dailynewsnblog
With each passing year, the PC gaming scene grows increasingly fragmented. More games are released, and on average they’re better, too. There’s just not enough time to cover them all, and 2025 was packed with gems you probably haven’t heard of. For those willing to go just a little off the beaten path, the current Steam Winter Sale looks like a never-ending bounty of undersold treasures. So here’s a carefully curated selection of 15 of my favorites to consider during the last couple days of sales season.
Here are the rules I’m narrowing things down with:
- Released (or otherwise re-released) in 2025: A fresh crop of recent underdogs
- Little to no coverage on PC Gamer before: Played & recommended by me
- Undersold, not underrated: Only gems hovering around 95% positive user score
- Offbeat, within reason: Fewer sicko picks this season, plenty of refreshing flavors
- 30% discount minimum: Wouldn’t be a proper sales roundup without savings
- One game per genre, with as wide a range as possible: Something for everyone
Since the year was so densely packed, I’m annoying the editors by slipping in a thematically related (but less beholden to the rules) alternative to each pick, for 30 games total. As ever, shout out your favourites, or comment if I helped you find something that made your heart sing. Let’s go!
Watch On
Price: $21 / £17.50 (30% off) | Developer: Siris Pendrake
A stunning testament to what a (mostly) solo developer can do with a modern engine and some stock asset packs. Still in early access, but already a very polished, lengthy and non-linear STALKER-inspired shooter with a funky setting. Mankind is effectively extinct. Lizard-people (which you’re one of) have inherited the ruins of our civilization, and ancient fae magics leak in through the cracks of reality, as if rogue super-science wasn’t enough.
Project Silverfish feels like a pared-down, greased-up version of STALKER. Faster, twitchier, impressively polished (at the expense of some detail), able to run great on even lower-spec machines and requiring less fiddling around between sorties. Expect to be thrown into messy multi-faction battles right off the bat with loads of loot, getting you into deeper expeditions early.
Alternatively: ADACA (50% off) – The previous game from the same developer, and effectively two games in one: A Half-Life 2/Halo-inspired story campaign and a STALKER-lite sandbox. Both surprisingly slick (and officially finished as of 2024), but Silverfish’s open world & systems are on another level.
Price: $14 / £11.72 (30% off) | Developer: Figburn & Melon
Hands up if you’ve still got a special place in your heart for Flash-era gaming, specifically Newgrounds. Contract Rush DX is a game forged in those familiar fires. It’s a little bit Mega Man, a little bit Contra and more than a dash of Alien Hominid, all held together with globs of slick vectorized cartoon animation, unrealistic hyperviolence and goofy humor. They don’t often make them like this anymore.
Contract Rush DX doesn’t rest on its nostalgic laurels though. There’s a beefy, smart platformer here, with its main levels playable in any order and each with a distinct feel and mechanical twist. Recruit new characters to access extra areas or tackle bonus side-missions and work your way closer to the lore-laden reveals of the game’s well-hidden True Ending.
Alternatively: Seafrog (50% off) – Another platforming gem that fell between the cracks, now refreshed and under a new publisher’s banner. A slick, high-technique blend of traditional platforming and Tony Hawk style skating, with big rewards for chaining long trick combos, giving every stage real replay value.
Watch On
Price: $12 / £10.05 (40% off) | Developer: LimboLane
Not just a hidden gem, but one of my favourites of 2025. You’re a Godpoke, wrangler of deities, sent to help put the bickering gods of this bizarre cartoon world back on the straight-and-narrow to avert the apocalypse. A refreshing take on the point-and-click adventure, as rather than hoard every item you find, you make up for your own quiet nature by using your suck ‘n’ blow megaphone to steal phrases from characters’ dialogue and deploying them elsewhere as potential solutions. Or just to goof around.
As with LimboLane’s previous Smile For Me, this is an entire world of Weird Little Guys, even the cosmically huge gods. Everyone’s at least a little bit of a freak, but they’re all weirdly lovable. Especially the chaotically helpful ‘bizzyboys’ gang, the solution to and source of half the game’s problems, and frequently featured in some deeply strange FMV puppet-show segments.
