No one's making a big-budget immersive sim any time soon, but you can catch up on the best ones ever made for less than the price of a single new game in the Steam Autumn Sale

GamesNo one’s making a big-budget immersive sim any time soon, but you can catch up on the best ones ever made for less than the price of a single new game in the Steam Autumn SaleWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

You can pick up bothDeus Exand itsunfairly malignedsequel,Invisible War, for under $1 each right now. You can even pick up every game in the series, including the actually very good Eidos Montreal prequels (and the truly terrible The Fall) fora mere $9.55 (£8), if you want to bag the lot.

People talk about older games being hard to go back to, but I replay Deus Ex 1 pretty regularly. You’ll want to install something like thecommunity patchto make it play nice on modern machines, but you’ll still find that it does some things better than any game before or since. Plus, the politics are buckwild, and that’s just fun.

Also, you should play System Shock. All of them, I mean. That means theNightdive remake of the first game—good enough to replace System Shock 2 on ourtop 100despite my own protestations—which you can pick up for a trifling $16 (£14) right now. Italsomeans the originals, which are still excellent.System Shock 1andSystem Shock 2are $2 (£1.39) each right now, and they’re both bangers.

Okay, you canprobablyskip 1 if you’re gonna pick up the remake (though I still think it’s a really interesting historical artefact in that context), but 2 is still my favourite ‘Shock’ game out there, BioShocks included. It’s got a great, creepy story, an interesting character build system, and theMedSci musicrips. It’s another one you’ll want to check thePCGamingWiki pagefor before you launch it, though.

It is worth noting that Nightdive has aSystem Shock 2 Enhanced Edition—a touch-up, not a full remake—in the oven. You might want to wait for that if you’re not raring to get your Shock on right away.

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Its excellent, roguelike DLC Mooncrash is also on sale, but the best way to pick it up is probably as part of theDigital Deluxe collection, which contains both the base game and DLC for $8 (£7).

Then once you’ve bought that, you should also buyDishonored($2.50 / £2),Dishonored 2($3 / £2.50), andDishonored: Death of the Outsider($6 / £5). They have all the systemic creativity of Prey but are level-based fantasy rather than open sci-fi. If you only grab one of them, it should probably be 2, which our Fraser Brown called “freakishly flexible, devilishly smart, and god damn is it a looker, with a bold art direction that’s refusing to age” in our top 100.

If you bought every single one of those classics, my maths says it’d bring you to $52.05 total, which means you get some of the greatest games ever made for less than the cost of a single new release. Which isn’t too bad, if you ask me. Which you did, since you’re here.

Thing is, of course, if you’re an immersive sim sicko you’ve probably played all of those already, so let me chuck in a few curveballs to tempt you during Black Friday season. For instance, you can pick upHexcraft: Harlequin Fair, an aimless, rambling lo-fi thing set in a demon-haunted Toronto that I quite enjoyed when Iwrote about it last weekend, for $8.50 (£6.68) right now.

You can also pick upBrigand: Oaxaca, a slightly baffling, almost obnoxiously unattractive game that I’ve fallen a bit in love with this week for $5.60 (£4.68). It’s a game whose entire reason to be is letting you do whatever you want: befriending, destroying, or ignoring factions, building your character to be a gunslinger or businessman or voodoo priest, and being incredibly difficult. In general, a bit like an imsimKenshi.

Finally, you can check outCtrl Alt Egofor $11 (£8.80) right now. Confession: I haven’t tried this one myself, but Dominic Tarason picked it out as a hidden gem of theSteamWinterSalea year or two back, calling it “One of the most interesting immersive sims I’ve played, a bit like Prey (2017) spliced with ‘80s puzzler Paradroid. Playing as a disembodied and deathless mind in a very British retro future, you can freely hop between robot bodies and anything else mechanical in the area, opening up some mind-bendingly creative solutions to problems and giving it huge replay value.” Sounds good to me.

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