoids and weirder things besides, each with their own usage, even if they might seem useless at first blush.
There’s a bit of immersive sim spirit in here too. So long as you can get to your goal, it’s a valid solution, even if it feels like you completely shattered the game’s physics to get there. At least some of the game-breaking is fully intentional, as some forms and transformation energy (the currency of Extreme Evolution) are hidden in downright wacky locations that’ll require some lateral thinking to access. Oh, and if the visual effects are a bit much, you can tone them down, but it does make the game a bit more boring to look at.
Death of a Wish – Hack n’ slash overhead character action
Price: $13.99 / £11.72 (30% off) | Developer: melessthanthree
Sequel to 2018’s excellent Lucah: Born of a Dream, Death of a Wish doubles down on the scribbly, low-fi art style but pairs it with a more refined, tighter, faster combat engine. If you missed the original game (more on that next paragraph!), the series plays like an overhead-view fusion of Dark Souls and Bayonetta. Precision dodging, satisfying combos, and high stakes. It’s also laden with heavy vibes, telling the story of empowered children surviving in a Shin Megami Tensei-esque fractured reality while escaping from the cult that raised them.
The story is still a hallucinatory snarl of time loops, psychic demons, queer religious trauma and battling for found family, but this time more focused. New protagonist Christian is a more aggressive, brash fighter, focused on creating his own openings and steamrolling enemies rather than waiting for a chance to parry. In short, it’s a little more Bayonetta than Dark Souls this time, but its story intersects with the first game, and the two feel like halves of a whole. Good, then, that for just a few pennies extra you can get a bundle with both games if you don’t have the first. Doesn’t matter which order you play them, but you should play both.
Price: $11.99 / £10.05 (40% off) | Developer: Crimson Herring Studios
While fragmented members of the original Disco Elysium team might be working on several spiritual successors, there are already a few games out now that have cribbed generously from its detective’s notepad. Sovereign Syndicate is one of the stronger offerings, borrowing much of its structure (and a distinct lack of tactical combat) and set in a fantastical Steampunk London. It’s all cogs-on-hats silliness, but embraced sincerely as you hop between four characters—a minotaur magician, a human courtesan turned rogue, a dwarven artificer and his robot buddy.
While the writing isn’t quite up to Disco Elysium’s level (honestly, what is?), it’s still a few steps above your average fantasy RPG here, and there’s an interesting mystery yarn to be unraveled. Despite the shifting perspectives, it’s a relatively linear game. While there are some big choices to be made along the way, you’re unlikely to be presented with a fractal mess of dialogue options at any given time, usually just two or three, with the occasional extra option if one of your stats is high enough. You do still have voices in your head, though; a concept I expect similarly inspired games to borrow over the coming years.
Price: $11.79 / £8.84 (41% off) | Developer: zagawee
No thoughts, head empty. Sometimes you just want to turn off all those higher brain functions and play a truly videogame-ass videogame. Garbanzo Quest is a great little platform shooter about a blank-faced little guy named Garbanzo (or Pinto, or both if you want to play co-op) on a quest to make friends and overthrow a capitalist skellington named Billi Bones. You run, you jump, you spit at enemies until they give up on fighting and look grossed out (a reasonable reaction) and occasionally explore to find hidden keys to alternate exits because there’s a whole Super Mario World style overworld to putz around in.
It all sounds pretty simple—and it is—but a lot of the best platformers are, and Garbanzo Quest just feels right. The music is catchy, the level design is just smart enough, the boss fights are challenging and the writing is kid-friendly but deeply chaotic. There’s accessibility options to tune the difficulty to your liking if you want, and even a 2-player only character that just floats around instead of having to jump; great if you’ve got a less experienced (but still eager) buddy that wants to play. It’s just a big, goofy, charming package. And there’s a level editor, too!
Price: $12.05 / £10.04 (33% off) | Developer: snekflat
The best-selling, most mainstream game on this list, which should tell you just how far off the beaten track we’ve strayed. The latest from the team behind the equally chaotic 2D platformer Wuppo (which is also going dirt cheap and bundled, so don’t skip it), Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip is best described as a kid-friendly Grand Theft Auto, but great fun for all ages. Tiny Terry is a weird little guy who wants to go to space. This means getting a car (so he takes a job as a taxi driver) and then making it fast enough to ramp into orbit. This means collecting trash, and the fastest way to do that is by committing crimes and not doing taxi work because work is boring.
