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