Alternatively: Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo (40% off) – another offbeat adventure about hanging out with weird little guys of myth and legend. This time you’re a snake-spirit in the Latin-American afterlife, trying to puzzle out how to break the eternal day-long loop that the dead are trapped in. Heartfelt, bittersweet and frequently funny.
Watch On
Price: $14 / £11.72 (30% off) | Developer: 13AM Games, Mighty Yell
If you were to make a new Missile Command game, what kind of game would it be? Probably not ‘Teen drama escape-room with tactical hex-based strategy’. This bizarre hybrid hasn’t sold well at all, but it’s a shockingly good and engaging time. Four teens set out to explore an abandoned cold war bunker, only to find themselves wrapped up in an escalating crisis necessitating a lot of point-and-click style puzzling and some almost Into The Breach-esque defensive turn-based battling.
The combat involves planning moves two or three steps ahead, saving resources by catching multiple incoming missiles in chaining explosions, just like the old arcade game. The two halves dovetail nicely, using smaller defensive battle simulations as puzzle elements, while the larger, higher-stakes battles can dig into your stock of missile launch keycards that you scavenge from the dusty corners of the adventuring puzzle rooms, making resource conservation all the more vital. Tense and smart.
Alternatively: Is This Game Trying To Kill Me? (50% off) – Another genre-hopping escape room adventure, although this one feels heavily inspired by Inscryption, as you explore a haunted videogame and the videogames within that videogame while being tormented by the (weirdly affable) entity lurking outside the rain-slick cabin window. Fun, goofy meta-narrative puzzling.
Watch On
Price: $6 / £5.10 (40% off) | Developer: Bubby Darkstar
Shooty is our best, last line of defence against a possible robot invasion. Her crack team of robot-hunting pals are goofing off at the beach today. She doesn’t have any clean clothes so she’s requisitioning her commander’s trousers today. Oh, and the robots are finally invading, but they don’t seem to be especially threatening so you can just take your time and do some errands around town. Nobody seems too threatened.
Shooty Shooty Robot Invasion feels like playing a webcomic. A particularly raucous, bright and chaotic one. Perhaps I’m just weird, but it’s one of the funniest games I’ve played this past year, only really beaten out by Skin Deep. It’s 70% exploring and meeting weird people and helping them with their daily problems, 30% light FPS combat as you blast robots using your special high-tech anti-robot bullets that only hurt machines. It’s a surprisingly full package as well, clocking in at ~8 hours of shenanigans. Longer, if you’re hunting for each mini open world level’s secret sidequests.
Alternatively: Fragrance Point (50% off) – Another ‘Goofing around with weirdos’ adventure, with a great rendercore aesthetic and an esoteric sci-fi spin. You’re a new being, constructed to complete a very specific mission that you never got told because you accidentally blew up the tutorial by spitting lipstick everywhere. But hey, this space station seems to be a 24/7 party zone, so just go with the flow!
![Maliki: Poison Of the Past [GAMES] Launch Trailer - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/36OvbkB0Csg/maxresdefault.jpg)
Watch On
Price: $18 / £15 (40% off) | Developer: Blue Banshee
In a fit of spectacularly unfortunate timing, Maliki: Poison Of The Past was an offbeat take on the JRPG formula by a French studio released just two days before Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. It’s arguably even more French, being based on a very long-running anime-tinged francophone webcomic, although no knowledge of the source material is needed to enjoy this standalone time-travelling adventure in high-intensity gardening.
There is a lot going on here. Traditional turn-based RPG combat (with some timeline shenanigans); time-manipulating puzzles reminiscent of Zelda, with each party member bringing a new puzzle-solving power to the mix; even some low-impact farming between sorties across the timeline on your quest to stop the titular Poison, an evil plant-entity spreading its roots across space and time.
It would be easy to draw comparisons to Chrono Trigger, but this one is a rich enough mix of inspirations to feel like its own thing.
Alternatively: Wander Stars (33% off) – Another offbeat take on classic JRPG tropes, this time from Venezuela, and paying more than a little tribute to Akira Toriyama’s wacky world of pint-sized martial artists and screwball comedy. Gorgeous art, simple, fight-heavy progression and creative combat where you collect a deck of words to chain into increasingly silly attack names to yell at full volume.
