amgg

i know this defeats the point since its not actually on sale but it IS very reasonably priced and seems like you might enjoy tinkering around with it: Mars First Logistics. think Besiege but its actually truck simulator and youre building little dinky buggies to cart increasingly awkwardly sized cargo around some very bothersome terrain

probably pretty common recommendations, but Night in the Woods and Citizen Sleeper are my fav games of all time, looks like they're both on sale atm

Intertial Drift was the one game in the spacetwinks thread i treated myself to. having a blast drifting around the track to eurobeat. large recommend as a game to chill out with 👍

obligated to suggest Cassette Beasts

I haven't gotten super far in it yet, but I've been enjoying Before the Green Moon- its a farming sim in a sci-fi setting with fun character writing (from what i've seen so far), an interesting premise, and an art style that really takes me back to early 3D games- the textures and the slightly less conventionally cute character designs feel like a fun creative choice that helps it stand out.

The biggest I can think of right now is Blasphemous being 75% off, one of my favorite vanias ever, early enemy design is admittedly a bit annoying but I adore the style of it and the bosses, wears its castlevania influence on its sleeve and does something new with it

I WAS MADE FOR THIS POST!

So recently I've been enjoying The Void Rains Upon Her Heart, which has been in early access for years but I was just gifted it recently. It's a super fun roguelite shmup, full of content, and it never gets boring. I'm real impressed by it.

I also really enjoyed Cassette Beasts. It's a Pokemon-esque RPG. The way I described it was "Leftist queer Pokemon made by millenials" and I think that describes it pretty well.

(Not on sale apparently but Slayers X is a new FPS made by the devs of Hypnospace, and the conceit is it's an alternate universe Doom WAD made by Zane)

SIGNALIS is the best horror game I've played in years. It's queer Silent Hill meets Resident Evil with robot girls, in the best way.

La-Mulana is a video game, if you've never played that :) On sale 75% off. Extremely worth it but also play at your own risk

You've PROBABLY played TUNIC, but TUNIC is one of the best games ever made!

And the last one I'll mention is UNSIGHTED, which is half off and was my GOTY for 2021. Good queer Zelda-esque darksoulsy stuff, with the right amount of anxiety mixed in.

If you're into Mega Man type games, there's one coming out in a week or so called Gravity Circuit. I checked out the demo after I saw it at PAX and it looks like it's going to scratch that itch real well for me.

Homebody is a shockingly well made horror/puzzle game in the vein of old resident evils if that's your sort of thing

Sludge Life is like if umurangi generation Was about getting high and laughing at the world's stupidest joke with your friends

Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent is a forgotten professor Layton rip off, but it's an incredible rip off with perfect vibes that tries to do a "what if twin peaks meets Fargo" and nails it with the best fucked up art

Slice of sea is a weird little point and click/platformer combo made by the master of old flash point and clicks, m. Skutnik; occasionally infuriating, always stunningly beautiful.

Mystia's Izekaya is a touhou fangame about running ur own Izekaya stand and if u don't mind fangame jank it has more weird girls and more beautiful pixel art then anything else on this list

...except for Dave the diver, a game about running your own sushi restaurant, which of u don't mind a mediocre translation (and some Haha Look At This Annoying Weeb jokes) has a great gameplay loop, BEAUTIFUL art, and an astounding depth of gameplay

Cultic is a real full blood-like FPS

Roadwarden is supposedly a fantastic big ol text game if u like that sort of thing, which given that u liked citizen sleeper, u prolly do

Steamworld heist is somehow the best turn based squad strategy game ever made, even though it looks like a strange steampunk thing. It's just that good and fun and simple. Also stars lots of hot robot ladies.

I'm a big fan of Creepy Castle, it's a dungeon crawler, has great music, very obviously ZX Spectrum/Timex 1000 themed visually.

