Prepare the wallets. The Steam Summer Sale has begun.
This is one of the craziest times of the year for Valve’s digital PC store. From now until July 4, hundreds of games will be available at huge discounts. So many are on sale that it can actually be hard to know which ones you should spend your money on.
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Above: Get too stressed and you may lose all hope.
Jason Wilson, managing editor
Darkest Dungeon
Original price: $25
Sale price: $15 (40 percent off)
Darkest Dungeon is about finding hope where none exists. It’s about pressing on when the oppressive weight of failure, of madness, and the supernatural. It’s about your dedication to restoring your family honor. This roguelike role-playing game focuses not just on managing your party’s makeup and advancement but also how they react to the horrors of the dungeons, their stress levels, and psychological breakdowns. It’s intense and harrowing, providing a grim sense of satisfaction when you accomplish a goal.
Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition
Original price: $40
Sale price: $20 (50 percent off)
Divinity: Original Sin hit in 2014, bringing us one of the best classic role-playing games to hit PCs in years. It mixes an interesting story, great turn-based combat (where elemental effects and objects play a role), and control over your characters’ advancement in a manner that’s engrossing. It also offers co-op play. And the Enhanced Edition offers hours of new quests.
South Park: The Stick of Truth
Original price: $30
Sale price: $7.50 (75 percent off)
Obsidian Entertainment is the first studio to successfully capture the humor and silliness of the long-running Comedy Central series. This turn-based role-playing game pits you as “The New Kid” (foul-mouthed Cartman has a more … colorful … name for you) as you embark on an epic quest for The Stick of Truth. It’s not just funny — it’s also a good spin on the Japanese RPG.
Above: He looks fun.
Mike Minotti, community mananger
Doom
Original price: $60
Sale price: $36 (40 percent off)
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Doom is a new game. It just came out in May. And as our review will tell you, it’s fantastic. Doom is a fast-paced shooter filled with old-school sensibilities. Doom doesn’t want you to hide behind some rock and wait for your health to recover. Instead, it encourages you to keep moving, killing anything in your way as quickly as possible to earn better rewards. It also has a fun multiplayer mode that lets lucky players turn into a powerful demon. For such a great, new game to already be 40 percent off is almost insane.
Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag
Original price: $30
Sale price: $7.50 (75 percent off)
The Assassin’s Creed series might be taking a break this year (minus that movie thing), but you can still get your fill of open-world murder thanks to the Steam sale. Steam has discounted multiple entries in the series, but none of them for as much as the 70 percent sale deal Black Flag has. Black Flag is one the best games in the franchises, because it’s just as much about being a pirate as it is about being an assassin. 75 percent off is about as good as it gets, so you should jump aboard if you haven’t played this one yet.
The Witcher III: The Wild Hunt
Original price: $50
Sale price: $25 (50 percent off)
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The Witcher III was one of the best games released in 2015. It’s a gigantic, open-world adventure filled with fantasy, monsters, magic, political intrigues, and the occasional exposed breast. The Witcher III is a great fit for anyone who loves long adventures. For $25, it should be an easy purchase if you haven’t already checked it out.
Jeffrey Grubb, GamesBeat reporter
Hover Junkers
Original price: $35
Sale price: $25 (30 percent off)
I know not everyone has an HTC Vive virtual reality headset, but I must recommend Hover Junkers to anyone who does. This shooter puts players on their own hovercraft in a multiplayer arena against up to five other humans. The idea is to ride your skiff up to an opponent and then drop behind cover on your room-sized craft (perfect for the room-scale VR that Vive does so well) and shoot them down. Because this is room scale, you can jump and roll around to avoid getting shot — and when I say “you,” I mean your actual IRL human body. It’s intense and unlike any other controller or mouse-and-keyboard game I’ve ever played.
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Audioshield
Original price: $20
Sale price: $15 (25 percent off)
Another early virtual reality masterpiece. Audioshield is a rhythm game that makes you feel like you are fighting off waves of attacking musical notes on a Tron-like concert stage. It connects with Soundcloud and your personal music library and will turn any song into a unique stage. Using the Vive controllers, you hold a pair of shields and must block (or punch) each note as they come in to the melody of each tune. It’s one of the best games I’ve played in 2016.
Invisible, Inc.
Original price: $20
Sale price: $6.79 (66 percent off)
This turn-based stealth strategy game is one of 2015’s standout indie releases. Developer Klei Entertainment, which produced the magnificent Mark of the Ninja, followed that up with Invisible’s clever combination of giving you all of the right information to infiltrate futuristic cybercorporations while also making you feel like you don’t have what it takes (both in tools and skills) to make it out alive.