The Best Game Deals in the Steam Spring Sale
The Steam Spring Sale is currently underway, running through Thursday, March 20, at 1 p.m. ET / 10 a.m. PT, with significant savings on hundreds of PC games. As usual during these sales, a ton of old favorites are about as cheap as they ever get—Mass Effect Legendary, which has all of the single-player content from the first three Mass Effects, is $5.99; Far Cry 2 is $2.99; most of Valve’s games, including Portal, Portal 2, and the Half-Life and Left 4 Dead series, are all at $1.99; Undertale is under a buck at 99 cents; and Titanfall 2, still perhaps the best FPS of the last decade, is $2.99. This is also a good time to save some money on the best and biggest games of the last few years. If you haven’t dug into Metaphor Refantazio, or Arctic Eggs, or Helldivers II, they’re about as cheap as they’ve ever been right now. Even the (almost) brand new Dynasty Warriors: Origins is getting in on the action, with a 20% discount barely two months after release. And even though they’re both a few years old now, Baldur’s Gate III and Elden Ring—probably the most acclaimed RPGs of the decade so far—rarely go on sale, making this a smart time to pick ‘em up. If you’re a PC gamer, or have a Steam Deck, it’s worth checking out. Here’s Paste’s quick guide to the best bargains during the 2025 Steam Spring Sale, with 21 games listed in no particular order. This is by no means a comprehensive overview of what’s on sale, but our own personally curated list of games from the last few years that we heartily recommend.
Mouthwashing
20% Off
$10.39
Mouthwashing is a bleak first-person psychological horror game developed by Wrong Organ, who genre-heads may know from their surreal freeware title How Fish is Made. While their latest starts out in a somewhat more grounded place (in that you don’t play as a sardine engaging in faux-philosophical discussions), it gradually builds towards similarly hallucinatory turns that make this a brain-searing lo-fi horror experience. After your captain crashes the Tulpar, a cargo spaceship, in a botched suicide attempt, the rest of the crew grapples with being stranded in deep space. Spoilers, they don’t handle it particularly well. If it wasn’t clear from this setup, this one is downright oppressive; your vessel is a dreary, increasingly dilapidated tomb portrayed via low-poly visuals which, like many games in this style, invite us to imagine the finer details for ourselves. These dimly lit corridors draw us in, less building towards jump scares or frightening encounters with monsters, and more inching us further into these characters’ headspaces as they approach heavily foreshadowed carnage. As you explore this ship, solving simple puzzles, the narrative uncomfortably peels back the layers of its crew like a Charlie Kaufman film, prodding at fears of purposelessness and employment anxieties as it builds towards its nightmarish climax that unveils the unforgivable act at the heart of this story. Through its portrayal of desperation, avoidance of responsibility, and crushing guilt, Mouthwashing is as cold as the vacuum of space. —Elijah Gonzalez
UFO 50
20% Off
$19.99
If the concepts for the 50 games in the fictional ’80s compilation UFO 50 sound inspired, well, that’s one of the things that makes it so great—probably too great to be a genuinely realistic fake ‘80s collection. There’s no laziness here, no hack jobs or quick cash-ins; every game has a cool or quirky angle to it, both narratively and mechanically, that puts them more in line with the kind of smart, retro-style independent games from the 2000s and 2010s that UFO 50’s designers are known for than the often limited and uninspired fare that even the best studios cranked out in the ‘80s. It took Mossmouth almost a decade to make UFO 50, which was originally aiming for a 2018 release; that roughly matches the amount of fictional time covered by the game, but I can’t think of any real studio or group of designers in the ‘80s who created a body of work as varied, thoughtful, substantial, and consistently interesting as UFO 50. Designer Derek Yu and crew don’t just evoke the most seminal decade for videogames here; they one-up it at almost every turn. It’s not just one of the best games of 2024; it’s 50 of ’em.—Garrett Martin
Dynasty Warriors Origins
20% Off
$55.99
Combat’s always been the thing about Dynasty Warriors games, and the combat in Origins doesn’t stand pat. It’s as quietly evolutionary for the series as its narrative, and richly satisfying in a way it hasn’t been in the past. Dynasty Warriors: Origins doesn’t just try to beef up the parts of this series that have traditionally been lacking; it also rethinks what it has most often done the best, making it better across the board. It’s enough to keep me happily hacking and slashing through the vast throngs of foot soldiers until a story-concluding sequel eventually hits my console.—Garrett Martin
Metaphor Refantazio
25% Off
$52.49
Metaphor: ReFantazio is a great RPG, and an excellent wake up call. The message within it doesn’t feel tacked on. The developers aren’t giving themselves a pat on the back with a not so subtle wish for the story they crafted to be the fantasy that inspires the player without the required foundation. Different structural framings (“use your time wisely and strive to be the best version of yourself”) make a difference. When some people still consider games like Final Fantasy VII to be apolitical in 2024, perhaps the bluntness is justified.