Also! AI: The Somnium Files is an incredible murder mystery VN with a really cool story that's 80% off, about being a detective who goes into people's dreamscapes and has both a cool robot AI eyeball as a partner and is a stepfather to The World's Strongest 12 Year Old Girl

these are all available on steam

i've had a great time with The Quarry, it's a pretty unique teen horror show type game that's part adventure game, part CYOA, and part dragon's lair. they boast "186 different endings!" but realistically it's like 5 or so different endings depending on how you count. twenty bucks! ted raimi is in it. good times
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1577120/The_Quarry/

along similar lines IMMORTALITY is also under 20 bucks and made my goty 2022 top 5 list. i think i like this game better than the quarry but really they're doing different things.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1350200/IMMORTALITY/

going to retro FPSes for a moment, Zortch is available for a fiver basically and it's a loving paean to games like turok, half life, unreal. but it definitely has an undeniable N64-aspectedness to its swag that i really enjoy. dumb, but highly competent fun, priced to afford
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2443360/Zortch/

and finally, i haven't even played this myself yet but i needed to check it out so i bought it instantly:
Hand of Doom. this one is a crusty goth druid first-person hybrid FMV/rendered graphics RPG situation. bout 7 bucks.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1924400/Hand_of_Doom/

Everhood is a super fun game with a lot of cool character designs and a very interesting story; people have called it rhythm based but it's only kinda so. The battles are very dodge focused and very music oriented. Pretty cool.

24 Killers is a fun game that doesn't really have combat in mind; it plays a lot more like Moon RPG Remix in that way. It has a really interesting story and a nice vibe, you help a cast of weird guys with various tasks. Very cool.

i think you did mention already having cartomancy anthology (i'd be curious to hear your thoughts if you've gotten around to it ^_^) soo i'll skip over to some other stuff by some pals i know :p

Co-open is a quaint and queer little game about a child's first trip to a grocery store alone, there's a lot of secrets to find and some quests that lead to some exploration, i think it nails the feeling of being a kid who gets lost. ( https://lowpolis.itch.io/co-open ) (It's about 2 hours long)

(Here's a "it's not on sale but" one, it has been in itch bundles, so maybe you already have it)
Yet another game where you go to a store. Dépanneur Nocturne is about going to a corner store to get a gift for a partner. Yet again, there's mysterious secrets to find. I like the hints at a larger magic world in this small trip. ( https://ko-op.itch.io/dep-nocturne ) (About 30 minutes to an hour)

Knight's Try is one of those Difficult kind-of-trolling-the-player 3D platformers but with an N64 type style. I feel like it's a bit more fair than most of that genre. ALSO one of my favorite features is that it has a midi-player built in and you can load up midis as the soundtrack. ( https://modus-interactive.itch.io/knights-try ) (Kind of hard to measure the time with this one. I wanna say it took me like 4 hours?)

https://dominoclub.itch.io/traumakt4 on mobile so markdown is hard and caveat: MIND THE CWS this is Not a streamable game but it blew me the hell away when I played it and I've only gotten the bad end. also I've been playing Boyfriend Dungeon lately and I'm in Love with it

Spin Rhythm XD is one of the best rhythm games on PC. high-quality, varied songlist (they commissioned 2mello!), charting and mechanics that make me feel completely in control of the music when i'm doing well, a semi-active custom charting community. it's all there. they even figured out how to make vocal charting work in a game that's not based on Vocaloid! you love to see it.

Hyper Jam is a ridiculously cheap, incredibly underrated, low-floor-high-ceiling multiplayer arena shooter. the game's fully dead so you'll need to play with friends, but that's fine, because that's the best way to play--this thing brings out people's competitive side like nothing else. the perk drafting system is practically built so the game will be fully unbalanced by its third round. it's a game where you complain about how ridiculously OP something is, only to win the round and go "...oh! never mind. ignore me. :-)". i love it.

LUNACID isn't on sale, but it's still cheap, and though I haven't played it in a while I keep having the urge to return to it because the vibes and exploration are so good. It is still in EA, but as far as I'm aware there's already a lot there.

Also, Analgesic Production's entire catalog is on sale right now. Anodyne 2 in particular is a real gem.

highly recommend Later Alligator if you haven't given it a look yet. Incredibly charming and fun point & click game with a huge amount of great art & animation

Curse Crackers is a neat, crisp platformer that becomes cooler the more you delve into it. Includes world-building, cute rabbit people, and Very Large Women

I'll toss my hat in for Lunistice, which is already fairly cheap at regular price. It came out last year and is just such a solid little bite of 3D video game platformer.

HROT is fantastic. Soviet DOOM that goes some wild places.

OPUS: Echo of Starsong is a pretty unknown release in the west, but give it a look! It's a space drama with a ton of character focus and a unique vibe to it. Gameplay is nothing complex, space travel resource management mixed with puzzles, but I still found it a pretty fun experience.

