Alright, I’ve mourned summer enough, please bring on the fall weather and everything that accompanies it. Well, almost everything. The neat thing about summer is that it’s prime time for deals on video games,, and this narrow window between the end of summer vacation and the actual beginning of autumn is the last bit of time for stores to squeeze some sales out before the heavy-hitting releases of the year start dropping every other week. In other words, here are a bunch of great games to check out on the cheap before Black Ops 6 rolls around and ruins your productivity and spending habits.
Untitled Goose Game
Untitled Goose Game has the benefit of being the most straightforward game included here. In it, you play as the titular fowl as they go about terrorizing the neighborhood. Rather than being some kind of freewheeling, open-world sandbox for chaos like Goat Simulator, Untitled Goose Game is actually secretly a stealth game. The goal is to get away with causing as much mayhem in the little English village as possible without getting caught. This includes ruining someone’s backyard, an avenue full of storefronts, and all manner of otherwise quiet, domestic settings. All the while, your rampage is set to classical music that quiets and loudens based on the current state of emergency. The whole thing feels much more elevated and elegant than it first appears, and I think that’s part of Untitled Goose Game’s appeal. Nowadays, you can even play it cooperatively, and two geese simply sounds like too much for this poor little town to deal with. Terrorize the locals and become untethered in Untitled Goose Game, which is going for $US10 on the Epic Games Store.
Gravity Circuit
The first few Mega Man X games are among the most cherished games of my childhood, and anything in that vein has immediately earned my attention and admiration. Gravity Circuit is one such game, but it’s even more interesting because it actually strips you of your blaster and focuses on melee combat and combos. It took me a while to wrap my head around that pretty drastic change, but once I did, Gravity Circuit really opened up, and just thinking about it now makes me want to pick it back up and actually finish the game. If you like games that love to throw twists on tried-and-true formulas, Gravity Circuit is well worth picking up for $US8.49.
Remnant 2
Remnant 2 is the pulpiest sci-fi action game you’re going to get. Often described as “Dark Souls with guns,” Remnant 2 is some of the most unabashed fun you can get out of a game. Shoot and satisfyingly dodge-roll your way through dark fantasy and sci-fi settings in a world-hopping adventure that feels ripped from the covers of schlocky novellas from another era. In the meantime, you’re also constantly earning new loot and progressing your class, which includes archetypes like the tank as well as one loadout that gives you a great dog as an AI companion. Its story has a sci-fi B-movie feel to it, being just coherent enough to propel you through its beats, but not enough to have tremendous staying power. In short, Remnant 2 is just the right amount of nonsense, and I loved playing it. It’s probably even better in co-op and now that most of its DLC is out, you’ll likely have even more sick-looking plant aliens to blast to bits. You can get the deluxe edition of Remnant 2 for $US30 on EGS.
Cyberpunk 2077
Despite my best efforts, I have not been able to shake Cyberpunk 2077 since playing it for the first time last year. It had one of the messiest launches ever, and is no doubt still riddled with blemishes and imperfections, and yet everywhere I turn, I still see Night City. I see Afterlife and Rogue sitting in the back of it. I see Johnny Silverhand and a view of the city from the outskirts of town. I see Santo Domingo, a neighborhood named after the capital of my mother country, and how rundown it is. I see the dilapidated ruins of Dogtown and the glow of the Heavy Hearts Club’s massive pyramid jutting out of it. I miss it all the time. I miss my V, and I miss his friends and his partner. Warts and all, Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the most unforgettable games I’ve played, and I still haven’t been able to place my thumb on exactly why. If getting lost in a world filled with people making the best of a shitty situation sounds like something that could mean a lot to you, you can pick up Cyberpunk 2077 for $US30 and its ultimate edition (which packs in the phenomenal Phantom Liberty expansion) for $US53.59.
RoboCop: Rogue City
I’ve only ever watched people play RoboCop: Rogue City, but from that alone, I’ve been able to glean that it’s actually a decent game that captures the spirit of the original movie. In it, you’re the eponymous character and you do exactly as he would do: you shoot, kill, and otherwise maim criminals. If this sounds simplistic, it’s because it is, and Rogue City thrives on that. It doesn’t have huge aspirations, and because the developers appeared to keep the game’s scope in check, they were able to make a competent AA-quality shooter with modest depth that adapts the original movie’s grisly violence pretty faithfully. You are a walking, talking tank who blasts and punches enemies to literal bits. You can grab enemies by the neck and fling them around. It’s a game that just nails the power fantasy of being RoboCop, and you can be him by picking up the game for $US25.
Jusant
Don’t Nod is most famous these days for making the Life Is Strange series, but it has spent the last few years taking the goodwill and resources from the massive success of those games to make a ton of markedly different games. One such game is Jusant, a game about a boy with the singular goal of climbing an impossibly high mountain. There is no combat and I’m pretty sure there’s no dialogue either. All you do is climb. I love games that focus on a thing and make it the most entertaining, challenging, and all-consuming version of it possible, and that’s how I feel about climbing in Jusant. After decades of playing through video game setpieces, it’s pretty easy to see through the artifice of scenarios designed to rouse me. I’m rarely, if ever, on the edge of my seat, muscles and jaw tightened due to the sheer exhilaration of a sequence. I was in that state for the entirety of my time with Jusant though. You can feel the thrills of surmounting the highest peak, too, by picking up Jusant for $US16.24.
Saints Row
Haters be damned, the newest Saints Row game was good. Maybe even great. It is not some ambitious and fundamental rework of the series that people grew to love, and it definitely isn’t the politically correct “woke” shit that certain people accused it of being. It was a fresh new skin on the exact same formula that made the series so widely loved in the first place. It’s maybe a bit more earnest than its predecessors, but that didn’t stop it from also being crass and inane, which are key tenets of what made Saints Row click for most of its audience. People just kind of wanted to hate this game and barely gave it a chance. If you played and loved the earlier games like I did, and just want another one of those with even more customization tools and a fun new setting in the American Southwest, there’s no reason not to pick up the new Saints Row. Crucially, it’s also only $US9, and you can get the gold edition with the expansion pass for just one more dollar.
Session: Skate Sim
Until the next Skate comes out, you may as well pick up the best possible skating simulator out there. Session is perhaps the most technical of all the skating games on offer, but it is alsothe most freeing. There’s no scoring, and there’s no real story there either. All you do is make your character, hop on your board, and cruise around real-life locales. The only goal is whatever you want out of that session. It’s beautiful and relaxing. Whenever I picked up skating as a teenager, I really just wanted to glide. Tricks and races were cool, but skating has always been about a vibe to me, and that’s what Session is built upon. You can chase that vibe down by picking up Session: Skate Sim for $US12.
System Shock
System Shock is one of the most stunning remakes of a game there is. It’s a complete visual overhaul of the 1994 original, but one that manages to maintain what made that game so legendary and profoundly influential. All of the friction of it is still there, and it is one the most densely textured games I’ve ever seen. It even features the return of the original voice for System Shock’s villain, SHODAN. If you’ve ever wondered about the history of immersive sims (a genre of game I’m obsessed with), there’s no better way to experience the moment where it all clicked into place than buying this very sensible and very faithful recreation of one of the genre’s formative texts. You can dive into System Shock for just $US18.
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