Steam Summer Sale Indie Roundup – July 22nd – Final Day

And here we are. The last final curtain call, and the end of a short and brutal campaign on your wallet. There’s now 24 hours to grab whatever you can at up to 80% off via Steam, and then things return to normal for another few months. This has been one of the more effective sales I’ve seen, with a lot of niche and indie games getting promoted solidly, and sales on even smaller titles outstripping AAA mega-hits. Here’s the last set of daily featured deals, and a round-up of recommended other items:

Today’s Individual Deals:

• Space Pirates and Zombies – 75% off – A charming 2D space combat/strategy/RPG hybrid. Starting out as a nobody in a lost corner of the universe, you set out to claim the mighty treasure of the Galactic core by the best way you know: Piracy! Beat up everyone in your path, steal their ship designs and manage a small fleet, constantly upgrading and levelling up as you go. It can get a bit repetitive later on due to the lack of variety in events and the procedurally generated universe, but an easy recommendation at this price.

• Bastion – 75% Off – One of the best indie releases in recent memory. A clever, creative take on the isometric action-RPG, narrated continually by a talented storyteller. Every tiny action, every item claimed and every enemy felled gets their own fully spoken narrative beat, and it all comes together quite spectacularly by the end. Not the biggest, hardest or deepest of games, but it has soul.

• Double Fine Collection – 75% Off – Questionably indie, although definitely one of the bigger players behind the rise of the Kickstarter phenomenon for indie funding. Double Fine have produced some great, compelling and excellently-written games over the years. This contains most of their recent output. Easily recommended.

Today’s Flash Deals – They’ll Be Gone Soon!

• Trine 2 – 75% off – 4 hours and counting down on this one. – Frozenbyte’s astonishingly good-looking platform puzzle adventure returns for an encore. Whimsical fairlytale storytelling, art to match, likeable characters and varied levels that require both direct and character-oriented logic to solve, there’s not much to dislike here. It’s even better with friends.

Today’s Indie Bundle (75% Off When Bought Together):

• Hydrophobia: Prophecy – Great water physics, and that’s just about it. Despite a huge set of overhauls and patches, the best this third-person shooter can hope to be is mediocre, and is aggressively irritating at points. There’s some nice concepts here, but it never really pulls any of them off. It’s sad, really – it could have been so much more if it had tried to be less. A puzzle game based around fluid dynamics, maybe, rather than a generic shooter with too much water.

• Orion: Dino Beatdown – If Hydrophobia was a textbook failure of ambitious concepts never realized, then this is on the scientific cutting-edge forefront of failure, and is still under peer review. Future soldiers with jetpacks and mechs battling dinosaurs in lush, tropical online battlefields? What could go wrong? In this case, just about EVERYTHING. It is an unholy trainwreck of a game, and not enjoyable in the slightest. Please, do not give the creators of this any money. Just buy the good stuff from this bundle separately.

• Star Ruler – 4X strategy with serious space-science math behind it. While very much on the dry and mechanical side, there’s a lot to like in this quirky take on the genre if you can see the appeal in deconstructing entire solar systems in order to create a ringworld-scale superweapon capable of punching a hole in a planet from half a galaxy away. It’s also 75% off if purchased by itself. You should do so.

• Waveform – A cute little rhythm-puzzle game, well-reviewed and polished. Not gotten to play this one myself, admittedly, but former IGM editor Chris Priestman  did, and loved the pants off it in his review here. To quote: “It’s a game that comes easily recommended to just about everyone, and one that you’ll come back to again and again, if just to sway along to the sublime soundtrack and calming visuals”. High praise indeed.

• World of Goo – One of the big commercial releases that kicked off this whole indie revolution. A super-charming, clever and varied physics puzzle game about building wobbly, burbling structures out of happy little living goo-balls, in order to ferry a certain number of them out of the level safely. Good replay value, and multiple solutions to most puzzles too.

A rather underwhelming indie bundle, sadly, brought down by a couple of damp squibs. As with the previous Winter sale, the previous days core deals are available for a few hours more, so snap them up if you missed any you wanted.

It’s the last day, so there’s no more reason to hold back. Got everything you wanted? Snapped up any big hits in the Flash Sales? Well, here’s some scattered indie recommendations, all at rock-bottom prices. All good games, and you’re sure to get plenty of bang for your buck with this lot:

Pixeljunk Eden – 80% Off
Stellar Impact – 75% Off
EYE: Divine Cybermancy – 60% Off
Solar 2 – 75% Off
Beat Hazard Bundle – 75% Off
Trine 1 + 2 – 75% Off (Flash Sale)
Analogue: A Hate Story – 50% Off
Nimbus – 75% Off
Super Monday Night Combat Bundle – 75% Off
Legend of Fae – 75% Off
Shatter – 75% Off
Inside A Star-Filled Sky – 75% Off
Sol Survivor – 75% Off
Waves – 70% Off
Mr Robot – 75% Off
Zen Bound 2 – 75% Off
Data Jammers: Fastforward – 75% Off

There’s plenty more where they came from in the Steam Indie section. Just sort by ‘specials’ to find some hidden gems. And that’s all, folks, until the inevitable Winter holiday mega-sale. We’ll see you there. And while you’re still here, why don’t you drop into the comments thread below? Share what your favourite picks of this sale have been, and drop a few recommendations of your own.