Steam’s annual winter sale is here — these are the best games to get
If you’re lucky enough to have a bit of time off around the holidays, we have great news: Steam’s annual winter sale kicked off today, and will run through Monday, January 5th at 1PM ET. Now’s a great time to stock up on some of the best games of 2025 at a solid discount, or add some classics to your backlog if you’ve got a hole in your library. Thousands of games are on sale, but we’ve picked out some highlights to help you get started. We were surprised to see Hollow Knight: Silksong for $15.99 ($4 off) given its modest price and how recently it came out. You can also pick up Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 for $39.99 ($10 off), Silent Hill F for $41.99 ($28 off), and Assassin’s Creed Shadows for $34.99 ($35 off). These games are all on sale just a few months after their release. Some of the most notable remakes and remasters...
If you’re lucky enough to have a bit of time off around the holidays, we have great news: Steam’s annual winter sale kicked off today, and will run through Monday, January 5th at 1PM ET. Now’s a great time to stock up on some of the best games of 2025 at a solid discount, or add some classics to your backlog if you’ve got a hole in your library. Thousands of games are on sale, but we’ve picked out some highlights to help you get started. We were surprised to see Hollow Knight: Silksong for $15.99 ($4 off) given its modest price and how recently it came out. You can also pick up Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 for $39.99 ($10 off), Silent Hill F for $41.99 ($28 off), and Assassin’s Creed Shadowsfor $34.99 ($35 off). These games are all on sale just a few months after their release. Some of the most notable remakes and remasters of 2025 have also been discounted. You can snag Final Fantasy Tactics – The Ivalice Chroniclesfor $39.99 ($10 off), Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter for $44.99 ($15 off), Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 for $29.99 ($20 off), Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake for $35.99 ($24 off), and Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eaterfor $41.99 ($28 off). These t**les are worth trying even if you’re familiar with the originals. Steam’s sales are an opportune opportunity to pick up older t**les that have stood the test of time, some of which you can get for under a couple of bucks. Too many great games fall into that category, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t call your chance to grab Stardew Valleyfor $8.99 ($6 off), The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Editionfor $9.99 ($30 off), Slay the Spirefor $2.49 ($22.50 off), Resident Evil 4for $15.99 ($24 off), Castle Crashers for $1.49 ($13.50 off), Bastionfor $2.99 ($12 off), and To the Moonfor $1.99 ($8 off). You can go even further back in the history of gaming and pick up collections of 8- and 16-bit games, including the chance to pick up Mega Man X Legacy Collectionfor $7.99 ($12 off), Castlevania Anniversary Collectionfor $7.99 ($12 off), and Contra Anniversary Collectionfor $7.99 ($12 off). There’s a little something for everybody in the sale, and we encourage you to mix and match contemporary and classic games to avoid getting bored.
Hollow Knight: Silksong
Where to Buy:
$19.99 $15.99 at Steam
Hollow Knight: Silksong is a tough-as-nails Metroidvania whose boss battles and platforming sequences reward your tenacity as you slowly get better. As Hornet, you’ll cautiously ascend to the top of the world, using weapons and traps to take down over 200 enemies and more than 40 bosses. Be mindful that letting your guard down can be lethal. If you haven’t gotten around to playing the original Hollow Knight, you can pick it up for $7.49 ($7.49 off) during the sale. Read our hands-on impressions.
Silent Hill F
Where to Buy:
$69.99 $41.99 at Steam
Silent Hill F is an exceptional survival horror game set in 1960s Japan. Protagonist Hinako Shimizu is a high school student who has to defeat actual monsters with whatever weapons she can find while also wrestling with inner turmoil caused by familial trauma. Her personal growth, a great script, and terrific score may compel you to replay the game to see all five of its possible endings. Read our review.
Resident Evil 4
Where to Buy:
$39.99 $15.99 at Steam
If you prefer a healthy dose of action in your horror games, the 2023 remake of Resident Evil 4 is an excellent choice. Federal agent Leon Kennedy is sent to retrieve the president’s daughter from a remote Spanish village, and ends up uncovering a murderous cult and plenty of gnarly monsters. The original game’s story has been fleshed out, and its script has been reworked without losing all of its campiness. Read our review.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Where to Buy:
$49.99 $39.99 at Steam
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a turn-based RPG with an engaging battle system that rewards you for mastering its dodge and parry system. Pulling off the right parry, which takes time to learn, and you can turn the tide of a battle. The game has an atmospheric soundtrack along with a story our reviewer found heart-wrenching, stirring, and humorous. It won Game of the Year at the 2025 Game Awards, too. Read our review.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows
Where to Buy:
$69.99 $34.99 at Steam
Assassin’s Creed Shadows has two big strengths: Its setting (medieval Japan) and its two lead characters, Naoe and Yasuke. Each character has a unique gameplay style, which gives you a couple of ways to approach each situation stealthily or by using brute force. Shadows’ open world is huge, and the little activities we found on our way to the big quests, and codex entries offering exhaustive details about the game’s setting made it fun to traverse. Read our review.