As Metaphor: ReFantazio constantly reminds us, both micro and macro problems are intertwined. What’s the perspective of somebody looking for an abortion in a red state, a family separated by the border, a kid in Gaza? The examples are everywhere, and they’re visibly blunt, too. They’re there while we scroll down on the timeline or in three-second-long attention span cycles while we swipe reels. If only more people made the effort to see things through somebody else’s eyes, perhaps we could regain some semblance of hope that change might stop being a fantasy.—Diego Nicolás Argüello
Arctic Eggs
30% Off
$6.99
I love eggs and I love cigarettes. No, you don’t understand. I really love eggs and cigarettes. I also love feeding people. I want to feed you at the end of the world. At the end of the world, I want to feed you all eggs, and maybe cigarettes, maybe ammunition, or eggs and canned fish and bacon. Do you have a favorite incongruous combination of absurd physics objects you want me to perfectly time in my sizzling skillet? Let’s fucking go. We’re on Big Shell, we’re on a khrushchyovka, we’re on the combination Big Shell khrushchyovka far beyond the timberline. Let me cook weird egg-centric meals for you while you tell me your weirdest thoughts.—Dia Lacina
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown
50% Off
$19.99
From the first rotoscoped jogs and leaps of Jordan Mechner’s brother, the core of Prince of Persia has been one of the exaltation of movement. We’ve come a long way since young David’s parking lot antics. Returning to its two-dimensional origins, The Lost Crown carries forward the dedication to cruel traps, brisk combat, and fluid motion into a stunningly-realized, interconnected world of elaborate puzzles and shortcuts, and it does it all with a rush of speed the franchise has rarely known. With how truly outstanding this game is, I’d be remiss in not mentioning how astonishingly idiotic the powers-that-be at Ubisoft were for dissolving and reassigning this team to work on old, crusty IP that posts big numbers for shareholders instead of giving them every opportunity to succeed a second time.—Dia Lacina
Thank Goodness You’re Here!
30% Off
$13.99
Thank Goodness You’re Here, a surreal puzzle-platformer where comedy takes precedence over everything else, is a game like none other. Imagine if peak Monty Python somehow made an Adult Swim show in the 2000s, except it was a game and not a show, and featured Matt Berry giving another impeccable Matt Berry performance. The “puzzles” are less about challenging you and more just a framework for bizarre little comedy sketches, pretty much all of which are absolutely hilarious. And it smartly ends well before it starts to wear out its welcome, after only two or three hours. It’s basically a perfect game if you share its sense of humor, and if you don’t share its sense of humor, you’re probably a bit of a bore. (Sorry.) It’s one of the most purely enjoyable games I’ve ever played, and I’m thinking it will be as fun to revisit again and again as the great comedies it echoes; it’s absolutely one of the best games of 2024.—Garrett Martin
1000xRESIST
25% Off
$14.99
1000xRESIST is many things, but it’s not a game that holds back any gut punches. It refuses to fit into any one box. It’s a walking simulator for a few hours before switching to a side-scroller. The third-person perspective suddenly shifts to a top-down view. It’s a visual novel but also you’re lunging between different nodes on a wide map. It’s a time puzzler and, at times, survival horror. It’s wholeheartedly committed to furiously surprising you again and again and again, and it undoubtedly excels in this mission from beginning to end. It’s the kind of game that can leave you feeling transformed. Few are the games as bold and brave and brilliant as this one; throughout its 15 hours, there’s a palpable eagerness to take the risks that many other teams would shy away from, especially considering this is Sunset Visitor’s debut game. 1000xRESIST is a dazzling testament to the stories this medium has yet to tell; an exemplification of the best that small yet ambitious teams can create; and a gateway to a future in which more videogame narratives have the courage and soul to tackle the ideas that it executes with equal precision and grace. It’s simply triumphant in everything it sets out to do.—Natalie Flores
Helldivers II
20% Off
$31.99
