The Steam Autumn Sale is here and uh, someone has ambushed my wallet. As usual, I went in with no plan and a magnetic pull toward the ‘add to cart’ button. I added eight new games and I think it’s safe to say my backlog is more of a small country at this point, it has its own economy and clearly no border control. Did I need any of these? No. Did I need any of these this week? Also no. But like every Steam sale, I convinced myself and probably my wife that I’d be sensible and I guess you could argue I still spent way less than one single new release game and I’m supporting indie developers? Sure, uh… yes, that will do. Well, let’s see what indies made their way into my Steam library this time around.
As usual, I recommend not limiting your seasonal game buying to just Steam. Other legitimate stores like Green Man Gaming, Fanatical or Loaded typically run competing sales and it’s always worth a quick look to compare prices.
Alright to kick off, Retro Rewind is the game I’m really looking forward to this sale. I just ripped through a somewhat draining themed month with Real-Time Stratember and something with not a lot of thinking will be a nice change of pace. Running my own Blockbuster Video without the inevitable outcome of going under sounds legitimately unreal. Oh yes, this is a first-person VHS rental store sim from indie developer Blood Pact Studios. You can buy VHS tapes, decorate the store, hire staff and deal with late fees like you would back in the day. I can’t wait to get absolutely slammed on a rainy, spooky Friday night. I hear the actual retail side of things is fairly shallow, but honestly I don’t need it to be that in-depth. Surprisingly, I was able to whittle my wishlist down a bit this sale. I even removed some junk I’ll never play. Solasta: Crown of the Magister sat on my wishlist for the longest time and this sale, I finally broke a fiver for it. This is a turn-based RPG from an indie studio and Tactical Adventures keep this one pretty closely styled on the same edition of Dungeons & Dragons as Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s also similar in how it handles with a party of four heroes in some pretty neat sounding adventures. You can even make your own campaigns with their dungeon maker, which is a nice touch. The Steam Workshop has a heap of fan-made custom campaigns, it’s nice to know there’s people out there looking to ruin your weekend and kudos to them.
How to Fish I bought on a recommendation from a mate and honestly, I’m not sure anyone asked for a co-op fishing game where the fish can fight back. But, here we are. The more I looked into it, the more I’ve been keen to play it. Solid recommendation, Rick! How to Fish’s popularity for pretty niche indie game has been surprising. In my lazy searching, it looks like it actually peaked at over 260,000 people playing at once. Massive. The story, which is pretty thin, is that you crash your boat onto an island after a few too many drinks and the only way home is to learn to fish, catch them and sell them to upgrade your gear to take down bosses guarding the other islands. Weapons ramp up in ridiculousness as you progress and I’m absolutely keen. Continuing that indie theme I pulled the trigger on the Screen Burn Developer Bundle which is the same developer behind Silent Hill: Townfall and includes their first two games, Stories Untold and Observation. Observation sounded eerie as hell and I’m here for it. You play as S.A.M., the artificial intelligence of an abandoned space station and you spend most of your time watching Dr Emma Fisher through the station’s cameras or poking into systems while she tries to work out what happened to the original crew. The whole pitch is that you’re not on the space station, you are the space station. Really sounds like you get to be a passenger as everything plays out, there’s also some weird always present hexagon on Saturn which I’m interested in finding out more about.
Stories Untold is Screen Burn’s first game and it’s a four episode horror anthology that slowly blends together into one story. It mashes up several styles of adventure game and switches up the mechanics so you never quite know what to expect. A lot of the puzzles happen through computers and terminals, with some including Morse code and the phonetic alphabet. It’s set in England in the mid-‘80s and the big payoff is that everything eventually fits together at the end. Still in the ’80s and even the same country, Shadows of Doubt is from British indie developer ColePowered Games and it’s set in an alternate 1980s which has been hyper-industrialised and is short on fresh air. You take on the role of a private investigator looking into murders and other crimes in a procedurally generated city where every NPC goes about their business whether you’re watching or not, which might be the most interesting part. You can rip through call histories, crack passwords, read emails and watch CCTV to help build your case or make a bit of cash on the side by selling the information. If you take too long investigating a murder, the killer will strike again. So, the clock is always ticking. Sounds like the city is more or less the main character here. Keen.
Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One is the story of Sherlock before he became the legend. The Developer, Frogwares, you might recognise from their previous Sherlock Holmes games, or maybe The Sinking City series. You play as Sherlock back when he was twenty-one and itching to prove himself, we join him as he travels to a Mediterranean island looking into the mysterious death of his mother with his childhood imaginary friend Jon. Jon is uh, definitely not John Watson. It’s an open-world mystery and you get to decide whether problems should be solved with brute force, or with your wits. The description reads kinda like an open-world Indiana Jones game. Almost. The final game I picked up, provided I don’t have another look, Death’s Door you play as a Crow, a reaper who collects souls for a bureaucratic afterlife office. Reaping souls ain’t much, but it’s honest work. This is up until your assigned soul is stolen and you have to chase the thief into a realm untouched by death. To open Death’s Door, you’ve gotta make your way through three dungeons and collect three Giant Souls. Sounds like a lot of paperwork for one small bird. Combat is a mix of using arrows, melee and magic against various beasts and demigods. Not usually my thing, but it sounded fun and it was only a few bucks so what’s there to lose?
Well, that’s the Autumn Sale for another year. A little damage has been done to the wallet, as per usual, but I’m happy with what seems like a bunch of indie bangers. There’s a lot of story and adventure in here, which isn’t really outside of what I’d normally play. There’s a couple more mindless games too, which I think we all need every now and then. I’ll be lucky to finish a handful of these by the time the next sale comes along, but they’re firmly on the backlog now anyway. The Autumn Sale rolls on through to the 8th of October, or the early hours of the 9th if you’re a fellow Australian. If there’s something that’s been sitting on your wishlist for a while, now is the time to be decisive. Or next sale, whatever. Maybe show more restraint than me, or don’t, I’m clearly not setting a great example.
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