All violence here is purely slapstick. You get a stick, and then you slap people with it, and they fall and bounce around before getting up again. No guns, no death, just cartoon antics, collecting stuff, buying questionable clothing and just generally messing around, getting distracted and causing trouble. It’s well-written and funny and a bit like the resurgent popular Simpsons: Hit & Run, but without the brutally hard races. It’s not a massive game, clocking around four hours long if you don’t get too distracted. But this is also an open world sandbox, so some distraction is a given.
Harvest Hunt – First-person stealth horror roguelite
Price: $8.99 / £7.49 (50% off) | Developer: Villainous Games Studio
There are a now-uncountable number of first-person horror games where you slink around a spooky forest, looking for arbitrary macguffins while avoiding some kind of wandering monster, but Harvest Hunt injects some interesting roguelite elements into a tired concept. Your goal is to survive five nights (where have we heard that before?) as a cursed village’s warden, collecting produce from the fields while avoiding the Devourer, a roaming worm-like monster that will spoil the crop (and you) if left to its own devices.
Each night you get an assortment of cards that add positive and negative modifiers to the map. Fortifications, chances to scare off the monster with fire, or maybe even weapons to fight back against it. Get some good synergy going and you might end up more of a hunter than a gatherer, or you might end up transforming the map into a quagmire of traps and obstacles for yourself. Over the course of multiple runs you’ll unlock additional cards to keep replays fresh (a real design challenge, considering it’s just you versus the monster) plus some story tidbits. It’s a compelling loop, and adds a lot to a formula that’s normally one-and-done.
Decline’s Drops – Platformer/Smash-like brawler
Price: $13.29 / £11.12 (30% off) | Developer: Moulin aux Bulles Studio
This year’s award for Frenchest platformer goes to Decline’s Drops, without question. Looking like a particularly kaleidoscopic European comic, the world has been taken over by a cabal of industrialist serpents that are polluting the land in the name of capitalism and growth. Only a sun-hatted puppet girl named Globule can save the day, mostly by punching things with big cartoon boxing gloves. I told you it’s a bit French. It’s beautifully animated and with really catchy music too, but where Decline’s Drops really shines is its mechanics.
The platforming and level design take heavy inspiration from the Donkey Kong Country Returns series, while the combat is a surprisingly technical riff on Smash Bros. Frequent arena battles encourage you to learn combos and keep juggle chains going, while spending a limited pool of energy on powerful special attacks. It’s great stuff, and despite it not selling great at launch, the developer is so committed to this passion project that they’re planning on adding another two worlds and three more playable characters over the course of next year.
Price: $13.99 / £11.89 (30% off) | Developer: Gardenfiend Games
It’s great to see grim fantasy style explored in fun new ways, and Perennial Order’s ‘plant horror’ setting and strange sprite-collage aesthetic feel genuinely refreshing. Everything here is made out of sticks, leaves, roots and bone, with your own character(s) standing out thanks to their bright petals against the gloomy backdrops. Rather than deliver another interconnected open world or traditional dungeon crawl, this is a hack n’ slash boss rush, playable solo but ideally with a budding buddy, local or online.
While there’s a good bit of walking and talking acting as connective tissue between battles, and the occasional threat in the spaces between bosses, the main fights themselves are a wonderfully varied lot. A personal favourite being a fight on a chessboard, played against a giant that moves pieces around to attack you. At least until you get him riled up, and he starts cheating. I won’t spoil too much, as the game is a relatively brief handful of hours long, but if you’ve got a souls-liking friend you can rope in, this is a great way to spend a winter evening.
Phantom Spark – Zero-G racer with a plot
Price: $12.99 / £10.88 (35% off) | Developer: Ghosts
Less is more, sometimes. Phantom Spark is a minimalist take on the zero-G racer. Think Wipeout, but entirely focused on precision time trials, beating your past ghosts and chasing high scores through nailing a perfect racing line. No powerups here, no stats or enemies to shoot. Just you, the track, and possibly a few rivals (that you can’t collide with) if you’re playing online or locally with friends, and it’s probably for the better here. If you’ve ever lost hours to mastering a map in Trackmania, it’s a similar deal here.
Of course, the best racing in the world would still feel a bit hollow without vibes to match. Phantom Spark trades Wipeout’s corporate-run sci-fi setting for a more mellow afrofuturist look. You’ll mostly be racing through monumental pastel-hued stone structures covered with ornate engravings and accentuated with neon lasers. The music is also a chill, trancey electronica mix that keeps running even when you reset a track. Surprisingly there’s also a substantial singleplayer story mode to give a little context and narrative to these races, but it doesn’t interfere with the core racing. The only real shortcoming of the game is a lack of a track editor, but the devs have mentioned that one might be a possibility in later updates.
