It’s been a while! Life has been going at a crazy pace and my traditional outlet of blogging has taken a backseat to, well, survival I guess. This holiday break is doing wonders to my sanity!

First, I want to restate for the dozenth time, the Steam Deck friggin’ rules. More than half of my existing Steam library is verified, and another quarter are playable. Things that aren’t typically are mouse/keyboard heavy, too old, has a weird launcher (looking at you Ubisoft), or just not optimized. Playing something like Cyberpunk Liberty City on this thing is a right joy. I am continually impressed and still feel like I’m holding the future of gaming in my hands – more so now that Microsoft bought out Acti-Blizz and Sony plans to port more to the PC. The downside is the harder-to-get-running other game stores, like Epic or GoG. It works, just not easy to get done.

Now to the topic at hand, the Steam Winter Sale. Or as it seems to have evolved, the everything-is-on-sale sale. My entire wishlist seems to be there, and savings seem to average around the 30%. In some cases, this is a great deal, in others (SquareEnix is bad for this), the base price is just dumb so the savings put it down to “I may consider buying it”. There are just so many games out there, it’s going to take a lot to convince me to play a $90 game on sale for $60.

So what have I picked up?

• Sea of Stars & Octopath Traveller 2 are set up on my deck. I’ll get to them in a bit
• Guardians of the Galaxy. A seriously impressive 3rd person action game with the humor of the comics, great controls, wicked fights, and a kick ass soundtrack. I almost feel bad not having played this earlier!
• Robocop. This is timetravelling back to the late 80s in all the grimy glory. It has a solid storyline, the “heft” of being Robocop, the exact tone from the first two films, and frankly less jarring given that we are living in this world today. There are issues with character growth (max vitality is pretty much a requirement) and the gun customization (auto-reload is beyond OP), but they wash away in the larger scheme.
• Talos Principle 2. A beyond solid puzzle game, with a seriously strong philosophical debate within. With about 150 puzzles inside, I could solve almost all with some time to think. Two of them required mechanics I didn’t grasp until I saw the solution. The storyline would make for a great sci-fi flick.
• Graveyard Keeper. Sort of Stardew Valley with more quests and less time/energy to do things. You can make zombies to automate things, and the DLC are all but required to truly enjoy the game. There’s a (very) late game buff that auto-generates energy that completely changes the pace of the game… I’d go so far as to get a mod to put that in earlier.
• Techtonica. This is an RPG with production chain elements, a sort of merger between Factorio’s grid-based design and Satisfactory’s exploration mechanics. It’s in early access, I saw Nilaus’ videos about it, gave it a shot. I like that the tech tree growth is based on quests and logical progression. I like the setting (tight spaces) and controls. I like the idea of production chains, but they are simply too complex at the start, with poor building option to find much joy. It goes too wide, too fast, and requires too much effort to “port” factories across the map. To me this is simply balancing, a natural step of any game in early access.

I’ve still got more to get through, and a few more sales that are catching my eye. Cocoon and V Rising are on the list, but at a price where I don’t mind paying full price to support great games. It’s been a hell of a 2023 for gaming, fingers crossed the pace continues next year.