2532: Five Games You Should Get in the Steam Sale

Steam’s Winter Sale has rolled around again! As always, there’s a wealth of great games on offer. On the off-chance that you don’t already own some or all of these games, here are five of my favourites that you should check out.

Recettear (£2.59)

I find it hard to imagine that anyone doesn’t have Recettear yet, but on the offchance you don’t, here’s the pitch.

Recette is a young girl saddled with an enormous debt. Fortunately, she has a shop with which she can attempt to clear said debt by selling items to the local community, as well as through making good use of the assistance of her fairy companion Tear (actually a representative of the bank keeping an eye on her finances) and the local adventurer’s guild.

Recettear is split into two main components. Firstly, there’s running the shop, which involves putting out items for people to buy, correctly answering their requests and haggling over prices. Secondly, there’s a significant roguelike-esque action RPG component in which Recette can hire one of the local adventurer’s guild to go into one of the nearby dungeons to fight monsters and acquire items that she can subsequently craft into more interesting items or simply sell as-is.

The closest comparison is probably Gust’s Atelier series, though there’s much less of a focus on crafting in Recettear and more on the dungeon crawling and customer interaction side of things. It’s one of the most charming games ever created, with a stunning localisation from the original Japanese by Carpe Fulgur, and is well worth your time.

Steam page

Binary Domain (£2.74)

An absolutely wonderful third-person shooter, Binary Domain takes Gears of War’s po-faced, joyless over the shoulder cover-based shooting and ramps up the adrenaline to make something with a bunch more personality and drama about it, albeit with (arguably) a few more clunky edges to it.

In Binary Domain you spend a lot of time shooting the shit out of robots, all of which shatter into pieces rather satisfyingly. There’s a variety of upgradeable weapons to acquire over the course of your adventure, and some truly entertaining setpieces. The story is good, too, featuring a cast who are all much more interesting than the walking military stereotypes found in shooters that take themselves a bit too seriously, and the whole thing feels like it’s been designed on the understanding that games are supposed to be fun.

Steam page

HuniePop (£1.74)

One of the absolute best puzzle games to be released in the last few years — hell, one of the only puzzle games to be released in the last few years that isn’t a free-to-play mobile phone-based Bejeweled ripoff — and a game full of endearingly cheeky humour designed by a team who doesn’t give a fuck about political correctness.

HuniePop is ostensibly a dating sim in that you build up your stats in order to attempt to woo the various girls on the cast, but the twist is that in order to have successful dates (or “intimate” encounters) you need to indulge in some mind-bending, highly strategic puzzle-solving using a combination of your pattern-spotting skills and the items you collect throughout the dating sim gameplay.

HuniePop is beautifully presented, highly playable, shamelessly lewd and an absolute pleasure to play.

Steam page

VA-11 HALL-A (£9.34)

VA-11 HALL-A is a brilliant visual novel-cum-bartending sim in which you take on the role of Jill, a rather ordinary young woman who lives in a cyberpunk future and tends bar in the titular drinking establishment.

VA-11 HALL-A tells its story rather wonderfully through what it doesn’t show you — since the majority of the action unfolds from Jill’s perspective behind the bar, you tend to see the immediate prelude to and aftermath of important events in the game world rather than the events themselves, which allows you to develop a much more personal attachment to them by hearing firsthand accounts from people who were there.

There’s a wonderful cast of characters — effortlessly “diverse”, I might add, and without making a big song and dance about it at any point, unlike its spiritual predecessor Read Only Memories, which very much wanted you to know how progressive it was at every opportunity — and a compelling story to enjoy here, all beautifully presented in the style of an old PC-98-era visual novel from Japan. Except this masterpiece was put together by a couple of dudes from Venezuela over the course of the last couple of years.

Steam page

Assault Android Cactus (£5.49)

One of the best shoot ’em ups I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing, Assault Android Cactus channels a variety of influences ranging from bullet hell shooters to Rare’s Jet Force Gemini to create a marvelously entertaining and meticulously designed twin-stick shooter for up to four players simultaneously.

Unfolding across some beautiful-looking dynamic levels, Cactus will challenge your shooter skills to the limit if you want to attain the best scores and grades, but the game also remains accessible to newcomers who just want to blast their way through to the end to say they’ve beaten it.

The whole package is capped off with an amazing soundtrack and some brilliant old-school Sega-style “EX options” that can completely change the way the game plays, and is an absolutely essential purchase for anyone who enjoys a bit of quality arcade action.

Steam page