I turned a nearly 10-year-old laptop into the most useful machine in my home lab
Despite spending my teenage years drooling over enterprise-tier hardware, my current home lab mostly consists of consumer-grade systems, with the only outlier being a Xeon workstation from 2016. In fact, running a few Proxmox experiments on my old gaming PC proved that I don’t need top-of-the-line specs to access its...
Despite spending my teenage years drooling over enterprise-tier hardware, my current home lab mostly consists of consumer-grade systems, with the only outlier being a Xeon workstation from 2016. In fact, running a few Proxmox experiments on my old gaming PC proved that I don’t need top-of-the-line specs to access its virtualization features, and today, I’ve got everything from mini-PCs and thin clients to x86 single-board computers fueling my tinkering escapades to some extent.
Daniel Martinez Dallas
Published by: aplhsindia.in
I ran a local LLM entirely off a NAS, and it turned my storage box into an AI-hosting workstation
Ever since I got into hosting my own large language models, I’ve tinkered with AI inference engines across multiple devices. So far, my RTX 3080 Ti remains my primary choice for deploying the Qwen3.6-35B-A3B for coding-heavy tasks using MoE offloading, though I’ve also had decent experience using Gemma-4-26B-A4B and GPT-OSS-20B...
Ever since I got into hosting my own large language models, I’ve tinkered with AI inference engines across multiple devices. So far, my RTX 3080 Ti remains my primary choice for deploying the Qwen3.6-35B-A3B for coding-heavy tasks using MoE offloading, though I’ve also had decent experience using Gemma-4-26B-A4B and GPT-OSS-20B on old Pascal-era graphics cards.
Michael Johnson Chicago
Published by: aplhsindia.in
OpenAI and Anthropic’s models attacked real companies during safety tests, and most victims never noticed
The most capable AI models on the planet have started breaking into companies that never agreed to be part of any test, and in most cases, nobody at those companies noticed until a person at one of those companies reached out to let them know. In the span of just...
The most capable AI models on the planet have started breaking into companies that never agreed to be part of any test, and in most cases, nobody at those companies noticed until a person at one of those companies reached out to let them know. In the span of just a couple of weeks, three separate organisations disclosed that models undergoing cybersecurity evaluations had escaped or wandered out of their test environments and attacked real systems on the open internet, despite nobody instructing them to. Each one believed, or talked itself into believing, that it was still playing a game.
Olivia Miller Seattle
Published by: aplhsindia.in
My USB devices weren’t charging until I tried a USB Type-A port instead
It's not news at this point that USB hasn't exactly been able to deliver on its lofty promises and goals. The "Universal" part of that acronym doesn't always hold up when it comes to power and data transfer speeds.
It's not news at this point that USB hasn't exactly been able to deliver on its lofty promises and goals. The "Universal" part of that acronym doesn't always hold up when it comes to power and data transfer speeds.
John Doe New York
Published by: aplhsindia.in
Meta ordered to pay an additional $567 million in public nuisance ruling
Meta has been ordered to pay $567 million in the second phase of New Mexico's landmark child safety case, bringing total charges to nearly $1 billion for being a "public nuisance." In a ruling published on Thursday, the Santa Fe district court found that Meta's platforms are a "significant contributing...
Meta has been ordered to pay $567 million in the second phase of New Mexico's landmark child safety case, bringing total charges to nearly $1 billion for being a "public nuisance." In a ruling published on Thursday, the Santa Fe district court found that Meta's platforms are a "significant contributing cause" of a teen mental health crisis affecting public health and safety throughout New Mexico."This case has always been about protecting children, standing up for families, and making sure that one of the world's largest technology companies cannot profit from practices that endanger young people without consequence," New Mexico Attorney G …Read the full story at The Verge.
Michael Johnson Chicago
Published by: aplhsindia.in
You, too, can 3D-print this mechanical bouncing DVD logo for unlimited fun
The problem with watching the DVD logo bounce around the screen is that, at some point, someone's going to actually want to watch a movie on that screen. But what if you had a homemade mechanical device that endlessly bounced a DVD logo around a screen so you could celebrate...
