It is a new dawn, a new day, and of course, there is a new sale on Steam, so your wallet is full of moths. If not quite yet, let’s see if we can find something else to keep you from screaming into the void at the never-ending torrent of horrible news shot in our direction daily. I did try to get a wide variety of “something for everyone,” so without wasting more time, let’s go.

Dispatch | $23.99 -20%

I’ve spent a bit too much time recently watching The Boys now that it has finished, and that’s about the only link to be had between the two. Dispatch is an episodic, dialog-heavy adventure title in the vein of Telltale games, but slightly better in that AdHoc Studio was formed by the people who escaped. In Dispatch, you play as Jessie Pinkman, who is the son of dead superhero Mecha Man, and very quickly learns he isn’t as super either.

If I were to once again make a joke that was signposted for the exceedingly dense, the Jessie Pinkman thing was also a joke; Dispatch is a superhero drama in a call center. Playing as Aaron Paul’s Robert Robertson, you interact with the on-call superheroes and send them out to saves by day/night. Each hero is voiced by (supposedly) an equally high-profile name, but I don’t know what a “Yung Gravy” is or that one Irish YouTuber who isn’t Eoin Reardon.

If that doesn’t do it, there is an aggressive and buff red woman with horns. I know how you all got horny for that in Baldur’s Gate 3.

Retro Rewind – Video Store Simulator | $15.92 -20%

Tying this into something we’re currently doing on the site, the last thing I got from Blockbuster was each season of Ugly Betty about 15 years ago. The sudden drop (a 70-degree ramp) in the middle aisle of that shop is still there, but it is now a Scottish supermarket. You see young ones, back in my day, you couldn’t just put on the TV and every film was there through streaming services, or dodgy Fire Sticks. You had to go outside for films. One option was the dodgy bloke at the pub, or you could buy the proper DVD.

The third option was that you could pay a small amount less than buying the film to rent it from a place like Blockbuster. Retro Rewind is exactly that. You run and manage a store where you rent out DVDs, or in this case, VHS tapes… Ask your granddad. I think with my love for TCG Card Shop Sim, Supermarket Sim, and noted love of others of their kind, this should come as no surprise.

As I say, you run a video rental store, so you’ll have customers come in daily, rent a legally distinct knock-off of major hits, and get angry at you when they’ve been using DVDs as drinks coasters. That’s just a pet peeve of mine. Each “month” is a season, and certain days of the month will correspond with the release of films or major events that people will want certain films for. For example, in autumn (“Fall” for simpltons) you’ll have Halloween, so lots of horror films are useful.

It is a great idea with lots of nostalgia for 90s cinephiles, and general nostalgia when watching films meant something. Reviewed very positively, if you’re like me and have a thing for store management games, this is certainly one to pick up. That or go in the back room and touch yourself to films like Strangle Things, Game of Thots, and Brokeback Mountain.

Farming Simulator 25 | $22.49 -25%

Perfect timing if you’ve been watching Clarkson’s Farm. The latest edition of Farming Simulator, Farming Simulator 25, is all shiny and nice if you have a NASA PC to run everything ultra-mega sexy, but chances are you won’t because you’ll want to mod it heavily. If you’re a boring person like me who has far too many podcasts and not enough free time but sack off work anyway, you too will look after lovely sheep and mow grass for over 200-300 hours.

It isn’t part of this and also isn’t on sale, but the “Highlands Fishing Expansion” is great too; I love driving my tractor around a place that feels familiar. Though for the base game alone, there is a bit more of a central European map, an East Asian map, and of course, an American one with a mod that allows you to grow the green stuff. I don’t mean pees. If you want something less about guns and setting fire to things, this is the one for you.

No Man’s Sky | $23.99 -60%

I feel like I am trying to sell water to a fish at this point. It has been nearly a decade since the disaster of Hello Games and No Man’s Sky first happened, and the story is very well told by many others, but I guess there are probably another five people left who haven’t played it.

No Man’s Sky is an open-world survival crafting game in the same way as Minecraft is a strip club on Mars, to someone it is, but to others it is about exploration, and others it is about cataloging species. Hell, did you know there is fishing in it now? Effectively, it is Stargate with ships and base building. If you have a love of Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, or hell, at this point, I think even Starship Troopers, there is something for your sci-fi-loving inner child.

Watch_Dogs Bundle | $12.12 -90%

I’m just going to say it: The ultimate evolution of the Ubisoft sandbox? For less than all previous offerings, you get three games in three distinct settings. I have my problems with Watch_Dogs (1) simply because Aiden Pearce is a grumpy sourpuss of a main character, but the city of Chicago and the magic wand of his smartphone create a world full of exploits. Including cheating at poker via CCTV cameras.

