Gaming on a budget is simple with these!
Gaming on a budget is simple with these!
We’re currently at a point where most people's disposable income feels like it’s at an all time low. So many fun things often cost just a bit more than most of us can afford right now. This is especially a problem when looking at our Steam wishlists. Yeah, things always go on sale eventually, but joy shouldn’t come every three months. Sometimes you need a fun, new experience that’ll make you happy for a short, exciting while.
This is where the incredible world of free steam games comes into play. It can often be hard to sort through the mountains of shovelware and shoddily-made test demos for gimmicks. We tend to come across terrible Steam Free to Play games. Always remember, though, but sometimes you find a hidden gem. A diamond in the rough. There are plenty of incredible games that are completely free to play, and all it takes is a quick download from steam.
Here are a few standouts.
Reviews: Overwhelmingly Positive (99%)
This is certainly the absolute cutest game on this list. The Werecleaner is a recent free game, though I’d say it has enough content, to be worth some money, in which you play as an adorable little werewolf, working as a janitor in an office building. Your goal is to clean up every mess in the office without being seen. Usually, this means using a lot of well-made stealth mechanics, but sometimes it means you end up having to create a few extra messes to clean up with the blood of your former coworkers. Eh, it happens.
If you’re specifically out looking for free games, the Werecleaner might be especially significant to you. The course theme of this game is that, as you explore this office, building full of debt and jobs, broken promises, and ruined dreams, you also witness a full scale worker revolution against their unfair wage thieves of greedy corporate bosses. It’s a really cute way to present a poignant message about the state of American jobs, while also giving you a delightful stealth game.
Get The Werecleaner here
Reviews: Very Positive (87%)
The Sims four is just the latest edition to one of gaming's most acclaimed series. You really can do anything in this game. Be abducted by aliens? You got it. Seduce a vampire? Slice of cake. Need a sweater? Done. The Sims four is the ultimate standard of life simulator. It has an intensely dedicated community and a development team. Hard at work to give it new content as often as possible.
Celebrating its 10th anniversary, the Sims 4 has been continuing at the height of popularity up to today. After all these years, people are still putting more hours than ever into their Sims four save files, so there’s no end to the incredible content people upload to the free marketplace, or as part of the incredible modern community of custom content. Plus, with multiplayer on the horizon, there’s never been a better time to get used to the Sims 4 system.
The Sims 4 is also famous for the amount of paid DLC it has. While the base game is free to play, there are hundreds of dollars worth of extra content you could splurge on in the future. There are plenty of ways to tell what DLC packs could be right for you. DLC for The Sims 4 also goes on sale pretty often, so you just have to wait a little bit until the next sale comes on.
Get The Sims 4 here
Reviews: Positive (97%)
Released mid last year to minimal fanfare, The Final Prize is Soup has not gotten nearly enough attention as it should. It’s only the latest game in the long career of visual novel making by indie developer 4noki, a recent master of interesting visual novels.
It was a small community that was long anticipating this game being released: fans of death game visual novels, such as ZeroEscape and Danganronpa. In the Final Prize is Soup you play as one of the many lost souls roaming throughout the afterlife, competing with other souls in an intense post-death death game for a chance at returning to the mortal coil.
Oh yeah, and by the way, one of the other contestants is your ex who you may still have some lingering feelings for.
Get The Final Prize is Soup here
Maybe horror is more your thing. If so, you might want to check out Babbdi, and possibly the eeriest game on all of the steam.
The premise of Babbdi is deceptively simple. There is a “plot” to this game, but there isn’t much to it:
See? There isn’t much going on you may notice throughout the storyline that the city of Babbdi has a few quirks. Maybe the people you talk to don't seem to have any limit to their neck’s range of motion. Maybe some of the brutalist apartment buildings here, feel, or are, completely empty.
Sure, you can easily get the train, leave the city, and see the ending, but that’s not the point. Babbdi is a game of exploration. There are some other scattered characters throughout the city. There are a few other items that may help with your mobility in exploring. Again, it all seems pretty simple, but this is genuinely one of the scariest horror games on steam, exclusively, because of how basic it seems. This game doesn’t use façades or scenically painted sky boxes to make you think the city is larger than it is. What you see is what you get, what you get is a surprisingly huge, fully explorable, desolate city. Some combination of the sheer scale of this game and the complete aimlessness it leaves you, as well as the near-absolute loneliness you have while exploring, gives you a heightened feeling of the uncanny. Only instead of applying to a person, you feel it about an entire city: Babbdi.
Get Babbdi here
You should give everything on this list at least to try. They are all free, after all, so they won’t make a dent in your Steam wallet, but they’ll certainly pad up your library with some great experiences.
