Steam Summer Sale 2025

Ah yes, yet another Steam Sale where I don’t need more games. Will I still splurge and stock up my backlog? Of course I will! As is tradition. It’s actually Winter here in Australia so ‘Summer’ sale doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. Winter is pretty cold and dreary at the moment, so the sale definitely hits at a good time for gaming and there are plenty of deals to be had. Are they the best deals? Well, I guess you could track the price with SteamDB if you really want to be sure. But, that doesn’t help you right now if you want to get on board and play some new, or old, video games. Let’s go over some of my purchases, thoughts and ever-growing Steam wishlist out of this current sale.

The purchase that has had a big impact for me thus far in the sale is The Walking Dead: The Telltale Definitive Series. It’s on a pretty decent discount at 75%, and yes I am aware it has been cheaper than this but I still pulled the trigger anyway and I’m super glad I did. I’ve played Season 1 before, there were parts that felt familiar but there some that felt entirely new. I’ve now just made it through Season 3, I honestly just haven’t been able put it down. It runs perfectly on the Steam Deck, the graphics aren’t anything that really poses a challenge but it still looks great and the comic book style is thoroughly enjoyable. The deep, well-crafted story unfolds through thoughtful writing and story-telling, where every choice you make is genuinely meaningful and leaves a lasting impact on both the characters and the plot. Much like the graphics, the controls and game mechanics are in no way world-breaking but they suit the game incredibly well and are very easy to learn. The Walking Dead is yet another case of not needing to reinvent the wheel to produce a top-tier game experience.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to detail every game I’ve bought quite like I did with The Walking Dead. It’s the only game I’ve bought out of the sale that I’ve actually played, so far. There are a number of point and click adventure games available in the Summer Sale, I’ve had my eye on Norco, The Will of Arthur Flabbington and the Darkside Detective games for a while. All I’m going to say here is don’t limit your video game discounts to just Steam and their seasonal sales. Fanatical has a build-your-own bundle which includes all of those games along with a few more such as the entire Broken Sword series. I’m pretty keen to get into some more modern point and click adventures, I’ve played the classics almost to death despite enjoying them every time. I also added a few of the Wadjet Eye games with Steam’s Dark Futures bundle which I found to be a decent price. I’ve been meaning to get to a lot of their releases, I hear nothing but good things. They are held in a very high regard for newer point and clicks and I’m very interested to see if that holds true. In a similar vein I picked up The Roottrees are Dead which seemed to be part point and click, part detective-esque analysis which sounded like a pretty good time.

I did nab a few more story driven games from the sale, which after sinking time into The Walking Dead games, I’ve become pretty keen on. An oldie, but a goodie, I grabbed the remaster of Fahrenheit, or Indigo Prophecy, as it’s also known. I finished it years back when it first released, but outside of the first scene at the diner I don’t really remember any of it so I’m looking forward to playing through it again. I added Remedy Entertainment’s Control: Ultimate Edition to my collection, I hear nothing but good things about Control and it was pretty damn cheap for what I hear is a solid title. I also bought The Quarry from Green Man Gaming’s aptly named ‘Sunshine Sale’ which came in a few bucks cheaper than the Steam Summer Sale. It came up a few times while searching for newer story-driven games and it strikes me as a creepy, horror adventure which sounds pretty enticing. The Precinct I’ve had on my wishlist in the lead up to it’s release and the Summer Sale had it at a modest 20% off. It seemed to be different to what I’d normally play, given I’m more of a Grand Theft Auto series fan and this is appears to be the other side of that. For something a little different as well, I picked up Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew. It seemed like a mashup of some of my favourite games and themes all blended into one. Think Baldur’s Gate, Fallout, Divinity style with turn-based combat and pirate themed. It sounded pretty decent when I was buying it, so we’ll see if that combo holds up. I capped off my Steam Summer Sale by finally pulling the trigger on Kerbal Space Program. It’s been on my wishlist for a while. It really just sounds like a lot of fun and frustration so I’ll give it a couple hours here and there to see how terribly I can destroy some rockets.

In a Steam sale, I would expect my wishlist to shrink as opposed to grow. This time around it grew almost at the same rate I bought games. I added a few newer point and click adventure games in Unavowed, Loco Motive, Lost Horizon, Whispers of a Machine, Chronicle of Innismouth, Lamplight City, Elroy and the Aliens, both Kathy Rain games and Lucy Dreaming. I think it’ll be a while until I buy those with what I’ve picked up already. It wasn’t all point and click games, I also added the likes of Northgard, Ghostwire: Tokyo, Solasta: Crown of the Magister, Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader, Selaco, Urban Strife, Tempest Rising, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Baldur’s Gate 3. There’s a few games in that list which are pretty massive open world marathons which I’m just not sure I’ll have time for right at the moment, Baldur’s Gate 3 definitely springs to mind when saying that. Even Rogue Trader projects as a 60+ hour game which sounds fairly lengthy, to me at least. But I will get around to buying and finishing them at some stage in the future.

I could have just as easily bought nothing and remained happy with what I have, but hey, why not build my backlog up even more? I seem to eventually get to them and actually finish them so I look at them as money well spent. …Probably. The Steam Summer Sale is ending very soon, my time AEST, I think it’s 2 or 3am on the 11th of July so not much time left to snag a deal. Have a look and splurge, or don’t and just play what you already have. I’m looking forward to each and every one of the games I bought and I think they’ll all perform pretty well on the Steam Deck. I didn’t expect to enjoy The Walking Dead series as much as I have, it just seems like peak storytelling when it comes to video games and is one of the best interactive stories I’ve ever played. I’m also really looking forward to getting stuck into the newer point and click adventure titles, I hope some of them hold up to the standard I expect. I’m a big fan of the classics, so they will be quite hard to beat.