Watch_Dogs 2 is easily my favorite because the world is bright, colorful, and doesn’t take itself too seriously. If I have to make a comparison, Watch_Dogs (1) is GTA IV if it were just depressing bowling, while Watch_Dogs 2 is Trevor laughing in GTA V during that scene in “Blitz Play.” It is also a game almost exclusively aimed at people like me who love Short Circuit and don’t exactly hate how Lucien Soulban wrote it. Soulban also co-wrote Far Cry 3 and wrote Blood Dragon, as well as being the narrative lead for Avowed.

Then sneaking up behind Watch_Dogs 2 is Legion, simply because it feels somewhat homely. It may also be slightly to do with the fact that you can John Johnson (to use an alias as a verb) No. 10 Downing Street with drones as a little old woman with a bad hip. Aside from reenacting the Gunpowder Plot (an actual plot point), Watch Dogs Legion does something games don’t often do: Set in a very near future (2029) London that still looks like London and lets you play as almost anyone whatsoever.

As I say, the evolution of the Ubisoft open world. The first game gave you a grim open world with a magic wand, the second gives you that, but refined in a dystopian Silicon Valley that is fun to be around. Then, in the third game, the profiler that tells you people’s backgrounds becomes more integral because you can play as the person you stumble upon on the street. The downfall of the third game is that you don’t have that connection with characters as you do with Marcus, Wrench, Sitara, Josh, and the Black guy whose name no one remembers for plot reasons.

Road to Vostok | $19.99 (not on sale)

I know everything else is on sale, but I wanted to cover this one nonetheless. Road to Vostok is an interesting game from the word go because it is one of those hardcore survival post-apocalyptic extraction shooters, but only single-player, that is very much unlike anything else. On the contentious border of Russia and Finland, you need to survive and make it to the region of Vostok (Karelian Isthmus). The catch is, Vostok is deadly. Very deadly!

Die outside of your little home base, you’re fine. Die on the way to Vostok, you’re fine. Die in Vostok? Start again from scratch. Only in the city of Vostok is there perma-death, and in that, there is a very interesting design and gameplay philosophy. You’ll spend hours building up resources, using ammo where you need it, exploring further and further, knowing you’ll respawn, getting ready to go into Vostok, and then suddenly a single bullet could end it all. It is a lovely sense of security, then suddenly pulling that away, but the player does so willingly.

Personally, I’d rather Road to Vostok than Tarkov any day. Which is nothing against Battlestate Games; I just want Road to Vostok to do really well.

Final Fantasy VII Remake & Rebirth Twin Pack | $31.99 -60%

I’d be wrong not to mention this one. Easily one of the biggest games of 2027 already, the third and final (hopefully) part of the Final Fantasy VII remakes is on the horizon, and there is really no better time to play catch-up if you haven’t already. Especially with the fact that Revelation is releasing on all platforms simultaneously early next year, barring delays, of course.

Final Fantasy VII Remake is a ground-up remake of the original Final Fantasy VII up to a certain point. I guess this is why people who make Final Fantasy VII their personality moan, as Remake is a small bit of disc 1 of the original, and Rebirth (spoiler) literally ends where disc 1 ended on the PS1. Albeit there is a lot more “content-wise” because the world-building is expanded upon, wider bits surrounding the periphery are pulled into focus, which makes these two about 80 hours of minimum main story only.

For what is effectively a reimagining of the low-poly world of Final Fantasy VII from the PS1 to fully-realized 3D, with all the details tacked on from side games also in mind. This bundle of the two games is hardly something to sniff at.

Icarus | $22.74 -35%

This is actually one that I’ve not played, and quite frankly, I don’t plan on it anytime soon because it is Open World Survival Crafting: The Game. That said, I have watched it being played and had to solve issues for it, as Icarus is one of my dad’s go-to things to play right now. I think what is important to say here is that my dad has also typically shunned playing games with guns, because his last game before Burnout 3 was Pong.

Now he’s running around with a shotgun and knife, stabbing bears and shooting fowl like a conservative MP angry they can’t shoot foxes now. Jokes aside, I’ve been looking at Icarus as modded Minecraft to the nth degree: You start with nothing (you lose, good day sir!) and have to build a house, a forge, a shotgun, a greenhouse, hunt some bears, tame a demented emu drawn by a child on PCP, and somehow invent electricity. You won’t believe me, but the only joke in there is the PCP. Seriously, I’ve seen this man (my dad), who struggles with Minecraft‘s redstone, set up and later improve his wiring for lights in his house.

If I haven’t sold the open-world survival crafting crazies on Icarus yet, let me attempt once more to draw a comparison: Imagine Fallout 4‘s base-building taken to its conclusion in one of these sorts of open-ended crafting games. Absolutely not my thing, but from the perspective of the open-world survival crafting fans, I can see why Icarus is one of the better titles in the genre.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl | $41.99 -30%

I know this one is still a bit steep, even at the discounted price, you could almost get two Final Fantasy VII games and three Watch_Dogs games for this price after all. However, I wanted to include S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 because there is something about it that encapsulates a lot of different things. Hell, if you’re buying S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 but also looking at the two other bundles mentioned here, you might even just be satisfied with getting the Metro Saga Bundle for another $5.04 for a total less than getting Heart of Chornobyl outside of the sale.

