Steam's Big Halloween Sale: The 10 Most Terrifying Deals To Check Out
You likely haven’t heard, but there’s an arcane tradition around these parts where every October 31 we recognize All Hallow’s Eve. It takes place the night before the international celebration of All Saints’ Day, the festival in recognition of the ‘90s English girl-band. Known by some as “Halloween,” the preceding night is a demonic festival of Satan worshipping and playing cut-price spooky video games.
In recognition of this, Steam has just launched Steam Scream Fest, a week-long sale of horror games to fill in the gap between the store’s It’s Slightly Earlier In October Sale, and the Hooray It’s November Now Sale. We’ve rifled through the various piles of jumble to highlight some of the best deals on spook to be found.
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Vampire Survivors
Just released out of Early Access and into its celebrated 1.0 form, and Vampire Survivors is already on sale! 2022's break-out genre reinvention, this Robotron-meets-roguelite has been an obsession all year. Bizarrely underpriced before, it went up to a still tiny five bucks last week, but is now back down to $4 until Halloween.
Discount: 20%
Price: $3.99
Control Ultimate Edition
The Max Payne creators, Remedy, managed it all over again with 2019's Control. The third-person game is a natural evolution of the developer’s fondness for manipulating time and gravity, as Jesse Faden takes on a monstrous enemy called the Hiss. It’s full of creepypasta stuff, and was heavily influenced by a community-run fiction archive called the SCP Foundation.
This is the “Ultimate Edition,” released a year later in 2020, adding in two expansions and various updates, now reduced by a whopping 70 percent.
Discount: 70%
Price: $11.99
The Forest
Following The Forest’s development while it was in Early Access was an extraordinary time. Every time I returned it, it had somehow become even more unnervingly freaky, while at the same time adding in lovingly rendered wildlife and beautiful sunsets. The Forest is a game that’s (if you’ll excuse this idiotic sentence) not a horror game at all, until it suddenly is.
You crash-land from a passenger plane into a...forest, the only survivor, and immediately have to find ways to stay alive. In this sense, it’s like so many other survival games, as you construct campfires, forage the wreckage for supplies, and begin trying to scavenge and hunt for food. After you’ve gotten used to this, maybe that night you see some odd-looking figure scuttling near to your camp, before it races off when you look at it. And then...well, you should play it to find out. Five bucks for this is a brilliant deal, as we wait for 2023's sequel, Sons Of The Forest.
Discount: 75%
Price: $4.99
Cult Of The Lamb
While 20 percent might seem a smaller discount compared to some of the whoppers in Steam’s sale, you have to remember that the utterly excellent Cult of the Lamb only came out in August! This wonderful elaboration of the roguelite ideas first appearing in Moonlighter has you playing as a cute little lamb, who’s also the head of the demonic cult. You need to manage your cult’s home camp, ensure your members are content, housed, punished, or buried, as well as heading off on action-adventure missions to gather resources, recruit new members, and battle the gods of opposing sects.
It’s completely brilliant, and one of 2022's finest new games.
Discount: 20%
Price: $19.99
Inscryption
Last year’s Halloween hit, Inscryption, is definitely just another deckbuilding card game, with its mechanics focused on sacrificing cards. That’s all it is. You’d be silly to think otherwise. Some people might have tried to suggest it’s more than that, but they are fools, and you should ignore them. Shhh. Just play the deckbuilding card game.
Scooping the big awards at GDC this year, it saw developer Daniel Mullins propelled into deserved attention, after his previous, also-brilliant games, Pony Island (the best game of 2016) and The Hex. Oh, talking of which...
Discount: 40%
Price: $11.99
The Hex
It seems silly not to also offer a shout-out to Mullins’ previous game, 2018's The Hex. While all the developer’s games are metatextual, smashing down fourth walls like a self-aware bull in an ironic china shop, The Hex takes this to somewhere just extraordinary, as you try to solve a murder where the killer is one of a collection of game genre stereotypes.
Beyond that, it’s spoilers all the way down, and the game is unquestionably best experienced going in blind. But on the way, you’ll be playing games across multiple genres, and experiencing surprises so big your hands will cover your mouth as you realize what you’ve done.
Discount: 75%
Price: $2.49
Resident Evil Village
Is it really only a year-and-a-half since Capcom’s giant-lady-sim Resident Evil Village appeared? Apparently so, making this 25 percent discount a welcome sight. Because it’s a tremendous survival horror game, even if it’s not quite the scare-fest of 2017's Resident EVII Biohazard. (We should always call it by its proper name, to remind them what they did.) However, that’s also on sale for ten bucks!
In fact, absolutely everything Resident Evil is, in Capcom’s spin-off Halloween sale on Steam, including, um, the terrifying Mega Man.
Discount: 25%
Price: $29.99
Read More: Everything We Saw At The Big Resident Evil Showcase
Carrion
2020's Carrion is a wonderfully macabre affair. With the core twist that you’re playing as the enemy, not the good guys, you’re a monstrous red blob of tendrils and ichor that is determined to escape a facility, and go eat the rest of the world. To do this, you have to negotiate your way through the 2D levels using an absolutely unique control scheme.
Your size determines how you move, and you can sacrifice parts of your being to fit through narrow ducts, or grow terrifyingly enormous to withstand the machine gun blasts of foolish heroes. When you move, you go so damned fast, and with such visceral awfulness, that it feels like nothing else. Listen: it’s brilliant, buy it and play it.
Discount: 60%
Price: $7.99
Scarlet Hollow
One of the most joyful surprises of the last couple of years is Scarlet Hollow. A choose-your-own-adventure visual novel, with RPG elements? Yes please. A bizarre tale of small-town folk and bizarre creatures in the woods? Absolutely. All incredibly well written and beautifully hand drawn, with a diverse and progressive cast, and the ability to talk to racoons? Take all my money.
Well, significantly less of it now, given it’s down to $16 this week. It’s coming out in chapters, seven in total, three out already, and the fourth due soon. But you get the entire lot for that price, and if you’re still not sure, you can pick up the first chapter for free.
Discount: 20%
Price: $15.99
Hollow Knight
As Team Cherry quite rightly takes their sweet time with sequel Hollow Knight: Silksong, there’s hope the game could be out next year. In the meantime, why not find out why everyone else cares so much, and grab the original?
I think of it as the hardcore mode for Ori and the Will of the Wisps, a much more difficulty metroidvania with its focus on tricky combat. It’s needlessly abstruse in places, especially with its pointlessly unhelpful map, but it remains an absolutely masterpiece of the 2D exploring-n-fighting theme. And now it’s half price!
Discount: 50%
Price: $7.49
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