Desecrators – Procedural 6DoF shooter
Watch On
Price: $10.50 / £7 (30% off) | Developer: Woodhound
I’ve always had a soft spot for free-flying PSX-era shooter Forsaken, a faster, louder version of Descent. Despite an excellent (and cheap!) Nightdive remaster, it seemed doomed to fall into obscurity. But tiny studio Woodhound seems to hold a special torch for it too, releasing this roguelike tribute out of early access in 2025. It looks, sounds and plays almost exactly like Forsaken, right down to the intentionally blurry ‘early 3D accelerator’ textures and overbearing colored lighting, but now with near endless replay value and online co-op support.
While Desecrators might lose something by not having hand-crafted levels, it does a very good job of procedurally generating labyrinthine mazes of tunnels, chambers and combat zones to blast through, punctuated with botmatch-style ‘invasions’ by rival treasure-hunters. It’s still growing, too, with new enemies and environments added in a recent update, along with tentative VR support for those with strong stomachs.
Alternatively: BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER 3: I OPENED A PORTAL TO HELL IN THE FAVELA TRYING TO REVIVE MIT AIA I NEED TO CLOSE IT (30% off) – Another very singular tribute, although more of a deep cut. A tongue-in-cheek dive into the world of Brazil’s early modding and game-dev scene, filled with in-jokes weirdness and an AMAZING title. But even taken purely on face value, it’s a fun shooter running on the original Quake engine.
Watch On
Price: $3 / £2.55 (70% off) | Developer: Leafy Games
Short, sweet and low-impact. At three dollars, it’s very easy to recommend Wyrmhall, a game about being a funny little goblin running an artifact-cleaning stall in the middle of an interdimensional nexus. Weirdos from across the multiverse wander in, show you their cool (but all gunked up) cursed/blessed/incredibly dangerous doodads, chatting with you as you delouse, scrub and polish them up. The artifacts, not the clients. Although sometimes they’re one and the same.
Clocking in at just a couple hours long (with no shortage of twists and turns), this isn’t an intense or complex game, but it is extremely funny, like playing through an extended Adventure Time skit full of gloriously wacky characters and some fun dialogue options that let you embrace your inner goblin. A good reminder that ‘cozy’ gaming doesn’t just have to be about repackaged farming lifestyle fantasies. Sometimes you just wanna go Goblin Mode.
Alternatively: Trash Goblin (40% off) – Would you believe that 2025 had TWO games about being a funny little goblin that cleans up strange artifacts? Trash Goblin is a bit less funny, but more technical, involved and mechanically engaging, using a lot more tools and upcycling to make your own goodies. Hell of a coincidence for lightning to strike twice.
Watch On
Price: $14 / £11.72 (30% off) | Developer: Pocket Trap
It’s a common lament that Nintendo has little interest in ‘traditional’ Zelda games now, favoring open world grandiosity over the classic NES and SNES-era format. Fortunately indies have you covered, and few do it as well as Pipistrello. The bones are solid—all the dungeon-crawling, puzzle-solving action you’d expect, fleshed out with a funky modern urban setting populated by rough-edged (but adorable) graffiti-styled critters, and with a few modern ideas like buying character upgrades on credit and paying them off over time.
The star of the show is the titular Cursed Yoyo. Weapon, mobility gadget, multifunctional puzzle-solving tool and just fun to show off with, you’ll be collecting new tricks for it all game long and each one opens up interesting new paths, making revisiting older areas engaging. Use slanted blocks to hit entire rooms with one spin, slam it against walls to launch yourself backwards over pits, and bypass obstacles by dragging yourself along using its string. It’s just a joy to use.
Alternatively: Zefyr: A Thief’s Melody (75% off) – ‘Retro’ extends well into the Gamecube era these days, and if you’re after something a little more Wind Waker-inspired, Zefyr is an excellent PC alternative. The work of a solo developer over the course of twelve years, this one’s a satisfying piratical fantasy adventure with some great puzzle-laden dungeons.