Where I think S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl stands out is the tactical shooter, almost an early extraction shooter, RPG model of gameplay. All set in and around one of the most fascinating settings in and outside of gaming, Chornobyl. From the horror aspect, there is so much you can do; from a story perspective, there is a proper heart that can be put into it; and from gameplay, you can kind of take guns seriously. The latter of those three is something we rarely see in gaming.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is a weird game that stands between some older games that took things seriously and made things difficult, while also modernizing that thing into a world post-Metro. They are very different sorts of games, but Metro and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. walk the fine lines of similar ideas of radiation making life difficult for humans, and it is about the will to survive. Maybe I’m just pontificating a bit too much about something that blends an RPG background with that horror and tactical shooter gameplay.

Football Manager 26 | $29.99 -50%

There is a point at which a game becomes a job, and you should really just put it down, but can’t. Since March, I’ve put in over 390 hours into one save of Football Manager 26, and I’ll tell you why in a minute. The point, more so, is that for all the complaints, some of which are completely valid, and I do have my own complaints with 820 hours of play total now, Football Manager 26 is one of those games where you need to find a reason for your being there. Give yourself a purpose.

The trouble with Football Manager 26 is that, unlike prior games in the series, where that was easier with plug-and-play skins to make it feel tighter and brighter, FM26 isn’t as warm and homely. It is modern, sleek, constrained, and from a storytelling perspective, not very worldly. If you’re just the manager in the top English leagues for the men, only loading top European leagues, the news of your world just isn’t as prominent.

Yet once I gave myself the purpose of joining Tranmere, taking them up to the Prem’, not only “hanging” with the big six but slaying them too, it feels bigger. Only made more… Worthwhile, I guess, because I’m using the youth, I’m finding players I wouldn’t otherwise find who are fantastic, and doing so while also outshining Steve Clarke’s achievements with the World Cup mode. That’s where I think FM26 is failing most, to give you as a player the sense of purpose and new achievements to go chase. Yet I can’t stop myself for a couple of hours almost every day.

NUTMEG! A Nostalgic Deckbuilding Football Manager | $14.99 -40%

As for my reason for getting back into FM26 so heavily and particularly Tranmere, this is it. NUTMEG! strips away practically everything and turns football into a deckbuilding Rogue-Like in an era of footballers having mullets and smoking 40 tabs a day. None of this pansy “that’s clearly a penalty” when Mbappé goes down nonsense – if you don’t go two-footed into a tackle trying to kill the player, I’ll sell you.

There is an air of nostalgia for NUTMEG!, when football scores were just shown on Ceefax, and here is the thing, that world feels lived in. The news and pop culture on TV is real with a hint of satire, all of which is aimed perfectly at old people like me who remember when Ronnie Barker had a stutter. Though if your nostalgia is a bit more football-inclined, all the players are real too. It is a really morish game that is great for playing while second-screening something like the World Cup.

Paralives | $31.99 -20%

What if The Sims were better but also not as ready because it is in early access? Paralives was released into early access about a month ago. I picked it up during this sale, and I’ve already downloaded far too many things from the workshop and started building mansions. It is like playing The Sims 3 again, but it is still better than that.

Complimenting Paralives is a weird one, because as much as I do think there is a lot to be said that it does better than EA’s offering, there is a lot that I’d ask for from Paralives‘ early access development. Placing items like curtains on a row of windows would be a lot easier with Planet Coaster & Planet Zoo‘s “duplicate and advance move” option, as an example. It is little things like that where I am picking Paralives apart, which tells you how good it is.

That said, it is also quite buggy as it recently launched into early access (I might have mentioned), so you’ll easily encounter problems. In 10 hours, I’ve had certain building parts, such as stairs, break and remove the floor. I’ve had to undo a lot because breaking the floor and moving it back up for the foundations meant that all the stuff in the room stayed where they were, but now floats that distance between the ground and where the floor of the foundation came up to previously. Then I had an instance where I couldn’t save after 3 hours.

Misc | $(varies) ?%

I wanted to do a bunch more options, but I don’t have the time, so I’m just going to give you the name of some other games that are maybe on the cheaper side or nearer the price of a cup of coffee. Subnautica is $7.49, Sons of the Forest is $8.99, and Terraria is $4.99. The base game of Euro Truck Sim 2 is $4.99, but if you’re willing to spend a bit more, the Premium Edition is $24.54. The base game of Planet Zoo is a steal at $2.24, but if you want 90s management at its core, Two Point Museum is $20.09.

Hades (1), Slay The Spire (1), and Overcooked! 2 are all $6.24 each. The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth Complete Bundle is $5.06, which you’d be crazy not to pick up. As you would be if you didn’t pick up Disco Elysium – The Final Cut for $3.99. Dishonored 2 is $5.99, or get Dishonored 2 and the Death of the Outside standalone for $11.99, and get the Dishonored Game of the Year edition for another $1.99. Now go play some games!

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