Here's 25 great games for $1 or less on sale for the holidays

There are a lot of games on sale for the holidays, and a lot of them are crap. No offense to the games, they're just not very good. So I went ahead and sifted through the sales for the best games I could find at an absolute bargain - some of them classics, some of them rather new. There's something for everyone in here, from experimental indies to a couple long-forgotten RTS.

Without further ado:

Steam

• Deus Ex: Game of the Year — A classic immersive sim (also on GOG).
• Teslagrad — A beautifully animated 2D explorer/Metroidvania.
• Hexcells — An excellent logic puzzle game.
• Payday 2 — A multiplayer co-op shooter. Buy four copies and have hours of fun.
• The Silent Age — Highly stylized point & click adventure.
• Original War — Forgotten classic RTS with interesting ideas.
• Deponia — One of the better from the new wave of point-and-click adventures (also on GOG).
• Valve's Back Catalog — Portal, Portal 2, Left 4 Dead, Half-Life: Source, Half-Life 2, HL2: Episode 1, and HL2: Episode 2. In case you somehow don't own those and/or are wondering what old gamers are talking about all the time.

GOG

• I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream — A sci-fi horror classic.
• Dex — A throwback cyberpunk action platformer with varied character build styles.
• Thief Gold and Thief 2 — Truly excellent stealth immersive sim games (also on Steam: Thief and Thief 2).
• Metal Fatigue — Truly unique mech RTS from the year 2000.
• Titanic: Adventure Out of Time — One of the all-time legends of the adventure/puzzle FMV games. A must-play if you like those.
• Her Story — A unique mystery indie in the form of a bunch of interview tapes.
• The Legacy of Kain series — The classic vampire action-adventure games. They're effectively genre precursors to Darksiders. Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 2, Legacy of Kain: Defiance, and Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen 2.

Itch.io

• Anodyne — A clever top-down 2D adventure game.
• ISLANDS — An experimental landscape exploration game. Won lots of awards.
• Rusty Lake Hotel — A mysterious and surreal point-and-click puzzler. Very good.
• Crossing to the Cold Valley — An absolute steal for a beautifully animated 30-minute game.
• Mountain — Finally learn what games journalists were tweeting about in 2014.
• Roguescape — $0.00, it's literally just free right now. It's a roguelike dungeon platformer.

Green Man Gaming

• Mount & Blade — A highly moddable medieval stabbing adventure.
• Frozen Synapse Prime — The original brilliant simultaneous resolution tactics game.
• Quarantine — Save the world from plague in a tough puzzle-strategy hybrid. It was fun in early access.
• Evil Genius — Learn why people are hyped for Evil Genius 2, then become hyped for Evil Genius 2.
• Teleglitch: Die More Edition — Scream in terror and shoot spooky things in this survival roguelike.

So there you go. That's like a million hours of gaming for, what, $30? $40? I didn't do the math. You do the math.