Helldivers 2 has had a bit of an up-and-down journey this year: it was an unexpected breakout hit, then drew ire for its temporary PSN linking policy and balancing decisions, until finally mostly ending up back in players’ good graces after a few extensive patches. The result is that this exercise in interstellar jingoism is more engaging than ever, with a huge arsenal of stratagems and ordinance that will almost inevitably accidentally turn your allies into mincemeat. This increased range of viable options results in much more varied “liberating,” with tons of tools that can be the right one for the current job. Although this increasingly empowering game balance squares awkwardly with all its glib anti-fascist satire, Helldivers 2 remains a brutal co-op shooter that demands teamwork if you want to avoid completely biting it. Well, that will probably happen even if you’re all well-coordinated veterans (again, that’s sort of the point considering the Starship Troopers inspiration), but that steep challenge makes for an oddly satisfying experience that will keep you and your friends marching toward certain doom.—Elijah Gonzalez
Ultros
60% Off
$9.99
Playing Ultros is gaming in a cloud of color and confusion, a perpetually exciting state of being that evokes the earliest days of videogames while still feeling ahead of its time. Between your constantly shifting relationship with your surroundings, the cryptic goals and hallucinatory interactions, the structure and action of Ultros is as psychedelic as its music and art. And that’s genuinely shocking, as few games are as fiercely devoted to the psychedelic aesthetic as this one. The bright, brilliant artwork by El Huervo channels the twisty chaos of comics legend Brendan McCarthy (who might be better known today as the co-writer and designer of Mad Max: Fury Road), uniting the abstract and the visceral (literally—guts are an omnipresent symbol throughout Ultros) to create an art style unlike any other in games. Meanwhile Ratvader’s original score captures the yawning, dramatic stillness of Popol Vuh, the ambient German rock group who soundtracked several Herzog films. El Huervo’s art and Ratvader’s music are the most obvious psychedelic signifiers in Ultros, but the game itself lives up to their mind-altering ambitions. It’s one of the best games of 2024.—Garrett Martin
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
30% Off
$48.99
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is most successful when it’s playing the hits. I cannot understate the shit-eating grin I bore on my face time and time again as I revisited places and characters that I’ve grown to love over the years. Costa Del Sol’s whole deal is fan service of the highest degree, for example, but upon some reflection, it’s hard to pinpoint a part of the game that isn’t. After all, VII‘s shadow is long and immense, and why cast light on it when you can draw it out even more? And so Rebirth keeps much of the original’s weirdo second act intact, from the march in Junon to the offputting and bizarre dolphin minigame just below it. Rebirth opts for accentuating Final Fantasy VII‘s eccentricities rather than casting them off or rebuilding them in many of these instances, and by god do I love it for that. Especially coming off of the constant escalation and movement of Final Fantasy XIV‘s 10-year story that I’m still working through, as well as the overly serious and misguided attempts of Final Fantasy XVI, Rebirth‘s unadulterated spirit is a breath of fresh, untainted-by-Mako-poisoning air. It’s a game whose playfulness never fails to rear its head, whether it be in some ludicrous plot advancement, a side quest where you are forced to fight as a frog, or partaking in any one of Rebirth‘s many, many minigames.—Moises Taveras
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
25% Off
$18.74
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a game with vision. It wraps intriguing puzzles in a digital gothic framework. It makes the most of its chosen medium as it forces us to navigate the tenuous details of this backdrop. Just about every layer of the experience is creatively risky, from its fragmented narrative to its uncompromising barrage of challenges, but these gambles largely pay off to deliver something with purpose and direction. Crafting this kind of maze isn’t easy; it takes a combination of subtle guidance and faith in your audience. But despite these challenges, Simogo never loses sight of how to stoke curiosity about what’s lurking around the next corner, whether it’s a treasure you’ve been seeking or, conversely, something horrible lurking in the dark.—Elijah Gonzalez
Tales of Kenzera: ZAU
55% Off
$8.99
