The Steam Autumn Sale started on October 1 and runs until October 8 at 10am Pacific (7pm in Central Europe). Unlike the themed fests Steam has been running all year, this one covers the whole store, which sounds great until you look at the numbers. Right now 21,233 games tagged Indie have a discount. Nobody is scrolling through that.
So I let the players do the sorting. The rules for this list: tagged Indie on Steam, made by an independent studio, released in 2024 or later, at least 1,000 Steam reviews (counted in every language, not only English), and ranked by how many of those reviews are positive, with bigger crowds weighing a little more than tiny ones. Prices are US dollars, checked on October 2.
What came out is a strange and lovely top ten. None of these games costs more than $18, seven of them cost under $8, and there is not a single big shooter or survival game in sight. Mostly it is puzzles, small weird adventures, and a pizza shop.
Creature Kitchen is the highest-rated indie game in the sale, again
If this one sounds familiar, it also topped our GOG Autumn Sale list last week. Steam’s crowd agrees with GOG’s: 99.6% positive from 9,937 reviews, the best score of any indie game on sale this week.
The Rat Zone calls it a “creepy-cozy cooking simulator”. There is a strange house to search, a forest outside, and local wildlife that comes to eat. Some of the critters take food right out of your hand, some need convincing, and you cook for all of them: more than 40 recipes, chopped, mixed and fried, with ingredients hidden around the house and in the woods. There is a photo album to fill, a radio to keep on, and graphics that look like they came off a 2003 PC on purpose.
The studio calls it “snack-sized”, so do not expect a long game. $6.39 at 20% off.
Öoo is a caterpillar made of bombs
You play a bomb caterpillar, and you explore a maze-like world by blowing things up in the right order. The developer, NamaTakahashi, calls it an exploration puzzle platformer, and the joy of it seems to be that most puzzles have more than one way through, depending on how you place your bombs.
It has no text at all, which is why its list of supported languages is longer than most store pages. The studio also says it takes two or three hours to finish, and it promises the caterpillar is “so cute that even people who dislike bugs can enjoy it comfortably”. 99.4% of 6,911 reviews seem to agree. $6.99, down from $9.99.
Strange Jigsaws hides a puzzle game inside every jigsaw
The store description is one sentence long: “A game of strange jigsaws.” That is FLEB being modest. Each of the roughly 50 jigsaws hides its own trick, so one might be made of rope, another is a lava control panel drawn in felt-tip pen, another is a captcha. You figure out how each one works by poking at it.
It is a spiritual sequel to FLEB’s earlier 20 Small Mazes, and the developer says this one is a bit harder. A handful of puzzles need some English, and there are colorblind toggles on the two that use color. At $3.99 it is the cheapest game in the top ten, with 99.2% of 4,792 reviews positive.
Funi Raccoon Game wants everything that is not nailed down
You are a raccoon. You just moved into a dumpster. It is empty, and that is a problem.
That is pretty much the whole setup of this 3D collectathon from The Crayon Eating Company. You travel through small connected worlds, “help” the locals (the quote marks are the developer’s), solve puzzles and steal everything you can carry home. The more stuff you collect, the more places open up, and the stuff itself doubles as your tools for getting around. The screenshots look like a 1999 PC game somebody found on a cursed CD, with police cars, trams and very loud skies.
It came out in March, and 99.2% of 1,891 reviews are positive. Only 10% off, though, so $10.79.
Pronoun Palace is a spelling roguelike with a political edge
Most word games ask you to spell nice long words. This one asks you to spell nice long words to fight a government that has confiscated everyone’s pronouns.
Cadence Petersen and Hazel Fackler made it as a two-person team, and the store page leans into the satire hard, so you will know quickly whether it is for you. Underneath that is a deep word roguelike: wooden tiles attack, plastic tiles defend, and more than 75 spells let you shift letters along the alphabet, turn tiles into candy or set up wildcards. Every enemy messes with the board in its own way, from poison tiles to capital letters. There are five characters, daily runs with leaderboards, and over ten difficulty levels.
It is the most expensive game in the top ten at $17.85, only 10% off. 99.2% of 1,414.
Monster Prom 4: Monster Con, the only one you can play with friends
Up to four players, on one couch or online, each trying to land a date at a nerd convention before time runs out. If one of your friends happens to like the same monster as you, good luck.
Beautiful Glitch went back to the format that made the original Monster Prom a hit. The con is packed with streamers, washed-up actors and game developers looking to network, plus four new love interests and two old faces, Zoe and Liam. There is also a new mechanic where you build your own comic book during the run. 99.1% from 2,141 reviews, $11.24 at 25% off.
Papa’s Pizzeria Deluxe is the Flash game you played at school, but bigger
Flipline Studios made Papa’s games in the Flash era, and plenty of people played them in a school computer lab when they were supposed to be doing something else. The Deluxe versions are full remakes on Steam, and this one has 98.7% positive from 3,734 reviews.
You take orders, put exactly the right toppings in exactly the right spots, bake, slice and box, while customers judge every pizza. New for Deluxe: a dining room, a delivery driver, a food truck, daily specials and holiday ingredients. The other Deluxe remake, Papa’s Freezeria Deluxe, scores even higher but came out in 2023, so the date rule kept it out. Both are $4.79 this week.
OneShot: World Machine Edition breaks the fourth wall on purpose
The original OneShot came out in 2016 and is still one of the highest-rated games on Steam. The World Machine Edition is a full rebuild on a new engine from Future Cat, made to run on Steam Deck, and it got its own store page in 2024. That is why it counts for this list.