The problem with watching the DVD logo bounce around the screen is that, at some point, someone's going to actually want to watch a movie on that screen. But what if you had a homemade mechanical device that endlessly bounced a DVD logo around a screen so you could celebrate corner hits forever? Well, that's exactly what this 3D-printable project lets you do.
John Doe New York
Published by: aplhsindia.in
I bought cheap server hardware for my home lab, and the electricity bill taught me an expensive lesson
Having built my first home server using components cobbled together from older builds, I realized fairly quickly that an experimental workstation doesn’t need cutting-edge specs to drive my virtualization projects. As time went on, I started grabbing outdated machines from flea markets, and with a little coat of Proxmox, they...
Having built my first home server using components cobbled together from older builds, I realized fairly quickly that an experimental workstation doesn’t need cutting-edge specs to drive my virtualization projects. As time went on, I started grabbing outdated machines from flea markets, and with a little coat of Proxmox, they became reliable nodes for my home lab, self-hosting, and DevOps experiments.
Sophia Wilson Atlanta
Published by: aplhsindia.in
Trying to explain One Night Only’s tech-enforced s** dystopia
From the omnipresent One Night Only trailer, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the movie glosses over its terrifying and absurd premise - in otherwise normal modern New York, single people can only have sex one night a year - to deliver an entirely traditional romantic comedy. I'm here to...
From the omnipresent One Night Only trailer, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the movie glosses over its terrifying and absurd premise - in otherwise normal modern New York, single people can only have sex one night a year - to deliver an entirely traditional romantic comedy. I'm here to report that it does not do that. No, the film is very much about life under Sex Purge Law, but where you might expect questions of politics or religion or fear or humanity, there are instead questions of boning. Questions like "Who should I do sex to and why?" are explored in an episodic format that sees two special hot people (Monica Barbaro and Call …Read the full story at The Verge.
Emily Brown Houston
Published by: aplhsindia.in
This ESP32 handheld is a retro emulator, FM synth, and Guitar Hero clone controller all in one
One of the best parts of being an adult is realising you have the money and the know-how to acquire all the things you coveted as a child. But what if you could make a device that put everything you ever wanted into one handy portable device you can take...
One of the best parts of being an adult is realising you have the money and the know-how to acquire all the things you coveted as a child. But what if you could make a device that put everything you ever wanted into one handy portable device you can take wherever you want? That's exactly what one Redditor did when they made an ESP32-S3 handheld that combines several uses into a single device.
Emily Brown Houston
Published by: aplhsindia.in
Why does Apple keep banning Telegram, but never X?
For roughly an hour this week, Telegram vanished from Apple's App Store. Even during that blip, it was a stunning absence for such a major app: an avenue of communication for more than 1 billion users around the world, used widely as a secure platform for people who live in...
For roughly an hour this week, Telegram vanished from Apple's App Store. Even during that blip, it was a stunning absence for such a major app: an avenue of communication for more than 1 billion users around the world, used widely as a secure platform for people who live in countries under censorship. Apple later revealed that it had removed the app due to the presence of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and restored it once that content was removed.But the decision once again stirred up questions and confusion about Apple's moderation policies and how it treats different companies. And one company in particular sprang to many people's m …Read the full story at The Verge.
William Garcia Boston
Published by: aplhsindia.in
Robocopy is still the fastest way to copy thousands of files on Windows, and I wasted years not using it
Windows is a bundle of both CLI and GUI tools. We use the GUI ones more because they serve a broader use case and are convenient to use. For file copying and moving, I hadn't ventured much outside the usual Ctrl + C and V, and the on-screen copy and...
Windows is a bundle of both CLI and GUI tools. We use the GUI ones more because they serve a broader use case and are convenient to use. For file copying and moving, I hadn't ventured much outside the usual Ctrl + C and V, and the on-screen copy and paste options in the context menu. The options work fine for multiple files and large files, and with the new dialog boxes and graphical representation of copying speed, it's hard to complain.
Olivia Miller Seattle
Published by: aplhsindia.in
My favorite Notion alternative isn’t Obsidian, it’s something I can actually self-host
When people talk about replacing Notion, Obsidian is usually the first app that comes up. I tried it too, and while it's an excellent note-taking app, it wasn't the replacement I was actually looking for. I wanted something that felt closer to Notion while giving me complete control over where...
When people talk about replacing Notion, Obsidian is usually the first app that comes up. I tried it too, and while it's an excellent note-taking app, it wasn't the replacement I was actually looking for. I wanted something that felt closer to Notion while giving me complete control over where my data lived. That search eventually led me to AFFiNE. After using it for a while, I realized it offered a better balance between flexibility, ownership, and everyday usability for my workflow. AFFiNE has become my favorite Notion alternative, rather than the one most people expect.
