Video games have become excruciatingly expensive in recent years, whether you’re buying one-offs or paying a monthly subscription. However, the Steam Summer Sale is always an opportunity to pick up a few bargains.
Here, then, are five brilliant games that you can pick up for less than $5.
Disco Elysium – The Final Cut (PC, Mac, Steam Deck)
Disco Elysium is unlike any other game you’ll ever play – a triumph of dark humor and stunning presentation. The graphics look like a Francis Bacon painting, the voice acting is HBO-grade, the Sea Power soundtrack could not be a better fit.
You play a car crash of a detective, who emerges from a trashed hotel room to solve a murder in a town where the locals are about as helpful as an abscess. With the assistance of your disapproving partner, Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi, you have to uncover clues and piece together what happened, while trying to ignore the voices in your head and the urge to reach for the bottle.
Disco Elysium lets you experiment with different play styles, some of which push the detective’s behavior to wild extremes. The skills tree is a little bewildering and the game does occasionally dip into the mundane, but it’s an unmissable bargain at $3.99.
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Frostpunk (PC, Mac)
Continuing the rather bleak theme, Frostpunk is a superb survival game, where you have to manage a colony in bitingly cold conditions. It’s both a challenge of resource management and diplomacy, as you try and maintain morale and order, while pushing the populace to endure ever-greater hardship.
It’s another game that looks stunning, with the smoke and steam belching out of your futuristic-looking city, growing ever-more impressive as it expands.
For my money, Frostpunk is a better game than its successor, which is still well worth playing once you’ve had time to defrost after this. Although it’s a bit more pricey than the $4.49 you’ll pay for this original.
Mini Metro (PC, Mac, Steam Deck)
If you’ve ever stood on a crammed metro platform wondering why the train’s taking so long to arrive, you might have more sympathy after playing Mini Metro.
This cracking little game puts you in charge of designing a metro system, starting off with a single line running from A to B, that soon expands into a dropped plate of spaghetti with a terrifying number of intersections and dependencies.
You can design subways for several real-world cities (New York, London and Paris included), and if the stress of making the trains run on time proves overwhelming, there’s a sandbox mode where you can play without pressure. At $4.99 it’s probably cheaper than a ticket on the real metro, too.
Lumines Remastered (PC, Steam Deck)
Lumines is a forgotten classic, first appearing on the PSP handheld way back in 2002.
There’s no doubt it’s borrowed heavily from Tetris, but instead of slotting differently shaped blocks into a grid, you’re charged with trying to form 2×2 squares of the same color to clear space.
All this is done with a techno dance beat smashing away in the background, the tune changing with each different skin as you power through the levels. It looks astonishing on the Steam Deck OLED, although you might want to plug in headphones rather than rely on the tinny sound from its speakers. A must-have for Steam Deck owners at $4.49.
Firewatch (PC, Mac, Steam Deck)
Firewatch is a game that’s hard to nail down. It’s quite chilled, but yet tense. It’s graphically stunning, yet simple. And it’s hard to put down.
You’re Henry, a troubled soul who’s taking a job as a fire lookout in the forest. Your only means of communication is a handheld radio with your supervisor. Things obviously don’t run smoothly in your lookout tower, and before long a simple summer job turns into something of a psychological thriller.
There’s no combat or puzzles, so to speak. Just a well-written storyline to follow and unpick – a story that’s well worth the current $3.99 asking price.
The Steam Summer Sale ends on July 7, so don’t hang around if one of these games has caught your eye.
