They All Rolled Over And Two Fell Out : The Steam Winter Sale

Happy New Year everyone! 

And with that out of the way, rest assured this is safe place! There will be no resolutions, predictions, reviews or any other acknowledgment of the change of date. There may be some looking ahead or looking back but nothing that mightn't just as easily crop up in a post here at any time of year.

For example, I'm about to recount my time with this year's Steam Winter Sale, which is only seasonal in the loosest sense of the word. It's still going, by the way, in case you haven't committed. You still have until 10AM Pacific tomorrow to make your mind up. Unless you're reading this after then, of course, in which case I guess you'll have to wait for the next one.

This year, I bought some games in the sale, which might well be the first time ever. It wasn't as as many as it could have been but it was still quite a few for me. 

I took my time over it, too. I had a good look at what was on offer when the sale began and picked out half a dozen likely prospects. For reasons that aren't entirely clear to me now but presumably related to me planning some kind of blog post about it, I took a screenshot of my Basket so I can confirm the six games I picked. I'm pretty sure I'd have forgotten the ones I didn't buy already, otherwise.

I can remember how I made my choices though. My thinking went like this:

Divinity Original Sin: played D:OS2 a few years ago and enjoyed it, until it annoyed me and I stopped. Never finished it but I clocked up over ninety hours, making it my sixth most-played game on Steam. It seems a fair bet that I'd get some value out of the original, although you do have to assume the sequel improved on it, so it could feel disappointing in comparison. The deciding factor here, though, was the price. At 90% off it seems positively rude to refuse.

Solasta: Crown of the Magister - Lost Valley: This is DLC for the main game, which I played last year and mostly enjoyed until the very end, when I couldn't beat the final boss. That was fine because I realised I didn't need to anyway, since when you do the game just stops so why even bother? This DLC adds a complete campaign, starting at Level 1 using fresh characters, so it's basically a new game on top of the old one. Reviews are decent and although the discount isn't huge, it was cheap to begin with so why not?

Cloudpunk: Had this on my Wishlist for a while. Not sure when I added it or how I came to hear of it but it very much looks like my sort of thing. It's a cross between NeoCab, which I loved but which apparently took me less than five hours to finish. (Seemed like a lot more but in a good way...) and Cyberpunk 2099, which I really would like to try but is a) still too pricy for me even at 50% off and b) might not run well on my aging PC. 65% is a very attractive discount and again this one wasn't very expensive even at full price.

Penny Larceny: Gig Economy Supervillain, Hello Goodboy, Cats and the Other Lives: I added all three of these to my Wishlist after I played their demos at various Next Fests. They've all been on sale before and I haven't succumbed so either the discounts back then weren't great or I don't want to play them as much as all that. 80% on Cats... is very appealing and 65% on Goodboy is pretty sweet. 40% on Penny isn't all that tempting but conversely it's definitely the demo, of the three, that I enjoyed the most.

I am quite good at not rushing to judgment on this sort of thing and the sale does run for a while so I left the six in my basket until after Christmas, then sat down and had another look. In the second round, only Penny Larceny failed to make the cut. I do want to play it but I'm pretty sure I can do better than 40% off - although now I check, that's the best offer there's ever been for the game on Steam so maybe I can't.

I still didn't press the Buy button. I gave it another couple of days for the final thrill of the hunt to dissipate, then I went back a third time. I was about to buy all five when it occured to me that there was one game in the list that I didn't really remember much about: Hello Goodboy. All I could recall was the obvious fact that it had a dog in it. 

That lack of recognition seemed concerning. I could remember quite a lot about both Cats and the Other lives and Penny Larceny so not knowing anything about Hello Goodboy other than what I could deduce from the title and the thumbnail seemed odd. 

So I did a little digging, by which I mean I read some of the Steam Reviews. The common theme among them seemed to be how very short the game was. That made me wonder just how much more entertainment I was likely to get out of the full game than I'd already gotten from the demo. Added to that, it's one of those games where extended gameplay comes from replaying the whole thing several times to see all the different endings, something I almost never do. I pretty much always accept whatever ending I get and move on.

With that new information, I not only took Hello Goodboy out of my basket, I culled it from my Wishlist, too. I should probably go back and do that to a few more games I added after playing Next Fest demos. As I've said a few times, for me there are often quite substantial diminishing returns from full games after I've played the demo. I can be something of a tapas gamer at times.

That left me with the four titles shown above, which I duly purchased, although not without a modicum of confusion as to what I'd actually bought. Somewhat confusingly Solasta: Lost Valley appears on the invoice but doesn't merit it's own spot in my Library, being subsumed as DLC into its parental Solasta tab and I seem to have been gifted not only the listed D:OS - Enhanced Edition but also D:OS Classic as well, which does apear in its own right in the Library. What the difference beteen them might be or why anyone would want both I have no idea and most likely I'll never find out because I'm sure I won't be playing both.

The whole enterprise cost me less than £20, well under my budget, so I may yet add another game or two before the sale ends. On the other hand, there's the small issue of finding the time to play whatever I buy, so maybe not.

On that, I have already made a start, at least. I put an hour and a half into Cloudpunk over the last two evenings. I'm loving it so far but I find it takes too much concentration to stick with for much more than an hour at a stretch. I can see why some reviewers describe it as a chill experience - certainly I haven't had to fight anything yet - but they must be considerably better at flying a hovercar than I am.

More on that one, no doubt, when I get further into the story. So far it seems charmingly episodic but I suspect there's a more robust narrative lurking beneath the surface. Cyberpunk tales are rarely heartwarming, after all.