Steam frequently does those sales where you get something for every $X that you spend. Usually, it's a trading card, which I immediately sell for a few cents, which translates to less money spent. I've reached the point where I only buy new games during those promotions in order to achieve maximum savings. In the interim, I'll just play some of the games that I bought last time and haven't gotten around to yet.

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I played Zoria during the last festival and it was enough to sell me on it. I avoided it this festival because I just want to wait for full release without seeing anything more than I already have.

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Not many of these looked that appealing to me this year. Tried running The Wickie, a Lovecraftian horror, through Proton but it wouldn't even launch. Also tried WarTales. It ran fine and the combat was solid but the game itself was rather dull.

EDIT: Went back and tried some more games. Deepest Chamber ran very well once I got past the starting menu (which was incredibly slow to load). Would only recommend it for people who found Slay the Spire to be 'too much.' It's a very watered-down version of Slay the Spire. Which is to say that it was fun, but not very challenging and it just made me want to play StS again instead of doing another run of Deepest Chamber.

Void Tyrant is also a watered-down Slay the Spire except it's charming enough and seems to be aimed at kids so I dig it. In fact, last night, I plunked my 8yo down on my lap and let her play while I gave advice. She adored it.

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Color me intrigued. Hopefully they capture the humor and campiness of those settings too instead of trying to go too serious with it. I notice there are a lot of us Gen Xers who get nostalgic for things without understanding the originals well enough to properly capture the feeling of them. (Halloween remake, last few Terminator sequels, TMNT reboots, the first GI Joe movie, etc.)

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Tales of Vesperia because I was nutty about Tales of Symphonia on Wii when it came out. Vesperia is a far weaker game. The combat is alright but the storyline is completely nonsensical and I don't think that the people they hired to do localization actually speak English. It's like it was run through Google Translate. It's full of random crap like people being shocked to hear information that they had already heard three times in the last few minutes or, in my favorite case so far, a side character telling her boss to say hello to the prince for her even though she was the one going to see the prince and he was the one not going.

Also Rocket League because it's the only game we have found that I can play with my friends, one of whom is on PS5, one on PS4, and one on Switch so I will likely never stop playing that.

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None of those are 'horror classics' in my book. Just jump scare-a-thons with shallow story and paint-by-numbers monsters. As a huge fan of horror in every medium, I am not hopeful about this one.

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Evil Inside is not working through Steam Play. I get the menu, followed by a black screen with text. However, when the text ends, it's just a black screen.

Rise Eterna also not working. Controls were wonky (reversed) and I managed to get through the first dialogue which took me to a map where no buttons did anything.

Trail of Ayash also not working. The game launches and I can hear the music, but that's all. Just spent five minutes staring at Steam, listening to creepy music, waiting for some sort of visuals to come up, but no dice.

We Are The Plague is also not working. Menu is unresponsive.

All told, I am disappointed. These were the only four games in the festival that looked even remotely interesting to me - none of them support Linux and none of them worked with Steam Play.

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I tried this one out during the last games festival. It was interesting. I'm a huge board gamer and this definitely scratched that itch, but it had two fatal flaws in my opinion. One, you are tasked with finding certain ingredients that show up in a variety of locations, but which ingredients are in which locations and when are random. So I never felt any strategy in my choices of where to go - I just went somewhere and hoped they had what I needed. And two, the 'social deduction' is way too easy. If you're even remotely skilled at logic puzzles, it's literally impossible not to know who your friends are by the end. It's not like "Werewolf" or "Throne of Lies" where a convincing liar (or an unconvincing truth-teller) can throw you off the track - it's a pure math game. You're given factual information that can only line up one conclusion so if you're wrong it's because you kept bad notes. That's not really a huge detriment though because the whole 'social deduction' mechanic is tacked on anyway. You can do things to help, or hurt, other characters during the game but there is no teamwork involved at all so you're better off just screwing over any other character regardless of allegiance.

Now, all that being said, what I played was the demo and maybe a lot has changed and/or demo play was not indicative of the final game.

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You're not wrong, Anza. It is absolutely very random, and you have very little control - just like real life dating. You can control your responses and choices, but not how others perceive or react to them. You can control where you go, but not what will be there waiting for you. You can control who you are attempting to woo and how you will attempt to woo them, but not whether they are even attracted to you or how receptive they will be to said wooing. It's not a game that you play to win - it's a game that you play to experience. Thankfully it's funny and has great music and the possible events are so widely varied, that it's going to be a very different game each time you play it.

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The wife and I had a lot of fun playing Monster Prom via Remote Play Together (or whatever it's called). Both of us sitting in our respective computer rooms laughing like maniacs as we competed for the affections of monsters. Granted it grew stale after only a dozen plays or so, but it was still well worth the money. Looking forward to picking this one up.

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