It's been my obsession since I first played it in 2021, and the game only got a whole lot better when they added voice acting in 2022.

inscryption !!! card battler with horror/suspense aspects and an interesting story !!!

Knotwords is a word puzzle game, similar to a crossword but instead of solving for a word from the definition, you have chunks of the puzzle with letters that must be in that chunk; very much the vibe of Picross where it's chill logic-puzzlin' that gets surprisingly challenging!

There's also The Case of the Golden Idol, a mystery-solving game I adore. If you liked Return of the Obra Dinn, you'll love this because it scratches that same itch of solving a mystery from moments in time. Tehy even released a new DLC!!

• Rollerdrome is what you get when you fuse Jet Set Radio with an arena shooter and it fucks so good.
• Donut County is incredibly cheap right now, it's just cute.
• Katana Zero is one of the best games to come out in the style that Hotline Miami refined, but with a story that I adore (It's even getting a big free update in the future!)
• Placid Plastic Duck Simuator is a lovely "game" to have on in the background, and it just got a new Sci-Fi themed DLC pack!
• Metal Wolf Chaos XD is one of the best america/super mech fighting games I've ever played. It's a goddamn mess. I adore it.

Loop Hero is on a big discount until July 13th-- it's a really fun game that feels like a deck-builder card game with rogue elements. I really enjoyed playing it, and enjoyed its excellent sound design even more.

Townscaper is a really, really nice procedural town builder. Entirely creative, no real "game" aspect beyond that you just get to build pretty little ocean towns very easily. Maybe not a stream material, but a really nice game to relax with.

Overload is a 6DoF FPS made by the old Descent developers, and is a spiritual successor to those classics as well as feeling like a true sequel. It's pretty fun!

Enter the Gungeon is on sale! Probably one of my all-time favorite games.

and Legend of Dungeon isn't on sale, but it's an incredibly fun co-op game or a challenging single-player experience with a lot of quirks. It's simple, easy to dive into, and can also be white-knuckle stressful when it gets hard!

Clash: Artifacts of Chaos is the recent release from ACE Team that continues building on the world of Zenoclash 1 and Zenoclash 2 (both of which are also on sale for very cheap and each and are just absolutely bizarre and wild and weird and I cannot do it justice by describing them. I would recommend them if you ever missed out on playing them, but they are not required to understand what is happening in Clash). Clash plays very differently (also on a completely different engine) and has some souls-like gameplay aspects. One thing to keep in mind that isn't explicitly stated: Every character understands the social rules of the world they live in. As a result nothing is explained to the player so you have to piece everything together yourself.

Dropsy is a point and click adventure... game. Still getting updates every so often since its release in 2015.

House of the Dying Sun is an interesting space combat game that's worth a few hours of time. I last played it in 2017, and the game never received any updates, but it's good for what's there.

Mainlining is a fun point and click hacking game.

Misericorde is a very cool murder mystery VN in a remote women's monastery on sale for USD$6.29
Rain World is so so so so so fucking good unique platformer for USD$9.99
Enter the Gungeon probably you have heard of for USD$5.99

fuga: melodies of steel is 40% off on steam- the combat is great, the characters are sweet, the story is straightforward and the deeplore is not. I went to a panel by the developers recently and they wanted to emphasize that there are no streaming restrictions (spoil away, basically) for the game or soundtrack, in case that’s helpful. I am still playing through 2, but so far the mechanic changes are really interesting, but I think are more impactful if you play 1 first. according to the devs (and in line with my own experience), it’s about 15 hours for your first play through and another 10 for endgame, so it’s not super super long. oh, and the soundtrack is really good (same composer as .hack and the jojo all star battle games lol)

long live the queen is on sale for just a few dollars, I think going into it not knowing about it is the best experience

the cat lady is also on sale for just a few dollars. it’s the only horror game ive ever gotten through, and i loved it - it’s dark but also treats the characters with a lot of kindness and warmth. i found the depiction of depression pretty true to life for me, there are a lot of potential triggers and i personally don’t think knowing about them ahead of time impacts the experience of the game.

Floppy Knights! With how much you liked Dicey Dungeon I would heavily recommend it, and not just because Marlowe Dobbe does the art and animation for it as well.

