8 Must-Play Indie Gems From Steam's Storyteller’s Festival Sale

One part deck builder and one part visual novel, The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood was one of 2023’s standout indie titles thanks to its fascinating world populated with unique characters like protagonist Fortuna. As a witch serving out a thousand-year sentence, Fortuna summons a demon to help her out of her situation and gains the ability to create her own tarot deck. Building cards takes the form of an MS paint-like interface that makes each player’s deck uniquely their own. As former friends and foes visit Fortuna, she reads each person their fortune—which the player has some sway over, adding weight to every decision. The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is a wonderfully witchy visual novel worth picking up.

The story of I Was a Teenage Exocolonist takes place over decades, as a group of colonists on a new planet struggle to make a new life for themselves amidst internal and external challenges. With so much life to experience, players start as a blank slate and must choose how to spend their time as they grow, leading to long-term consequences that you might not face until the end of a playthrough. Along for the ride is a cast of well-written characters that all have their own stories to tell, both as your friend or foe—depending on the choices you make.

If you don’t slay the princess, the world will end. At least that’s what Slay the Princess’ narrator tells you when you start the game. What unfolds as you choose to follow or refuse this command is a visual novel unlike any other. Uncovering the many layers of the game’s narrative is a rewarding experience thanks to how reactive it is, offering up numerous options and permutations to every encounter. On top of that, the game ties its many threads together into a poignant narrative about life, death, and transformation.

There is no one protagonist of Saltsea Chronicles. Instead the game follows the entire crew of a ship in a post-apocalyptic world dotted with islands after a massive flood. The lack of a single main character makes for an interesting adventure game in which every island you visit requires you to pick the crew members you want to explore with, meaning that every island has different ways to approach its challenges since every crew member has their own strengths and weaknesses.

LucasArts adventure games will always hold a special place in a lot of people’s hearts, with the Monkey Island series especially being fondly remembered. But they aren’t entirely a thing of the past! 2022 saw the release of Return to Monkey Island, helmed by series creators Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman. If you thought the old adage ‘you can’t return home again’ applied to returning to Monkey Island, you’d be wrong—Return to Monkey Island is full of classic adventure puzzles and witty writing in spades. It can stand proudly alongside the other greats in the series that came before it.

The shutdown of an online service always means the loss of an entire community. Videoverse puts players in the midst of one such shutdown, in the last days of an online forum for the fictional game console the Kinmoku Shark. Through commenting, moderating, and even video-chatting with other wayward users on the dying console,Videoverse tells a story about making connections even in the digital end times. In a real-world landscape where entire games or social sites always seem on the verge of collapse, Videoverse is a story that will hit close to home .

Running a plant shop may not be a premise you’d expect to lead to one of the most enthralling investigative games in recent memory, but that’s what Strange Horticulture delivers. In addition to the enjoyable tedium of categorizing and shelving plants in order to help (or hinder) customers with their various ailments, Strange Horticulture deploys Obra-Dinn like deduction in how you discover the identity of plants. Interactions with customers then doles out an eerie story involving murder, cults, and more mysteries to uncover. It all adds up to a cozy puzzle game perfect for anyone with a taste for something on spookier side

As the Roadwarden, your job is to take the roads not traveled across a desolate fantasy world that most dare not traverse. Hired by travelers and merchants, you trek from village to village while fighting off the many dangers in between the patches of safety offered by settlements. Roadwarden is a text-based RPG but don’t let that put you off. By combining tabletop style storytelling and beautiful pixel illustrations, the choose your own adventure style of Roadwarden will enthrall you in ways you wouldn’t expect.

Of course you don’t have to stop at just eight games. Keep perusing the sale and you are sure to find even more titles worth your time and money.