Killer Deals: A Guide to Buying Mystery Games on Steam

How to logically deduce the best games to spend your money on

Happy Mystery Monday!

A shockingly high amount of mystery games are on sale for record-low prices this Spring Sale on Steam.

There are way too many good deals to list them all in today’s newsletter (even excluding the ones we already covered last week) so it was extremely difficult for me to choose which games to feature.

In fact, it was so difficult that I decided to just write a guide on how to choose which games you should buy during a Steam sale. So I hope you find this useful!

What Are Steam Wishlists?

I’ll start by mentioning the key feature of Steam shopping: the wishlist. When you find a game on Steam, you can add it to your wishlist to purchase later. Then once the game first releases, or when the game goes on sale, Steam will send you an e-mail reminder to buy the game.

Game developers tend to rely on wishlist counts for predicting how well their game will perform on launch day, and some speculate wishlists help boost the game in the store algorithm. So if you find a game you like, you should absolutely add it to your wishlist!

(That said, I’d like to tell developers to approach wishlists with some skepticism. There are definitely plenty of buyers who don’t use wishlists at all, instead buying games on impulse or without relying on (or perhaps not even knowing about) the inner workings of the Steam store. There are also plenty of people who add games to their wishlist (and probably bots, too) with no intention of ever buying them. Don’t just chase numbers, but make a good game!)

The most obvious way to find a good deal is to rely on your wishlist. After all, these are games you already want to play. Now it’s just a matter of letting them drop down to a “low enough” price that you feel like it’s worth splurging on.

But that is the eternal question — how low is low enough?