It is officially fall. The temperature is already noticeably dropping, meaning layers are coming back into fashion and crunchy leaves are about to start decorating our pavements. Heavy blankets are getting hauled back out, unless they never went away, and games are going on sale to celebrate the coming of the best time of the year. GOG is already hosting a massive autumn sale, and the lineup of discounted games spans a few decades. If you can think of it, it’s probably on sale right now, and tons of great titles are more affordable than I’ve ever seen them. Without further ado, here are just a few notable selections from GOG’s crop of cheap games:
Sleeping Dogs
I’ve been playing Yakuza 0 for several months now, which has given me the appetite for another game that is similarly open-ended and features an in-depth melee combat system, meaning I had to reinstall Sleeping Dogs for the first time in about a decade. Sleeping Dogs switches things up though by placing you in the shoes of Wei Shen, an undercover cop in Hong Kong who goes back to his hometown to bring an end to the triads terrorizing it while getting revenge for his sister. By comparison, Sleeping Dogs is a much grislier, cinematic, and operatic crime drama and brawler, but it’s also got some really neat things going for it outside of these hooks.
Sleeping Dogs’ progression system, which tied abilities and passives to three separate gauges, was novel for the time. You had XP that’d be gained for the triads, the police, and the citizens, and each leaned into a different part of the experience.You get triad XP for being more violent in combat, or citizen XP for doing side missions, meaning you get out of the game what you put in. Police missions sometimes involve disguising Wei and sneaking into places to do hacking minigames and investigative work that break up the pace of the open-world action, and then there’s a whole host of side activities to do, as is par for the course, like street racing and karaoke. Sleeping Dogs successfully blends different styles of open-world games to offer impressive range and depth, and it’s criminal we never got a follow-up, but you can pick it up for $US3 on GOG and personally amend for that.
Disco Elysium
Disco Elysium is one of the most verbose and intimidating RPGs out there. Much has been made of its literary texture, complex dialogue systems and themes, art style, music, and more since it was released in 2019. It is, by my measure, the most acclaimed RPG of the last decade save for perhaps Baldur’s Gate 3. It is equally beautiful and downright ugly in the most complimentary way imaginable, and to really let on anything else about the game would be to do you a disservice. Grab Disco Elysium – The Final Cut while it’s only $US10 on GOG.
Firewatch
Firewatch is an all timer for me. Many folks got hooked on “walking sim” adventure games a few years earlier with Gone Home, but it was Firewatch’s irresistible style that sunk the genre’s claws into me. Henry and Delilah’s late night confessions to one another in the solitude of the Shoshone National Forest are still the best examples of deeply human and natural-feeling dialogue in video games. Firewatch is also masterfully paced, and while many have their reservations against its conclusion, I think the tension it builds in getting to that point is some of the best dramatic work in the medium, thanks in no small part to the game’s writing as well as Chris Remo’s impeccable score. It is, to me, what it looks like when something in the genre is firing on all cylinders. Firewatch is a stunning and haunting game that you should grab, especially considering it’s only $US4 on GOG right now.
Dishonored: Complete Collection
I’m still mourning Arkane’s closure. It’s simply not fair that one of the brightest teams in the AAA space no longer gets to make the wonderfully inventive and stylish games that they specialized in because one project went awry under bad management and pressures from publishers. While Prey is my favorite of their titles, you can’t go wrong picking up the Dishonored games either, which put Arkane on the map. These steampunk stealth games represent some of the very best of the immersive sim subgenre, especially in the 2010s, and boast a truly timeless style I don’t think I’ll ever tire of. I can take or leave its morality system, but Dishonored’s branching paths and inviting level design inspired some of my favorite off-the-cuff thinking, all the while allowing me to rip through the nobility of marvelously rich locales like the rat-infested Dunwall or the lush Karnaca. We got three of these bangers before Arkane kind of put the series on ice, and you can pick them all up by buying the Dishonored: Complete Collection for $US15 on GOG.
XCOM 2
In gaming circles there’s a time-honored tradition: name the members of your XCOM squad after your friends and watch as they float or sink under the weight of the hostile alien threat in this intimate tactics series. XCOM: Enemy Unknown brought the storied franchise back and seemingly restored interest in turn-based tactics games like it, but XCOM 2 was when the genre really blew up. Everyone was playing it when it was released, and considering the higher difficulty of the sequel, it led to even funnier and brutal runs of teams composed of all your closest friends. XCOM 2 also has the benefit of being a sequel: it’s got more fleshed out mechanics, generally better features, and enjoyed much more support, including the War of the Chosen expansion that everyone seemed to love and better infrastructure to host mods. You can grab one of the defining tactics games of the 2010s by picking up XCOM 2 for $US3, and if you’re interested, War of the Chosen will only run you another $US4.
