Mary recommends 11 games that don”t get much attention and are close to her heart.
The Steam Winter Sale is in full swing and also on GlobalESportNews we are regularly scouring the offers to find the best bargains for you. For example, we”ve already picked out these (25 great games for under 5 euros)
And although you”ll find a lot of top games there, I”m simply missing the small, special insider tips that rarely make it into such lists. That”s not because my colleagues have no taste (okay, they could play more dating sims …), but because there are simply far too many games to recommend.
That”s why I want to use the calm before the turn of the year to present you with eleven very personal insider tips from the Steam sale. These are games that no one else recommends to you and where it”s always Mary, what weird stuff are you playing again? Besides, no one can stop me on holiday duty anyway.
So let”s get started:
Table of Contents
Hidden Folks
Genre: Hidden Folks Puzzle – Release: 15.February 2017 – Developer: Adriaan de Jongh, Sylvain Tegroeg – Price: 3,59 Euro (reduced by 70 percent))
In the hand-drawn hidden object game Hidden Folks, as the title suggests, you search for all kinds of people and objects. But unlike “Where”s Waldo” or other pictures, the people in Hidden Folks like to hide in tents, buildings or behind hay bales. So you can happily click around on the really lovingly drawn pictures to find all the objects. Sometimes you have to set off a chain of events before you reach your destination.
Hidden Folks is an absolutely fantastic game for in between. Whether it”s boredom during lunch break, puzzling together with the family or finding one or two people on the Steam deck before going to bed, Hidden Folks always goes!
Death”s Door
(Genre: Action – Release: July 20, 2021 – Developer: Acid Nerve – Price: 9,75 Euro (reduced by 50 percent))
Imagine you”re the grim reaper in crow form and your working day just can”t get any worse. You get one of those rare assignments and you screw it up because someone steals the very soul you”re supposed to collect. And then that someone disappears into a world untouched by death.
This is exactly the premise of Death”s Door, an action adventure with a slight Souls-like touch. You fight as a small crow with sword, double daggers, hammer or broadsword against a series of creatures that just don”t want to pass away.
Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc
(Genre: Adventure – Release: Feb 18 .2016 – Developer: Spike Chunsoft – Price: 7,99 Euro (reduced by 60 percent))
Ostensibly, only the brightest and most talented students are admitted to Hope”s Peak Academy – so protagonist Makoto Naegi is all the more surprised when he is also accepted as the “Ultimate Lucky Student”. But the euphoria is short-lived. At the latest when all the students are locked inside the school and terrorised by a black and white bear. The bear makes them an offer: kill one of your fellow students and get away scot-free, then you are free.
The Danganronpa series is something very special. The mix of crime, psychological horror and wacky characters is probably not for everyone. But if you”re up for it and appreciate a good and, above all, surprising story and have no problem with rather shallow gameplay from point&click as well as mild quicktime events, you”ll find a real story highlight in Danganronpa.
Graveyard Keeper
(Genre: Management Simulation – Release: 15. August 2018 – Developer: Lazy Bear Games – Price: 6,71 Euro (reduced by 60 percent))
Graveyard Keeper combines management simulation with role-playing elements and a lot of black humour. Again and again you have to make decisions: Do you process the corpses in your care and thus supply the witch burning festival with fresh(?) meat? Hidden behind the humorous facade is also an extremely cleverly told story, which is linked by individual quests.
There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension
(Genre: Point&Click-Adventure – Release: 06. August 2020 – Developer: Draw Me A Pixel – Price: 7.79 Euro (reduced by 40 percent))
This is definitely not a recommendation. Because there is no game that pays homage to the good old days of Lucas Arts and co. You don”t have to think outside the box when puzzling and combine the gearwheel from the setting icon with an object on the screen, for example, where would we get to that?
In this game, you”ll find a lot of fun.
In There is No Game, you”re certainly not playing with the game itself against a glitch that pisses you and the non-game off. And you”re certainly not travelling through video game history or recognising old classics in the process.
And now read on. There”s no game to recommend here.
60 Seconds! Reatomised
(Genre: Strategy – Release: July 25, 2019 – Developer: Robot Gentleman – Price: 4,99 Euro (reduced by 50 percent))
No recommendation list without post-apocalypse! Here you play a family shortly before and after the nuclear annihilation strike and see what happens when you”re not in a Vault like in Fallout, but in your home bunker. Home sweet home and all that. But before it”s off to the safe basement dwelling, you have exactly 60 seconds to throw everything important out of your pad into the basement – that includes your family members, by the way.
