Steam

Vampire survivor.

Pony Island. Don’t look into the game at all. Go in blind. Awesome little gem of a game.

Both Portal games, $0.99 (due to the Puzzle Fest). I know I'm late asf but Portal was booming all those years ago but I didn't have any money. I finally got to play both games a few months ago. Portal 1 was cool I guess. Portal 2, however, is probably the best game I've played. The graphics and design, the story, the overall puzzle, the music, I immediately fell in love when I played it.

I don't know if a $35 game would count for this, but RimWorld has absorbed vast amounts of my life, and it is a very good game.

Titanfall 2 for like 4$ cuz it's rare to find it not on sale these days

Hands down the single best fps I've ever played. And an amazing campaign too.

To the Moon.

It's a cute little RPG-maker adventure game and by the end of it I was ugly crying

I got "To the Moon" for free (steam gift). Not saying I cried, but I cried.

Not on steam, but Voices of the Void. It'll probably be sold at some point, but for right now it's free on itch.io. It's still in pre-release, but it has more content even now than a lot of fully released games have.

Vampire survivors was great, its not .99 but it is still pretty cheap and has been free on epic a few times. But enter the gungeon is one of the best games I have ever played.

exit the gungeon on the other hand is an empty shell of itself. Pun intended.

I bought Minecraft way way back when it was pretty new and nobody was talking about it for about $1.50. Like a month or so later, they dropped the survival update that put it on the map.

"World of Goo" was this for me, just a fun little surprise.

Tabletop Simulator is around €3 on third party seller sites

XCOM2 - I'd heard of it but was never really interested. Then it was either on sale or in a humble bundle (with all its dlc) very cheap (under £10). I absolutely loved it from start to finish and it's made me obsessed with turn-based combat.

Soma

Undertale

It was closer to $10, but Wandersong was worth every penny. It's a puzzle/platformer game where you play a bard, the main gimmick of the game being that you have to sing your way out of any problems you encounter. It feels like something that should get stale, but the game is always thinking up new ways to use the mechanic from communicating with ghosts, to making plants grow, to convincing bugs to move rocks out of your way. Great characters, great story, good soundtrack. Definitely worth trying if it's sitting in your library from a bundle or a sale.

Superflight, 3$ normally goes on sale for 0.59$. I've gotten a good 30 hours out of the game so far. Perfect for winding down after a stressful day or playing while talking to friends and passing the controller around.

Once bought Darwinia for 99c in some US store, what an amazing game. Wouldn't mind a remaster or sequel to it.

Salt and Sanctuary. Great souls like metroidvania with great hand drawn graphics.

Fallout 3. I had a big lull in gaming where I played some on Xbox and ps2, but not much on those either because I started working (at like 15 years old) and my PC could no longer handle games. So I missed out on that when it came out. And New Vegas. Well after a few years and after moving to a place that had broadband, I had the money for a new PC. FO3 goty happened to be on sale on steam. I grabbed it for super cheap and just become so engrossed. I don't think I had played a modern open world game like that ever at that point. And it had such a fun interactive story where choices had consequences. I blew the shit out of a whole town with a nuke not realizing how it would impact things. Now it is my favorite type of game. Grabbed New Vegas on sale shortly after and got to continue the experience. All for super cheap.

Downwell

I'm up to about 70 hours with Tametsi. I'm almost done the 100 main puzzles, but I haven't touched the 60 bonus puzzles. Considering it cost me ~1000 won (78 US cents) that's got to be some kind of cost-per-hour-of-entertainment record for me. Not counting things I got for free.

Gnomoria $3.99 and got about 300 hours out of it. It was a game that took a lot of inspiration from Dwarf Fortress but had 'graphics.' The dev stepped away a while ago but pretty sure everyone that bought it got their $$ worth.

Ultima IV: free on GOG, one of the greatest games ever made that still holds up today (though irritating in certain ways, the core game is pure gold).

Brotato - such well spent 5$

The Beginners Guide. $10, 2 hours long, and one of the most personal and profound pieces of media I have ever experienced.

The Captain

Got it for free during an Epic giveaway and was blown away. LucasArts point and click style with massive replayability

Not on Steam, but Boomerang Fu was one of the best game I purchased for ~$3. Probably my most played game on Switch.

Can't remember what i paid but was cheap, beat invaders, pretty awesome space invaders like arcade game, fun addictive game play, good music and sound effects, good visuals. Blast through fleets of enemies, skill up, and compete for daily and weekly high-scores. 32 hours played so far and is perfect for the Steam Deck.

KOTOR. Bought it in 2012 for 2.24€ during a steam sale, not only I'm still playing it to this day, but its plethora of technical issues pushed me to learn new things about how linux works internally.

Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion, Spiritfairer, Slay the Spire

These were all free to me through gamepass or Amazon. Went with fairly recent ones

Dicey Dungeons. I love roguelike deck builders, but on paper DD has too silly a premise and too much RNG. It's a lowkey masterpiece of game design. I ended up buying it for my switch, android, and steam. If you like games like Slay the Spire or Monster Train, you owe it to yourself to check out Dicey Dungeons. I am not sponsored in any way.

How about $0 for CS:GO?

I have not spent one red cent on that game and I have 1600 hours on it.

SNKRX for me. Minute to minute gameplay is very simple -- all you do is steer your train of dots left and right around a small arena, but the depth of strategy and the skill cap is surprising. I got many hours out of it. Also there is a mobile version!

I hope you're not referring specifically to Wheat Thresher-vania. I'm reminded of what that Dead or Alive guy said about Dynasty Warriors... "Yes, there are tons of onscreen characters, but they're all dumb as toast. You're just lopping off dozens of cabbage heads."

There's just something mechanical and hands-off about Vampire Survivor that I don't like. It's playable? But rarely did I experience anything I would call fun. It was more of an unhealthy compulsion than anything, like picking at a scab.

I think I bought Glyph for pretty cheap on the Switch. I loved it so much I bought it full price on Steam shortly after

LISA: The Painful.

It's gone up in price with the Definitive Edition, guess it's grown a lot in popularity.

This is a postapocalyptic RPG done in RPG Maker with excellent storytelling and the weirdest weapons and attack patterns I ever experienced. You can attack enemies with your own stench or even frighten them by telling them ghost stories.

I've felt more for the pixelated companions in this game than I've ever felt in a AAA game. It's so full of humour and despair, playing through this is such an emotional rollercoaster.

I'm not ashamed to have cried