Steam’s spring sale might be over, but with so many stores, you’re never short on opportunities to demolish both your bank balance and free time. Stepping up to bat yesterday was the Epic Games Store, beginning their latest two-week-long round of discounts. Sadly they’re no longer doing ridiculously discounted loss-leader ‘coupons’, but there’s still plenty of very good games going cheaper than seems reasonable.
Here’s a few picks to get your bargain-hunting off to a good start:
- Alan Wake 2: Deluxe Edition (-50%) - An absolute gem from Remedy, and still one of the Epic Store’s highest-profile exclusives. Now with two excellent rounds of DLC and recently tuned up with even better ray-tracing, for the high-end crowd.
- The Outlast Trials (-60%) - The co-op frightfest just got a fresh chunk of time-limited story content, making this a great time to drag your friends into ‘therapy’ with you.
- Dragon Age: The Veilguard (-50%) - A steep discount on what might well be the end of the troubled but much-loved series. For all its flaws, a fascinating game that survived development hell.
- It Takes Two (-70%) - While its genre-hopping successor Split Fiction is rolling in praise, this co-op gem is still well worth playing. Plus, the writing’s better in this one. Only one player needs to own it, thanks to the Friend Pass system.
- The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (-80%) - Still one of the best RPGs around, holding up great thanks to a next-gen update and seeing a fresh round of modding interest thanks to CD Projekt’s extensive efforts to bring their tools to the community.
- Pacific Drive (-40%) - Automotive Stalker in the Pacific Northwest. An excellent and offbeat road-trip survival game, and due for a big update adding mid-run saves and new content next week.
- Saturnalia (-80%) - It wouldn’t be a sales roundup from me without at least one deep cut indie pick. Saturnalia is like a lurid, Giallo-style Alien Isolation, set in a randomly generated Italian mountain town.
And of course, Epic are keeping up their free game firehose for those with wallets already drained but free time to spare. For the next week, you can snag a pair of cartoon cat-themed games, Cat Quest and Neko Ghost, Jump! completely free.
The former is a good’un—part of a series now up to its third game, and a great way to introduce younger audiences to Diablo-like hack n’ slash ARPG mechanics. The latter is an unusual pick: a perspective-switching 3D platformer that’s been stalled in early access for years. Hopefully not a sign that Epic has run out of noteworthy giveaway deals for the year.
And if you’ve been picking up those freebies for a while, chances are you’re struggling to keep track of a game library that spans far beyond Steam’s comforting bounds. I personally cannot recommend Playnite highly enough. It’s a free, open-source app that tracks and collates all your games across however many stores you may have to wrangle, and lets you directly install and launch stuff from most of them. Basically what GOG Galaxy was meant to be, only modular, community-run and just better overall.
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