Into The Breach
For tactics on an entirely different scale, I cannot recommend Into The Breach enough. Another all timer, Into The Breach may look deceptively small, but it’s actually massive. You play as a mech squadron sent back from the apocalyptic future to combat an alien threat. While the action is rendered on what appears to be a tiny grid, the mechs and aliens are actually engaging in ruinous kaiju-style combat. Knocking back an enemy into a mountain, for example, threatens to make it crumble, and because of how powerful every unit is, Into the Breach feels way more like a sweeping tug-of-war than an all-out display of strength. If you were to wield your power incorrectly, you could threaten the surviving cities of humans on the map, which provide energy to the mechs.
I really love the clever engagements that arise from the fragile conditions of the world and the limitations of your units. For example, it may be advantageous to bombard a city in order to push away an alien that’s going to destroy it, or push one of your own mechs in the way of a projectile to spare a factory or a time pod with a recruitable unit. Manipulating factors of the environment, like forests that can be set on fire or dams that can be destroyed to make rivers, is key to surviving, which is often the real goal of Into The Breach rather than conquest. Ultimately, it spins a simple power fantasy into a game that calls into question the efficacy of that dream, while simultaneously creating novel and dynamic struggles to overcome and providing a whole new playbook of solutions. Into the Breach is one of the very best there is, and it’s all yours for $US7.49 on GOG.
The Wolf Among Us
Right around the same time that Telltale was getting off the ground with its Walking Dead games, it also began to adapt another seminal comic book series called Fables. The result of that was the gritty fantasy noir The Wolf Among Us, which followed Bigby Wolf (based on the Big Bad Wolf) a grizzled private eye attempting to solve a murder in Fabletown, a kind of hidden enclave of storied characters from fairytales and folklore sitting in the middle of 1980s Manhattan. It is exactly the kind of grimdark version of cheery tales that started cropping up around the turn of the millenia, but also The Wolf Among Us itself kind of rules. It’s grittier than the very sentimental Walking Dead games, heavier on action, and feels more acutely stylized. I’m also simply a sucker for a good mystery, and not only does The Wolf Among Us feature a pretty great one, but it ends on a hell of a cliffhanger, which is supposed to be followed by the long-in-development sequel. Ahead of that being released in the near-ish future, you may as well get acquainted with Fabletown by picking up The Wolf Among Us on GOG for $US7.49.
Her Story
Her Story genuinely drove me mad. I felt frenzied as I scribbled every last detail and minor tick of Hannah Smith during her police interrogations. I was translating freaking Morse code for god’s sake! This mystery game, which is relayed entirely via FMV-style footage, has you combing through police interviews of a woman in connection to the murder of her husband and simply becomes so. Much. More. Even now, I struggle to think of a game that has so completely enthralled me to the point where I held my head in my hands contemplating its intricacies.I feel like Her Story, as well as other Sam Barlow games, have earned this reputation for being too heady or full of themselves, but they’re just titles that poke at the player and beg them to be a little more curious.Her Story prompted a lot of thought and reflection from me, and the night that I spent poring over every little detail of it is genuinely one of my most treasured memories of a game ever. If you give yourself over to it, you will hardly regret it. Her Story is literally just $US2 on GOG, so after picking it up, you may as well also get Immortality from the same developers for another $US12, because it is an absolute miracle of a game that builds on the former’s foundation so wonderfully.
Katana Zero
Katana Zero does kind of have it all. Its lightning fast combat, which demands you survive whole levels without being hit by a single enemy, is a thrill to master, and it looks and feels elegant. Its noir-adjacent world and style feels ripped from John Wick, and I love the presentation of its grimy and non-linear storyline. Plus it’s so clearly Hotline Miami distilled into a 2D hack ‘n’ slash. But mostly, I love Katana Zero for this one track that I haven’t been able to get out of my head. It’s called “Rain on Brick” and exceptionally captures my perfect ambiance. The soundtrack to my inner monologue, and some of the slickest 2D action, can be yours by picking up Katana Zero for $US9 on GOG.
Death’s Door
Death’s Door was my favorite game of 2021. Coming out of absolutely nowhere, I got it on the strength of everyone’s recommendations at the time, and now I replay it once a year. Essentially a top-down but still 3D Zelda game, Death’s Door follows a crow who works as a reaper for the now bureaucratic institution of death. However, the crow begins to unravel a conspiracy surrounding a figure known as the Lord of Doors and the disappearance of the embodiment of Death. While that’s a fine enough framework for the rest of the game, what I truly adore about Death’s Door is its tone.
Death’s Door is absolutely whimsical in the face of the dark fantasy it portrays. Its world, which often feels like if Dark Souls was grafted onto a Zelda overworld, is colored in with pastels and is filled with lovingly vibrant takes on sometimes drab archetypes. That it undermines such dark material as death often feels like the point of the game, which sees both the beauty and pain in passing. Meanwhile, it’s puzzling and action are more than sufficient on their own even if it mostly plays the hits, though I’m hardly one to complain about more of a good thing. Death’s Door is genuinely charming and good fun, melding familiar experiences and inspirations into something refreshing in tone and spirit, and it can be all yours for $US4 on GOG.
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