Price: $11.99 / £10.05 (40% off) | Developer: Perfectly Paranormal
The spirit of Day of The Tentacle shines bright in this one. The Holy Gosh Darn is the latest in the “Tuesday Trilogy”—a trio of offbeat adventures about life, Death (capitalized, as in the skellington dude) and the cosmic order all set on the same extremely messy day. This one has you playing as Cassiel, an angel trying to avert the destruction of heaven, which is about to happen in about 20 minutes. It gets messy, fast. You can roll back time as you see fit, or skip forward, but you can only bring back a single item from the future with you, making for some interesting puzzles where you might just need two of the same thing to progress.
Comedy is a tricky business at the best of times, especially in games. While The Holy Gosh Darn didn’t get too many belly laughs out of me, it did manage to shake loose a few chuckles and plenty of smiles. The game’s rude, crude cartoon afterlife walks a fine line between irreverence and restraint, and the voice acting is surprisingly solid too. Even better for you bargain-hounds: You can get The Holy Gosh Darn EVEN CHEAPER somehow when you buy this bundle including it plus the other two games in the trilogy. One of the weird cases where more is, paradoxically, less.
Angelstruck – Twin-stick roguelite arcade shooter
Price: $3.59 / £2.99 (40% off) | Developer: Feral Paw
What’s one of my roundups without a big dumb arcade game? Angelstruck plays a bit like recently remastered score attack shooter Savant: Ascent, but with more room to move horizontally and some roguelike perks and long-term unlocks to keep things fresh between runs. Aesthetically, it’s silly heavy metal fantasy stuff—an angry red, horned lady is blasting her way out of hell, clearing out angels with a big gun on the way to the top. It would be edgy if it wasn’t delivered with all the seriousness of a Saturday morning cartoon, with the protagonist pulling silly faces during the boss intro splash screens, and on some of the perk card art too.
The bosses are stand-out moments though, with the big armored serpent that snakes around the arena cutting off movement options being a personal favourite. There’s also a surprisingly complex scoring system encouraging perfect play and long combos. Perhaps a bit redundant in a game with roguelike elements, but it’s still fun to make big numbers go up. My only real gripe with the game is that the player character run animation looks a little stiff, in a nostalgic, flash animation-esque way, but you can do a lot worse for under $5.
Price: $17.49 / £14.69 (30% off) | Developer: Metric Empire
If you like a little roguelike in your FPS’ing these days, you’re spoilt for choice. Roboquest, Gunfire Reborn and Deadlink are just the tip of the iceberg. But one that a lot of people have overlooked is Battle Shapers, a Mega Man-inspired bright and cartoony take on the formula. It left early access just days before the winter sale began, capping off its story with a definitive ending and some fun new systems that let you tweak and tune difficulty in interesting ways. Combat isn’t a million miles away from Doom Eternal here, with a bunch of cooldown-based powers and enemies that get stunned when on low health, opening them up for a big melee finisher that restores some of your shields.
Rather than being a canned animation playing when you finish an enemy, you just punch them and send robots ragdolling, often launching them into other bots and doing damage. While there’s plenty of character-building options in any given run of Battle Shapers (I especially like the ability to freely take the perks and modifiers from unwanted weapons and slap them onto the ones you do like), there’s a surprising amount of long-term progression. The game feels a bit limiting at first, but you’ll eventually unlock perks like wall-running and the means to break cracked walls to open alternate passages after a few loops. The story is a bit simplistic (it’s no Hades, and unvoiced) but this one grows a lot over the course of multiple runs.
Eden Genesis – Precision speedrun platformer
Price: $7.49 / £6.29 (70% off) | Developer: Aeternum Game Studios S.L
The ‘greatest precision platformer’ crown has changed hands a few times over the years. I Wanna Be The Guy, Super Meat Boy and Celeste have all claimed it at one point, but most have forgotten just how good Dustforce was. Its movement was technical, its skill ceiling miles high, as the top level rankings required you to maintain inertia from every slope, slide across ceilings and chain together attacks without missing.
