It’s the most wonderful time of the year if you’re looking to financially ruin yourself by purchasing copious amounts of discounted games on Steam. I always am, so of course I’ve continued my tradition of writing up a list of game recommendations during this year’s Steam Winter Sale. The sale will be active until January 5th, 2026. Because November is already nearly halfway over as I write this, I’ve cut this list down to eight games as opposed to the usual ten. I think that’s still an agreeable number since these games are, as the youth would say, “bangers.” Let’s begin!

Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor | Discount: 30% | Sale Price (USD): $9.09

I’m starting this list off with one of the most successful launches out of Steam Early Access that I’ve ever seen. I know I included DRG: Survivor in last year’s Winter Sale recommendation roundup, but it was still in Early Access back then. Now it’s fully launched and has quite a bit more content to offer on top of its already well-developed foundations. As you might have guessed, DRG: Survivor is a Vampire Survivors-like game that’s spun off from the original Deep Rock Galactic. The main difference between the two is that you’re perpetually on your own in DRG: Survivor.

You usually have one of two main objectives in each run of DRG: Survivor, depending on which gameplay mode you picked. In “Classic Mode,” you’ll have to fight through five stages of hostile alien bugs to lure out and kill an especially powerful bug called a Dreadnought. In Escort Mode, you’ll have to, well, escort (and fuel) a piece of heavy machinery as it works its way toward extracting a valuable resource that can’t be mined manually. There’s quite a lot more to DRG: Survivor than that, which is why I’d suggest checking out my review if you’re interested.

News Tower | Discount: 20% | Sale Price (USD): $19.99

News Tower has very recently left Steam early access, being only days away from its 1.0 release at the time of writing. In News Tower, you’ll run your own newspaper in the 1930s. You’ll have to manage employees with different skill sets, maintain necessary equipment, and print the most important news stories you can. You’ll hire and promote everyone from reporters to typesetters to janitors and make sure they have everything they need to excel at their jobs. You’ll also have to keep your subscriber numbers growing.

Since News Tower is set in 1930s America, you’ll encounter and report on major real-world news stories from that time period. These can range from the start of the Great Depression to the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, to ongoing organized crime activities, and everything in between. If you want your newspaper to succeed and turn a profit, you’ll have to ensure your stories are detailed, accurate, and most importantly, interesting. It seems the public’s attention spans weren’t much better in the 1930s than now. There’s a demo of News Tower on Steam if you want to try it out.

Cryptmaster | Discount: 35% | Sale Price (USD): $16.24

I recently described Cryptmaster as “what you’d get if you crossed Typing of the Dead with a 1990s-era grid-based RPG and had a younger Vincent Price as its narrator.” You play as a group of four undead adventurers who have just been brought back from the grave by the titular Cryptmaster. The core gameplay loop within Cryptmaster revolves around your ability to type single-word commands quickly and accurately, which might be problematic from an accessibility standpoint. Cryptmaster offers the option to turn its combat into a turn-based mode to potentially alleviate any accessibility issues, however. That’s alongside several other customizable difficulty settings.

The party of undead adventurers you control fills several common RPG character class archetypes: Joro is a fighter who’s best at drawing enemy attention away from his more frail companions. Maz is a bard who provides utility to the group via buffs, healing, and crowd control. Syn is basically what you’d probably think of when you hear the word “rogue,” and Nyx is a caster with power over water and aquatic creatures. The Cryptmaster reanimated you because he wants your help to subjugate the world of the living.

Void War | Discount: 20% | Sale Price (USD): $15.99

Void War is basically FTL: Faster Than Light meets Warhammer 40,000, albeit without an official Warhammer license from Games Workshop. In Void War, the God-King of the Solar Empire has just died, and you represent one of several cults fighting each other to claim his throne. I know very little about Warhammer or any of its various spin-off universes, but I do know that I’ve been absolutely enthralled by Void War. That being said, I’m not going to go through the process of comparing and contrasting Void War and FTL here because I’ve already done so in my review.

