Top Three Games of the 2017 Steam Summer Sale
Scarlett Shiloh ’19 / Emertainment Monthly Staff Writer
Ah, yes, the Steam Summer Sale has passed. When everything is half off (or fifteen percent off, if the developer is a chump) and no game is safe from being bought. People scramble to buy dozens of games for incredibly cheap prices, and submit the rest of their lives to buying an endless amount of games… only to just let them rot in their library until they get bored.
I, for one, succumbed to the 2017 Summer Steam sale. Here are three great games I picked up from the sale that you should consider buying!
I’ve personally never played The Oregon Trail (probably because I’m one of them young’uns), but this game is probably a lot like it. In Organ Trail, you play as a team of five members driving from DC to Seattle to reach a safepoint, away from the zombie apocalypse raging on. The game revolves around resource management and simulation/choice making, but there are also shooter bits (obviously, where your characters go to shoot the zombies, or run over bandits trying to gun you down) as well as timing based minigames (using scrap to fix your car.) The balance between gameplay and simulation is really nice. How you manage your resources while you’re rested at a town impacts how your travels will go, and it’s really interesting how one mechanic influences the other! Really fun, really engaging, and very action-packed with lots of opportunities to kill zombies.
The phenomenal artwork of Jotun is plenty enough reason to pick it up. Jotun’s art is what makes the game a masterpiece. All the animations are hand drawn, and the backgrounds are simply breathtaking. The camera zooms in and out of the landscape to show you where you are, and it is so, so, so pretty. The game weaves Norse mythology into its plot to show Thora, a former viking who has succumbed, and her quest through Valhalla to impress the Gods. All of the enemies and bosses are based in Norse mythology as well.
Jotun’s gameplay is pretty simple to grasp, and it does a good job of explaining the controls without actually telling you them (i.e. figuring out how to use the axe to get past certain obstacles.) Each enemy has its own gimmicks and it’s fairly easy to figure out how to surpass them. However, that doesn’t make the game particularly easy, but it’s a challenge enough to keep the player interested. And again, if the gameplay doesn’t catch you, it’s worth playing just for the art, and Thora is a complete badass.
RPG/adventure games are fun, they always have been, but no one can deny how much they’ve changed over time, be it from minor graphical changes to incorporating intense plot elements. Evoland shows that evolution from the wee beginnings of adventure games to what they are today (think of it like the first The Legend of Zelda game to Breath of the Wild.) Evoland starts out as just having limited controls and a small color scheme to having vibrant colors and manageable controls. As a gamer and a history-enthusiast, it really appealed to me!
It’s worth noting, however, that the game’s plot occasionally gets overshadowed by its history lesson, meaning that the story doesn’t play a huge role in the game. However, this doesn’t subtract from Evoland’s gameplay and how it definitely follows the “show, don’t tell” rule many games seem to forget nowadays.
The Steam Summer sale has long past; however, there’s always the Winter Sale to look forward to. If you need some new games to fill your library, though, and don’t mind paying the full price, I’d suggest checking out these games! Otherwise, I’ll be writing for the next Winter Sale as well, with some new games y’all should check out. See you then!