Eden Genesis doesn’t quite stick the landing in terms of story, perhaps going a little heavy on its fully voiced cyberpunk drama, but the running and jumping here is unmistakably based on Dustforce. Every level is an obstacle course to be routed out, with rankings, leaderboards and high scores to chase, plus optional objectives encouraging obsessively replaying each stage until you can do it perfectly. No pauses, no damage, no collectible left behind. It’s not the most original game in this lineup, but the world could use a little more Dustforce.
Psychroma – Cyberpunk horror adventure
Price: $4.99 / £6.39 (50% off) | Developer: Rocket Adrift
If you’re fresh off the unsettling realness of Mouthwashing and looking for another piece of sci-fi horror designed to get under your skin, Psychroma isn’t a bad second shot of poison at all. Like Mouthwashing, it’s about the failing relationships of a handful of people in a dark but familiar future. In this case, a cast of heavily augmented people trying to make ends meet, sharing a high-tech house in future Toronto, neon-lit but crumbling and rendered in a sickly, DOS-esque colour palette.
Also like Mouthwashing (although this is almost certainly a case of parallel evolution, given that both were in development side by side, and this came out months earlier), it banks heavily on glitch effects, fragmented timelines and unreliable narrators, saving gore for a handful of scenes. Owing to the excellent sprite art used for close-ups, it’s grisly stuff when it wants to be, although the character sprites when walking around are gangly to the point of being almost abstract. It’s a short, uncomfortable ride, clocking in at around movie length, and with minimal puzzling. A great bit of sci-fi unpleasantness for those who’ve acquired the taste.
Price: $9.59 / £8.09 (40% off) | Developer: Pizza Bear Games
Sometimes a game just doesn’t age well. EA’s old Strike series of tactical helicopter shooters is probably best left in the ’90s, as leading a one-chopper Gulf War campaign against tired Arab stereotypes doesn’t quite sit right in the year 2024. Megacopter thankfully salvages the important part of the series—the satisfying, technical arcade helicopter combat—and replaces the jingoism and setting with lurid, bloody cartoon nonsense that feels lifted straight from a Troma movie: Evil reptiloids are invading and plan on destroying mankind’s greatest monuments; our mascot pizza and arcade complexes, and only a blood-fueled ancient Aztec gunship can fight back.
It’s a little more arcadey than Desert Strike, and broken up into smaller missions with a shop in between to buy new gear. Guns, armor, new missile types—standard enough stuff. Less standard are the cooldown-based Az-Tech powers like a partially invulnerable dash to help deal with the more bullet-hellish attack patterns you’ll encounter. There’s also some big messy boss fights where you’ll have to ration your ammo and occasionally make a dash to pick up more from elsewhere on the map. There’s some rough edges (the in-flight UI looks a little bland), but this is a generally great take on a largely forgotten formula.
UltraNothing – Mind-bending block puzzler
Price: $2.59 / £1.20 (35% off) | Developer: Snorillaka
Were it not being sold on Steam (admittedly for just pocket change), I could believe that UltraNothing just popped into existence one day like some kind of cursed anomaly waiting to be found and picked apart. On the surface a simple block-pushing puzzle game set in a surreal, abstract world. Shove things around until you can drop a floppy disk on a computer and move to the next level. There’s some brain-teasers, and the world map gradually expands outwards as you complete levels, but it doesn’t seem like there’s too much to it.
And then it starts introducing new mechanics. Big ones, like turn-based strategy and unit command and construction and death abuse and camping. All while still letting you do the basic block-pushing stuff. Suddenly previous areas gain strange new contexts, additional unhinged dialogue drags you deeper, and before you know it, you’re lost in the sauce. I’ve still barely scratched the surface of this one and feel I’m in too deep. Some say that it’s dozens of hours long even if you’re a puzzle freak. I am not.
Price: $19.79 / £16.49 (34% off) | Developer: Artificer
With the success of last year’s Shadow Gambit (which I reviewed here, and the crew hailed as the best stealth game of 2023), I figured the stealth tactics sub-genre was due for a renaissance. Given that Sumerian Six has flown under almost everyone’s radars despite publisher Devolver Digital’s best efforts, I am seemingly wrong. Or maybe it’s just the game being too stealthy for its own good. In short, this is Commandos, but in a Hellboy-esque pulp adventure setting where heroic super-scientists battle the Third Reich. And the great thing about Nazis in a stealth game is that you won’t feel bad about wiping out every last guard!