Turn-based tactics with your attack + move actions and creatures drawn from your modifiable deck. The game lets you pull off some really clever stuff. When your deck clicks and you start to feel like you are comboing out or solving the map next turn - jubilation.

Wonderful music, the story is cute, and 8 bucks on steam right now. I've put in about 20 hours so far and that was with doing bonus content and the main story, if you want to get an idea of the time commitment.

"Vividlope" is really lovely if you want a fun puzzle game to check out! i played the demo for it and it was great

Here's a couple of favs

Noita is a difficult roguelike that's hard to master, but its got a really cool physics engine.
No Straight Roads is a sort of flawed game but it has so much personality and creativity put into it.
Katana Zero is Katana Zero

I think most of these are on sale right now on steam
(also Hi-Fi Rush if you haven't played it; Hi-Fi Rush is the video game of all time)

I always use a request for good and cheap games for Slice&Dice recommendations. It's on Itch, it's like 5-8 bucks and you get a PC and Android version. The game was one of my all time fav roguelikes and then the dev randomly dropped a "2.0" update that like doubled the content for free. I have put minimum 300 hours in it. Big recommend.

100% Orange juice is the best online multiplayer game out there. It's a 4-player board game about hating your friends and whoever had the idea of developing randomness for computers. It has over 20 DLC, but the game's been maintained since 2009 so you can forgive them.

Despite its name, Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass is a very fun 2d rpg game. It takes place inside a dream of an 8 year old named Jimmy. Made in RPGmaker it takes inspiration from many snes rpg's (yes, including earthbound).

Jimmy has the ability to empathize he is able to take the form of some of the enemies you fight, leading to a fun mechanic inside the turn based combat. It also includes a comprehensive world to explore and interact with, and really funny npcs to talk to. (just dont forget about the pulsating mass)

the game is on sale now on steam for $10.49 (i have no clue what that is in canadian) https://store.steampowered.com/app/706560/Jimmy_and_the_Pulsating_Mass/ and the sale ends on July 13th.

There is a LOT of side content in this game (i clocked in 70 hours when i finished the main story and all the side content) and it does get a lil grindy sometimes, but its also just has a really fuckin good story with amazing emotional beats, it's also one of the few rpg's that managed to get me invested enough to see through it 100% so thats my seal of approval.

"garden galaxy" is a very simple, fun little game where you build a tiny garden block by block/plant by plant, and get tiny visitors. they give you coins when you click on them, which you can put into a magic pot for random garden items, and you can build your little garden based on those.

i'd call it more of a multi-tasking game, since it's not too mentally demanding and there are no specific goals like dorfromantik/cloud gardens, but it's nice to play while you're chatting with others or streaming to friends on discord, or for late nights when you are tired and just want something simple to occupy your mind. i think it is 6.99 on sale.

i hope you find many good things to play!! happy gaming!! :D

Paradise Killer!!
A Little to the Left!
Assemble with Care!
i will edit more in later if I think of them

a couple of my friends have been really into vividlope recently, it's not on sale but it's only $10

I’d recommend Lobotomy Corporation and its sequel, Library of Ruina. (Although Ruina can be played alone). Both games with really in-depth gameplay systems and interesting stories. There’s also a second sequel, Limbus Company, but I haven’t played it yet because it’s a gacha so I can’t say if it’s good or not.

Thomas Was Alone is a fun 2D platformer that’s not too hard and makes you have emotions about quadrilaterals.

A Hat In Time is a good 3D platformer if you haven’t played that. I really enjoyed my time with it.

All of these are on sale also

Sable is a game I've been enjoying recently, you explore a desert wasteland on a hoverbike while on a personal quest about self discovery and finding your place in the world. I'd compare it to the newer Zelda games but without the combat and a beautiful art style.

Dark Messiah of Might & Magic I kinda bought as a joke because you can do some funny stuff with the spells and because it's a wizard game in the source engine but it's GENUINELY very solid gameplay wise.

Friends vs Friends is a FPS deck builder in which you face off against your friends (or strangers) it's a fantastic game I highly recommend it if you're looking for an arcade-y shooter to have some fun with

Sable: https://store.steampowered.com/app/757310/Sable/
Dark Messiah of Might & Magic: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2100/Dark_Messiah_of_Might__Magic/
Friends vs Friends: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1785150/Friends_vs_Friends/