Some Of Our Favorite Hidden Indie Gems Are In The Big Steam Sale

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a day ago

The Steam summer sale is an annual opportunity to add vast numbers to the teetering pile of games you'll get around to playing someday. With bonkers 90-percent-off deals, you can grab recent big-name games for under $5, all of which you'll definitely remember to load up someday. But it's not just the AAA blockbusters that are cheap right now; the sale also includes fantastic unknown indie games at far less risky prices.
Buying an unknown game, or one that's barely had any reviews, is fraught. Of course, for such games, that's a self-perpetuating problem—no giant buzz means no early sales, and no early sales fails to encourage others to take a chance. Fortunately, there are wonderful sites out there that root through the squillions of games to help you find the good stuff, like IndieGamesand Alpha Beta Gamer, and YouTube channels like SplatterCatGaming. (And, if I may, my own Buried Treasure.) So there's no better time than now to look through their recommendations, and then see if those games are cheaper in the Steam sale.
But, to make life even easier for you, I've gone back through some of my favorite hidden indie treasures of recent times—games that are completely brilliant but mostly unknown—to see which are discounted right now. Read on for a few suggestions of games you might otherwise entirely miss, now at even lower prices.
In an already fantastic year for point-and-click adventures, The Beekeeper's Picnic really stands out. This gorgeous exploration of the post-war relationship between Holmes and Watson, now living in retirement, is touching, smart, and stunningly written and acted. We wrote more about it here.
Sale Price: $11.19 (20% off)
Steam Page
A super-smart, super-difficult puzzle game in which you play a ghost-like creature who is apparently driven to crush squids. You do this, as is so often the case, by pushing blocks onto them. But Ligo gets unique when you play as two or more of the main character at once, each moving in tandem and, upon coming into contact, globbing together to form a longer (or taller, or more right-angled) creature. It's properly tough stuff, presented very beautifully.
Sale Price: $12 (20% off)
Steam Page
Imagine playing No Man's Sky through the lo-fi worlds of Ed Key's Proteus. That's the slightly-overselling-it pitch I have for Miro, a game made by one person with huge ambitions. This is such a lovely example of where indie gaming can be utterly different from big-name-publisher games, taking big swings without necessarily being able to connect them all, set in scratchy, experimental weirdness. We wrote lots more about it here.
Sale Price: $12 (20% off)
Steam Page
Imagine if you took all of the old-school Zelda games, smooshed them up in a blender, put the results in a centrifuge, and then titrated the results into a single drop. You'd be mad. Don't do that. You can't even blend digital concepts. But Master Key does make me wonder.
This is a stunning piece of game design, a progressively unlocking RPG delivered in black-and-white, with no dialogue (people communicate in pictograms), that'll tickle all the places A Link To The Past can. We reviewed it here.
Sale Price: $7.19 (40% off)
Steam Page
City building games have become just incredibly complicated in recent years, letting you control everything but the color of the gum on the sidewalk, but sometimes it's pleasant to hark back to those older times when things were somewhat simpler. Dawnfolk does that with its tile-based town creation, but then adds in a whole lot more with its puzzle-like goals, increasingly involved challenges, and the gorgeous feature whereby teeny events take place within the individual tiles. We wrote much more coherently about it here.
Sale Price: $12 (20% off)
Steam Page
We are so very blessed with great puzzle games. (I'm currently hooked on Nurikabe World.) But every now and then there's something that's extra special. Polimines is one such game, a logic puzzle game that is so perfectly delivered as to be sublime. That first game joined the ranks of Hexcells with its elegance of design, and now this far more involved, complicated, and fantastic sequel, Polimines 2, surpasses it. I'd explain the conceit to you, but your eyes would glaze over at my attempts, so just watch the video above to get it.
Both games are bundled together at the best price I've ever seen for this.
Sale Price: $5.61 (58% off)
Steam Page
If you're old enough to remember Hexen and Heretic, then sit down, you look tired. And while you're here, play Wizordum. If, on the other hand, you're not over a thousand years old, then oh boy, do I have something fantastic to introduce you to. It's this game called Wizordum, based on some old games you won't have heard of.
This is a spectacular FPS in which you mix melee and ranged attacks with your sword-and-spells character. It's also an old-school boomer shooter that's not about frantic speed. Instead this is much more about discovering secrets, finding bonus areas stacked with ammo, and methodically solving vast level-sized puzzles to find keys and open doors. It's bloody marvelous.
Sale Price: $16 (20% off)
Steam Page
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