You guide Niko, a kid stranded in a strange world whose sun went out long ago, and the job is to bring it back. The twist is that the game knows it is a game. Some puzzles need you to look outside it, and this version wraps everything in a fake computer desktop, with a music box, character profiles and wallpapers you unlock. As the subtitle warns, you only have one shot. $7.99 at 20% off, 98.5% of 5,816.
Servant of the Lake only came out in August
Rusty Lake has been making strange point-and-click puzzle games for over a decade, and this is its newest. 7,610 reviews in seven weeks, at 98.5%.
You start a new job as a servant at the Vanderboom house. The family has guests coming, and your chores start out normal enough: straighten the portraits, do the laundry. Then you are assisting with alchemy experiments and cleaning up after them. It is set decades before Rusty Lake: Roots, so fans get backstory, and newcomers get a self-contained weekend in a house where something is clearly wrong. $5.59 with 30% off.
A Webbing Journey lets a spider do the chores
The humans are out, the house is huge, and you are a tiny spider named Silky with a lot of web to spare. Fire Totem Games built a physics sandbox where you climb any surface (upside down and underwater too), string webs from wall to wall, and use them to lift, drag and hang just about anything in the room.
There are jobs to do as well. The developers say every room has its own crew of spiders with their own problems: cook breakfast, fix the aquarium, chase down runaway balloons, help a spider called Vera solve the mystery of Prof. Quack. Most of them can be solved more than one way, which in a physics game usually means the messy way works too. You can also dress Silky in hats, shoes and “various levels of fluffiness”.
One thing to know: it is still in Early Access, more than a year in. 98.9% of 1,397 reviews are positive anyway, and it is $6.99 at 30% off.
Hades, Balatro, and the famous names that missed the cut
The 2024 rule is there to keep this list about new games. It also hides some of the best deals in the sale, so here they are.
Four older indie classics are 75% off, which is as low as they usually go. Hades is $6.24 (98.0% of 309,110). Slay the Spire is also $6.24 (97.5% of 219,004). Celeste is $4.99 (97.4% of 148,025), and Undertale is $2.49 (96.5% of 343,568). If any of them is missing from your library, sort that out before anything else on this page.
Then there are the huge 2024 and 2025 hits, which qualified but ranked lower, simply because a game with 200,000 reviews always picks up a few more grumpy ones. Balatro is $11.99 (97.8% of 199,295). Schedule I is $13.99 (97.8% of 317,991). Dispatch, the superhero office comedy from AdHoc Studio, is $23.99 (97.5% of 184,673). And Pizza Tower, a 2023 game that missed the cutoff by a year, is $13.39 at 98.3% of 72,826.
Small, new, and still under 1,000 reviews
A 1,000-review minimum keeps the ranking honest, but it also shuts out games that simply have not been found yet. Everything here came out in 2024 or later, is on sale this week, and is rated as high as the top ten.
Tall Trails is the one I would point people to first. You are Alp, a little golem with a rocket boot, and anything you pick up can go in the boot as fuel: hot peppers for a jet pack, whirligigs for hovering, spiders for swinging. Five biomes to climb through, made by one developer, Brady Soglin. 99.4% of 722, $6.99.
As Long As You’re Here is the heavy one. You play Annie, an elderly woman with Alzheimer’s, as she moves out of her home and her children argue about how to care for her, while memories of her dead brother keep leaking into the present. 99.8% of 559, half price at $4.99.
LOK Digital is a puzzle game about learning a made-up language, where every new word changes the world in some way. Fifteen worlds, each built on a new rule, plus daily puzzles. 99.2% of 606, and $8.99 at 40% off.
DEVIL BLADE REBOOT is a remake of a 1996 Japanese shoot ‘em up, made by its original creator and released in English for the first time. You score more the closer you get to enemies before you kill them. 98.9% of 847, $11.19.
Platypus Reclayed is another remake: the 2002 shmup with everything made out of clay, rebuilt from scratch and re-photographed in 4K. 99.1% of 700, $10.49.
4D Golf is mini golf in four dimensions, from CodeParade, the developer of Hyperbolica. Over 120 levels and a course editor if your brain survives them. 97.8% of 808, $12.99.
HorrorVale is a spooky turn-based RPG about a girl going to the underworld to rescue her zombie dog, Scruffy. The store page promises over 50 hours, which is a lot of game for $11.99. 98.9% of 436.
And the cheapest thing on this whole page: Fishing at the Lake Full of Cats. There is a lake, it is full of cats, and you have to fish up every one of them, more than 20 types, using bait, tools and a bit of deduction. 99.8% of 448, for $0.49.
What to grab before October 8
Ten games, and you could buy the whole top ten for about $83. Most people will not, so here is how I would split it.
If you want just one, Creature Kitchen has the best score in the sale and costs less than lunch. For the cheapest haul, Strange Jigsaws, Papa’s Pizzeria Deluxe and Servant of the Lake come to $14.37 together. And if you have somehow never played Hades, Slay the Spire, Celeste or Undertale, all four together cost $19.96 this week, less than Hades alone at full price.
The sale ends October 8 at 10am Pacific.
Three games for under fifteen dollars
- Strange Jigsaws
- Papa's Pizzeria Deluxe
- Servant of the Lake
A puzzle box, a pizza shift and a very polite haunted house. The cheapest way into the top ten. $3.99 + $4.79 + $5.59, all out now.
Short and a little bit creepy
- Creature Kitchen
- OneShot: World Machine Edition
One evening each, give or take, and both fit the end of October better than most horror games do. $6.39 + $7.99.
The old giants at 75% off
- Hades
- Slay the Spire
- Celeste
- Undertale
Not in the ranking, because of the date rule. Still the best value anywhere in the sale if one of them is missing from your library. $6.24, $6.24, $4.99 and $2.49.