Lingo 2 – Wordy puzzlevania
Price: $7 / £5.95 (30% off) | Developer: Brenton Wildes
Loathe as I am to utter the word ‘Metroidbrainia’, it feels appropriate here. Lingo 2 is a brilliantly smart word puzzle adventure through a minimalist, Minecraft-esque block labyrinth where you interact with the world by typing letters into terminals. Simple. Except that you have to unlock one letter at a time like Metroid upgrades, and the phrase-and-response puzzles get painfully smart, fast. Sometimes you’re looking for a word of the inverse meaning, or an anagram, or a palindrome, or a synonym, or a chain of words that connect several terminals together.
The deeper you get, the more puzzles become available, and the more complex the world becomes, with secrets, hidden paths and optional areas seemingly everywhere with puzzles both spatial and lexical. My only gripe is that the game can be a bit US-centric, with some puzzles referring to specific American brands or idioms, but I never found it too egregious. The original Lingo is also discounted, and has its own set of puzzle mechanics so you can play them in any order.
Alternatively: Rules & Rodents (40% off) – On the other end of the puzzle scale is Rules & Rodents, which is entirely wordless. A cute little mouse plots a cheese heist/escape armed with a magical scroll that holds pictograms that enable or disable specific gameplay rules controlling both you and the adorably animated rat guards. Just a few hours long, but feels perfectly paced with a surprisingly dramatic finale.
Skogdal – Norwegian dirtbag deckbuilding
Watch On
Price: $10 / £8.37 (50% off) | Developer: Erlend Kirkeboe, Kay Arne Kirkeboe
You can’t go 10 minutes without bumping into a Slay the Spire-inspired deckbuilder these days, but few have the scribbly, grimy vision of Skogdal. Set in small-town ’90s Norway, you’ll be making your way through the streets battling an assortment of meatheads, weirdos and wildlife, all rendered in lumpen pencil-sketch comic style. There’s a bit of Beavis and Butthead energy here as your crew of weird losers clash with retro pop culture seen through a uniquely Nordic lens.
While each playable character brings their own gimmicks to the table, there’s a big focus here on summoning friends into battle, who add their own cards to your deck and often add activatable powers to your party. While run-based, there’s an increasingly weird story that unfurls as you complete runs, unlocking new characters (including a knock-off Norwegian Steven Segal) and new routes through the region. Not being Norwegian, some of the gags flew over my head, but most of them feel universal enough to land.
Alternatively: Crown Gambit (40% off) – The latest from the team behind previous hidden gem Aetheris. A gorgeously illustrated twist on the card-battler format, split about 50/50 between visual novel-ish gothic knightly intrigue (with multi-choice dialogues) and party-based strategic battles. The two halves interplay, with the size and shape of the combat play-field shifting to reflect the prose.
Schism – Low-fi action roguelike
Watch On
Price: $7.79 / £6.50 (35% off) | Developer: Fami
Rough-edged, low-fi and abrasive in style, Schism feels like the kind of game I devoured in my youth. The kind of vaguely punk design that ruled in the late DOS shareware era. Under the intentionally rough aesthetic lies a very smart, experimental take on Binding of Isaac-esque action roguelike shootery. Weird creatures, weird characters, and even weirder item synergies (thoughtfully evolved as this game stewed in early access) make this one refreshing to chew on even if you’re played a bunch of Games Like These.
Schism isn’t afraid to mentally overwhelm the player. Outside of the one small concession of pausing time as you enter a new room (letting you plan your initial movement before all hell breaks looks), there’s some Ikaruga-inspired polarity switching mechanics, letting you negate red or blue bullets. You’d think that’d make things easier, but it just gives the game an excuse to blanket the screen with projectiles. Intense fun.
Alternatively: Rift Wizard 2 (50% off) – Another low-fi roguelike, but more traditional in design. Positively archaic, even. Rift Wizard 2 feels most closely related to Chaos, an early cast-em-up by X-Com designer Julian Gollop. Rather than crawl through mazes for loot, each floor is a complex, open turn-based tactical battle demanding you use all your spells and summons.
My Little Puppy – Dog-based emotional devastation
Price: $17.50 / £14.69 (30% off) | Developer: Dreamotion Inc.