Astrologaster | Discount: 75% | Sale Price (USD): $2.49

Astrologaster is one of the reasons I’m glad I started my Backlog Busting series. I’ve yet to even make a dent in my game backlog, and it’s the chance that I’ll encounter gems like Astrologaster that make the process of getting through my backlog more enjoyable and interesting. In Astrologaster, you play as “Doctor” Simon Forman, a medical school dropout in 16th-century London during an outbreak of the bubonic plague. Simon uses his vast knowledge of astrology and his limited medical experience to cure himself of the plague, which leads him to conclude he can heal the sick in the same way.

So, Simon gets the word out that he can provide medical assistance to those in need. There is the small matter that he doesn’t have an actual medical license, though, so he’ll need to treat patients effectively if he doesn’t want that to eventually come back to haunt him. Each of Simon’s patients will describe what ails them as best they can, within the limits of the time period’s concepts of modesty and accepted medical science. With those facts in hand, you’ll then use deductive reasoning and readings of the stars to (hopefully accurately) diagnose and treat each person’s ailment.

Quest Giver | Discount: 50% | Sale Price (USD): $2.49

Quest Giver is a game that manages to take the usually monotonous concept of being, well, a quest giver. That is, someone who stays in the same spot waiting to be approached by adventurers who are looking for work, and makes it both interesting and enjoyable. You’re apparently employed by a temp agency that dispatches quest givers wherever they’re needed in a bog-standard high-fantasy setting. Your job is to act as a liaison between townsfolk who want quests done and the adventurers who are willing to do those quests in exchange for rewards. In other words, you handle a lot of paperwork.

You’re expected to write up the contracts between the townspeople who posted the available quests and the adventurers at your disposal who can complete them. You’ll have to use your intuition and any knowledge you have of common RPG tropes to match each adventurer to quests that are appropriate for their level and class. If you screw that up too often, you’ll be lucky if your total jerk of a manager fires you before any disgruntled adventurers kill you instead. There’s quite a lot of intrigue in Quest Giver beyond that. You can check out my review if I’ve piqued your interest.

The Roottrees are Dead | Discount: 20% | Sale Price (USD): $15.99

Breaking news at the top of the hour this morning: The Roottrees are Dead, someone made a video game about that, and I’m recommending that you check out said video game. In The Roottrees are Dead, you’re an unnamed whiz in the field of genealogy, and you’re unexpectedly called upon to put your skills to the test. You’re recruited by a mysterious woman in the wake of a plane crash that’s killed the CEO and all potential heirs of a massively profitable candy company. A clause in the will of that company’s founder is where you come in.

Since those specific people all died at the same time, you need to sort through a genealogical mess and figure out who’s entitled to inherit obscene amounts of money. At your disposal, you have the following: A corkboard, red string, a list of names that serves as a starting point, a connection to the pre-social media Internet circa 1998, a high-quality printer, your own reasoning abilities, and a rubber duck with whom you can talk things through if you get stumped. If you manage to find the correct path through the Roottree “family jungle,” there’s a significant payday in it for you.

Digseum | Discount: 30% | Sale Price (USD): $2.09

Digseum is an incremental game that sucked me in more deeply than nearly every other game I’ve played in recent memory. I mentioned in my review that I played through the entirety of Digseum’s (admittedly rather short) story in a single sitting. During those few hours, I was fully sucked into Digseum’s gameplay and entirely forgot about the world around me. Especially considering how rare it is for me to be so thoroughly immersed in games nowadays, I’m still shocked (in just about the best possible way) that Digseum and its rather minimalist presentation had that effect on me.

In Digseum, you and an NPC friend of yours decide to follow your mutual dream of opening the world’s greatest museum. Somehow, though, neither of you thought to acquire any display pieces before the museum’s opening day. So, you’ll have to go excavating for relics to make your museum worth visiting. That’s barely scratching the surface of what Digseum has to offer, and I really don’t want to spoil any of it. Digseum is dirt cheap even when it’s not discounted, so if you’re at all interested in incremental games, you really owe it to yourself to have a look at Digseum.

There you have it, folks! Another year ending, another Steam Summer and Winter Sale behind us, and another somewhat jarring reminder of the inexorable march of time. In my closing spiel from last year’s Winter Sale recommendation roundup, I suggested that we should all manifest that the coming year would be better for games and for us all. That seems to have rather spectacularly backfired, but I’m not giving up hope. I’ve still got tons of discounted games to buy and possibly eventually play, and now, I hope, so do you. Here’s to 2026 sucking much less than this year did!

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