Depending on who and what you have saved in the bunker, the real fun begins. Because now you have to see how you survive. How do you ration your cans? What do you do against boredom and madness? Do you send family members out into the radioactive wasteland? And what happens when they come back as mutants? In 60 Seconds! you”ll have to make all these decisions by diary and weigh up the sacrifices you want to make.
Oxenfree
(Genre: Adventure – Release: 15 January 2016 – Developer: Night School Studio – Price: 1,63 Euro (reduced by 80 percent))
No recommendation list without post-apocalypse! Here you play a family shortly before and after the nuclear annihilation strike and see what happens when you”re not in a Vault like in Fallout, but in your home bunker. Home sweet home and all that. But before it”s off to the safe basement dwelling, you have exactly 60 seconds to throw everything important out of your pad into the basement – that includes your family members, by the way.
Depending on who and what you have saved in the bunker, the real fun begins. Because now you have to see how you survive. How do you ration your cans? What do you do against boredom and madness? Do you send family members out into the radioactive wasteland? And what happens when they come back as mutants? In 60 Seconds! you”ll have to make all these decisions by diary and weigh up the sacrifices you want to make.
Oxenfree
(Genre: Adventure – Release: 15 January 2016 – Developer: Night School Studio – Price: 1,63 Euro (reduced by 80 percent))
All Alex really wanted to do was take her stepbrother to a sleepover party. But the old military island where the teenagers are celebrating holds a dark secret or two. A lot can happen before morning comes and the group can leave the island again.
Oxenfree relies on a unique mix of exploration and dialogue decisions. You walk around the island in 2D and, with the help of a radio, receive voices from the afterlife that give you insights into what once happened on the island. At the same time, you have to deal with the group of rebellious teenagers who – depending on your decision – are sometimes more, sometimes less your friends. If you prefer thrillers to horror and want to play something short (approx. 4-5 hours of game time), Oxenfree is the right choice for you.
The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles
(Genre: Visual Novel – Release: July 27, 2021 – Developer: Capcom – Price: 24.79 Euro (reduced by 38 percent))
No recommendation list without Phoenix Wright. The detective games from Japan have a very special place in my heart because they combine all the things I love: great characters with depth, an exciting, unpredictable story, self-deprecating humour and some good murder mysteries!
The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is the prequel to all the other Phoenix Wright games. Set in late 19th century London, you take on the role of Ryunosuke Naruhodo (an ancestor of Phoenix Wright, named Ryuichi Naruhodo in Japanese), a junior lawyer. He gets into one mess after another and always finds himself in the English court as a criminal defence lawyer.
If you haven”t had any experience with Phoenix Wright before, you can get started with Ace Attorney Chronicles without any prior knowledge. You”ll only fail to understand one or two allusions, but they”re irrelevant to the grand main story that spans the two games included in the Chronicles.
Orwell: Keeping an Eye On You
(Genre: Adventure – Release: Oct 27, 2016 – Developer: Osmotic Studios – Price: 2.49 Euro (reduced by 75 percent))
In these days of controversial chat control laws, giant data octopi and AI, the dystopian world of George Orwell”s 1984 and the game based on it, Orwell: Keeping an Eye On You, no longer seems so far away.
As a member of Orwell”s staff, you investigate the digital lives of your fellow citizens to find the perpetrators of a series of terrorist attacks. In the process, you scan websites, private chats and files for exciting information. In a second step, you are supposed to pass this information on to your contact at the authorities. But is this really a clever idea? What happens if your information leads to false conclusions and innocent people die? These are the moral questions we face in Orwell. The point-and-click adventure plays with your decisions and your deductions.
Boyfriend Dungeon
(Genre: Action – Release: Aug 11, 2021 – Developer: Kitfox Games – Price: 11.89 Euro (reduced by 30 percent))
There are things you don”t even know you want until they”re there. Like dating your weapon in a dungeon crawler. That”s exactly what you do in Boyfriend Dungeon. In a world where deadly weapons can be absurdly pretty people at the same time, anything is possible.
The Weapon People have a bigger problem at the moment: they are kidnapped unconscious and found by you in the so-called Dunj, which are teeming with monsters. Together you fight your way to the deepest level to kill the boss. In the upper world, on the other hand, you meet in human form for dates or just for a nice chat. Boyfriend Dungeon combines two completely foreign genres (dating sim and action rougelite) into a fantastic mix of fast-paced combat, deep conversations and hot dates – and that”s what makes it so great.
Max Gentleman Sexy Business!
(Genre: Management Simulation – Release: 25. February 2020 – Developer: The Men Who Wear Many Hats – Price:8,39 Euro (reduced by 50 percent))
Do you have any other games that no one but you would recommend? Then write them down in the comments!