The beauty of Tales of Kenzera: ZAU is that grief is not linear. It’s not something you heal from and it doesn’t ever look the same across two people. It’s a deeply unique experience, but at the same time, it’s also universal. The complexity of grief is what makes it so. Zau feels anger, guilt, and sadness. He feels all of it and he mediates those emotions in the Great Spirits he helps cross over. He helps a parent loosen their grip on their child, he provides a salve to the anger between father and son, and he learns to let go. Each new character is a different expression of why you can get stuck in your loss, how it can debilitate you and keep you in an endless loop, ultimately impacting those around you. But even when the darkness rushes in at the end of boss battles as you try to escape a zone, the vibrancy of those emotions is never lost. When I pitched this article, I didn’t know if anyone would understand what I meant. The grief that Surgent Studios has captured is vibrant and saturated. It’s not a dull pang or a numbness that creeps. It’s more potent and the beautiful world it lives in makes it all the more impactful.—Kate Sánchez
Norco
60% Off
$5.99
As a Southerner I don’t really trust anybody to write about the South unless they, too, are from here—or at least have lived here long enough to truly understand what makes it great and awful in equal measure, and how the ways in which the South is actually fucked up often diverge from the ways in which outsiders think it’s fucked up. Norco, a smart narrative-driven game about the unique ways in which institutions like religion and big business have exploited the South, its people and its land throughout history, is clearly the work of people who understand this region and its fundamental defects. It’s an unflinching, occasionally surreal glimpse into an only slightly exaggerated version of Louisiana, with its mythical and allegorical flourishes only highlighting the aimless mundanity and real-life degradations of the modern South. If you only play one game from this list, make it Norco.—Garrett Martin
Citizen Sleeper
70% Off
$5.99
You can think of Citizen Sleeper as a sort of digital board game set in a sci-fi dystopia beset by end-stage capitalism and all the rampant dehumanization that entails. It’s a game about work and death where the only levity comes from the relationships we make with others—yes, the friends we made along the way, but not nearly as banal or obvious as that sounds. It questions what it means to be a person in a system that inherently subjugates personhood to corporations and wealth, and it probably won’t surprise you that the answers it lands on aren’t always the most optimistic or uplifting. Here at Paste Cameron Kunzelman described its “melancholy realism” as part of a trend alongside other story-driven games that are largely hostile to the dominance of capitalism, and it echoes the impossibility of thinking seriously about this medium, this industry, and, well, every aspect of society today without discussing the impersonal economic system that drives it all. It’s a heady RPG that respects your time and intelligence, and one of this year’s must-play games.—Garrett Martin
Street Fighter 6
50% Off
$29.99
All long-running games eventually have to figure out how to attract new players without disenchanting their fans. It’s even tougher with fighting games, and especially one as old, beloved, and rich in history as Street Fighter. Street Fighter 6 has figured out how to cater to its massive following while still welcoming new players, and then providing both with the innovation of a surprisingly deep RPG on top of the core fighting game. Whether you’ve been mixing it up in those streets for decades or never even reeled off a single hadouken before, Street Fighter 6 should be on your fight card. It’s the new standard in fighting game excellence.—Garrett Martin
Kentucky Route Zero: PC Edition
50% Off
$12.49
Cardboard Computer’s exploration into the mysteries of the mundane finally came to an end in early 2020, almost a decade after the first part’s original release, and it was well worth the wait. This magical realist adventure combines the mythological folkways of “old weird America”—here personified by a stretch of rural Kentucky that regularly phases between the familiar and unearthly—with a pointed critique of how capitalism reduces everybody to interchangeable commodities. Workers grind themselves to bones to pay off their “debt” to their employers, pharmaceutical companies basically own the doctors who prescribe their medicine, and an amiable truck driver gets lost on a routine delivery with no end in sight. It’s a beautiful bit of inspired genius that doesn’t lose anything in its console translation.—Garrett Martin