It’s polished, varied fun, and despite giving you some fun powers (one of your squad is a were-bear, great for those moments where you want to be a little less stealthy) it’s a surprisingly stiff challenge, moreso than Shadow Gambit. The only fly in the ointment is the developer’s bizarre decision to use AI tools to generate a lone marching song. Presumably there was a good reason for it, but still, a mild disappointment. Still, at this price (with a further discount if you own Shadow Gambit, Shadow Tactics or Showgunners), it’s easy enough to overlook.
Price: $9.99 / £8.37 (50% off) | Developer: La Moutarde
There have been plenty of JRPG heavyweights this year, including popular GOTY pick Metaphor: ReFantazio. Here’s a relatively bite-sized adventure that you can get through in a lazy holiday weekend. Visually Terra Memoria evokes Capcom’s classic Breath of Fire series, especially the later games with their chunky, detailed sprites and evocative 3D worlds, but with a relatively low-stakes story and sense of whimsy. Interestingly, once assembled, all six party members are active at all times. The three front-line fighters never change, but you can pair each of them with one of three support characters, modifying how they behave in turn-based fights.
Despite its relatively short run time (a bit over 15 hours, according to most), Terra Memoria crams in a lot of ideas, including cooking minigames and some town-building. If there’s one criticism that can be levelled against Terra Memoria, it’s that the translation, while perfectly serviceable, has a little ‘second language’ funk to it. Specifically the kind you sometimes get when going from French to English. I’d love to hear how it holds up in the developer’s native language, but as my brain is only big enough to hold one set of words (and an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure games), I’m unable to judge. But it’s only the smallest of grumbles, and 10 bucks well spent if you’re up for a lighter, fluffier fantasy adventure.
Kitten Burst – Aerial racer/Dead internet simulator
Price: $18.74 / £14.61 (25% off) | Developer: Jam2go
The least discounted and most expensive game here, but you aren’t going to find anything else like Kitten Burst. Trust me, I’ve looked. It’s an aerial racing game set in the dead and abandoned ruins of the future Y2K-styled internet. You control a flying, cat-shaped program exploring abandoned digital spaces, freely exploring until you begin a point-to-point checkpoint race where you can push your luck by flying extra close to walls to boost your speed, which makes for a fun and challenging risk-reward mechanic.
While the majority of the game is exploring the strange cyber-landscapes and completing races, gradually levelling up your cat’s (freely respeccable) stats, there’s a few minigames in here and some surprisingly cool musical boss fights. Battles lock your flight path onto rails and play like a hybrid of Star Fox (minus the shooting) and interactive music video, with big baddies blasting obstacles and bullets at you to the breakbeat. It’s a pretty substantial package, with a surprising amount of dialogue channelling the internet of ages past. Remember: Scene, Emo and Goth are three entirely different things.
Price: $9.89 / £8.44 (34% off) | Developer: Fission Ogre
The one early access pick in this roundup, but even limited to just its first episode, this is a wild ride of an FPS campaign. Built on the ever-reliable GZDoom engine, Relentless Frontier is pure sci-fi power fantasy. You’re a power-armored supersoldier fighting off a colossal swarm of insectoid monsters, but rather than go the Space Marine route of having you tank your way through problems, you’re all about zipping through the battlefield’s vertical spaces at speed, herding enemies together then splattering them with explosives, a belt-fed automatic shotgun and a six-barreled assault rifle.
There’s surprising depth to the combat, like armored enemies that need to have their plating cracked before you can effectively do damage, and some Metroidy exploration and backtracking to unlock bonus permanent upgrades for your suit. The game also handles resources in an interesting way. While there’s your usual assortment of pickups around the map, using your melee nano-axe will help you build up a stockpile of space goo that can be converted instantly (even mid-combat) to give you a quick top-up of health, armor or ammo. Even with some secret hunting, you’ll probably need to as well, as this game will put you through the wringer at higher difficulties. Satisfying, technical combat: A great foundation for more to come.
This is just a tiny fraction of the interesting and undersold games from 2024 alone. It’s easy to lose perspective and focus solely on a handful of big live-service failures or absurd marketing crossovers, but the fact is that there are more great games out there than you (or I) will ever find time to look at, let alone play. And don’t forget, games don’t age like they used to—almost everything in my previous hidden gem roundups is still going cheap, and they’re as good as the day they launched. Go check some of them out here:
To all the developers behind these games: Thank you all. It’s strange and obscure indie games that got me writing about the medium in the first place, and it’s why I’m able to showcase all of this here.
And to everyone who found something to treasure here: Don’t keep it to yourself! Share what you love and tell others, algorithms be damned.
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Kurt Indovina
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