One of the higher-budget games here, released just a couple months ago. A silly but often heartstring-tugging, genre-hopping adventure about a corgi deciding to leave Dog Heaven after catching the distant scent of their human. Antics ensue, rainbow bridges are surfed across, adventures through the afterlife are had and not a single chance is missed to squeeze Big Feels out of the audience.
As you might imagine it’s not especially challenging stuff, but there’s enough variety across the adventure (including a bunch of minigames and light challenges) to keep you engaged and paying attention. Long enough to keep eyes on the screen so you don’t miss any of its gorgeously animated cutscenes, bridged with hand-drawn art. There’s a real understanding here of how dogs move, especially the inherent wigglyness of short-legged friends like corgis, which means if you’ve ever had or lost a fuzzy little friend in your life, this one is going to hurt.
Alternatively: Koira (50% off) – A surprisingly similar adventure, this one with a silhouetted, storybook aesthetic. A hermit and their dog enjoy life and nature in the mountains, interacting with wildlife, communing with the spirits and absolutely not getting into any life-or-death ordeals or supernatural goings on. Needless to say, the dog is also very good. They all are.
Decade – Time travel mystery
Watch On
Price: $7 / £5.95 (30% off) | Developer: Last Piscean
A fantastically smart piece of sci-fi narrative experimentation. After the end of the world, three children discover a time machine. Perhaps the present can be rewritten, but the problem is that you can only send one person back at a time, with a single standing order and maybe one item, and they’re going to have to spend a decade in that era before returning to base and reporting in, perhaps bringing back an item with them.
Every choice is to be agonized over. The time spent in the past changes your trio. Personalities and statistics warp over time. Piecing together the origins of the apocalypse is just the first part of the puzzle, with over 20 possible endings depending on what factions you nudge or nurture, who you choose to assassinate and which child you choose for each expedition to the past. For a game presented almost entirely in (thoughtfully written) text and low-fi monochrome art, Decade is powerfully evocative.
Alternatively: No Time (35% off) – If you want your time travel a little less esoteric and more tangible, this Back To The Future-inspired sandbox immersive sim has been in early access since 2019, and just recently added the final mission in its main story arc, though there’s plenty yet to come.
Kiloton – Real-time nuclear strategy
Watch On
Price: $2.50 / £2.14 (50% off) | Developer: Jack Morehart
2025 was mostly a year for playing it safe in the strategy genre. DLCs, familiar genres, remasters and revivals. Kiloton is the sicko pick (I did say fewer, not none)—a minimalist, fast-paced simulation that feels like something lifted straight out of Wargames. The only winning game might be not to play, but playing with nukes can still be pretty fun. It’s a lightweight geopolitical sim where you’re ideally trying to avoid conflict, but every country is automatically jostling for position, with armies drawn to where there’s any gap in defences.
Diplomacy IS an option, but might just be denying the inevitable, and matches play out in a matter of minutes. What makes this game especially for sickos is that you play it entirely with the keyboard, with typed menu commands and simple menus navigated with the arrow keys, your clicking keypresses echoed in the game’s own soundscape. Great for building tension, and will keep your hands moving quickly as things spiral out of control.
Alternatively: Chip n’ Clawz vs The Brainioids (30% off) – Would you believe that the creator of X-Com released a new strategy game for 2025, and it totally flew under the radar? A cartoon action-strategy game (a bit like Brutal Legend) playable the whole way through in split-screen co-op or via Friend Pass. A great way to introduce kids to the genre, and not too shabby even for veterans.
And that’s it for 2025. It wasn’t an intentional theme, but there sure were a lot of games about terrifying apocalypses and hanging out with Weird Little Guys, weren’t there? Let’s avoid the former, and hang on to the latter in 2026.
At least the videogames will be good, eh?
Once again, I hope I’ve helped broaden your horizons a little, and maybe introduced you to a game or two to love. As always, check out my previous roundups below (and maybe even my Steam curator page, where everything I enjoy goes), as almost everything from previous sales is back again at even steeper discounts, and still as good as ever:
Until next time, and happy new year!