Death’s Door
75% Off
$4.99
Death’s Door implicitly argues something the entertainment world at large needs to understand: Nostalgia doesn’t have to be shameless or oppressive. It doesn’t have to be the summation of a game’s (or a movie’s, or a TV show’s) ambition. It doesn’t have to be splashed all over the cover and title screen, or the full extent of the marketing campaign. Death’s Door deeply evokes the spirit of some of the most beloved games of all time, and does it well enough that anybody familiar with those legendary games will no doubt recognize and appreciate it. And it does all this with a context and presentation that makes it feel new and vital and not just like a calculated imitation of the past. It takes so much of what made the original Zelda and A Link to the Past into timeless classics, but makes them into their own. Nostalgia can be part of the package, but it shouldn’t be the whole point, and Death’s Door’s cocktail of mechanical nostalgia and narrative creativity is something we don’t see enough of in today’s IP-crazed business.—Garrett Martin
Dragon Age: The Veilguard
50% Off
$29.99
Dragon Age: The Veilguard is far from perfect; combat is repetitive, the world leans on stock fantasy concepts more than it should, and it’s a little too bloated. I only started playing it to get some background before my interview with its creative director; I never would’ve thought I’d stick with it after that interview, and keep playing it for another 50 hours or so. Part of it might be because it’s been so long since I’ve played a classic Bioware-style game that I liked, and the fundamental appeal of making friends to stop the end of the world remains strong. But it also says a lot about Veilguard and especially its writing and characters; unlike Origins or Dragon Age II, I genuinely like talking to these people, learning about their struggles and hopes, and helping them become the best versions of themselves. There’s not a single drip among Veilguard’s seven companions; sure, they can all be annoying in different ways, like most people, but they all have redeeming qualities and I haven’t yet wished I could kill any of them permanently (something I can’t say about the buddies from older Dragon Age games). And as always there’s a primal allure to making my characters’ stats go up, and rampaging through the same fights and enemies hasn’t become too obnoxious yet. I actually kind of appreciate that kind of mindless grind, as somebody who grew up back when every RPG was like that.—Garrett Martin
Forza Horizon 5
50% Off
$29.99
Forza Horizon 5 is the most gorgeous and dynamic game I’ve played on the Xbox Series X by a mile. That said, the beauty of the game isn’t just in the mechanics alone. It’s in how the game loves, respects, and brings Mexico to life. When it comes to representing Mexico on-screen, Americans like one thing, and pretty much one thing only: Sepia tones. Baked in browns and oranges, representations of Mexico on screen in film and television strip the country of its beauty and distill it down into its most stereotypical parts, often using it to highlight narcos. But in Forza Horizon 5 the diversity of the races is met with the diversity of Mexico itself. Mexico isn’t just a desert landscape, and the 11 distinct biomes in the game highlight that. It’s clear that a lot of love went into Forza Horizon 5. You can see it in the car selection. You can see it in the environmental design. You can hear it in the playlists. This game thrives on a culture of love that is baked into every gameplay element. In every way, Forza Horizon 5 is a love letter to Mexicans, and it’s one I’m thrilled that I opened.—Kate Sánchez
Baldur’s Gate III
20% Off
$47.99
Much has been made of how the Dungeons & Dragons-based videogame Baldur’s Gate 3 adapts its tabletop origins, but what’s most interesting about it comes from its videogameness. One of the things that is so thrilling and strange about tabletop to me is that it is negotiable. We can discuss everything, the course is far from set. A videogame, by nature, is bound to its code. There’s unpredictability, sure. But even in a game as big as Baldur’s Gate, there is a single course that all players must chart. There may be hidden secrets, oft-discarded paths, but the general arc of the game is recognizable and familiar to every player. It’s unwise to characterize Baldur’s Gate 3 as a tabletop sim for exactly that reason. It has limits that friends around the table do not have, but that also means it cannot be negotiated with.—Grace Benfell