My favorite Steam game is a game that was also on the Wii: Okami. In a couple of words, the game is about a goddess dog that goes around fighting other gods with paint. In other words, you play as the goddess Amaterasu in wolf form, reborn after the demon Orochi becomes unsealed. Nearly every enemy has a foot in Chinese mythology, leading to the enemies being incredibly unique. One minute you're fighting an imp, another minute you're fighting a crane, and the next minute you're fighting a nose. I will not provide context; you need to buy the game.

You can use divine weapons to exorcise your enemies, but you also have brush techniques that you get throughout the game. The first being your Power Slash, a perfectly drawn straight line that'll instantly cut anything it's drawn over, including any demon that you happen across. As the game progresses, you'll gain control over the elements, the sun and the moon, and also time. A handful of abilities are even hidden behind side quests, giving you a surprising reward for going off the beaten path.

Besides creating some chaos with your divine powers, you can actually do some good for the characters in the world. Like any good deity, you do this out of the goodness of your heart... and also for financial gain. As a god, your currency in this game will be a literal numerical measure of the faith that has been put into you. This is your equivalent of exp, not earned through battle, but by doing tasks. Using it, you can upgrade your health, amount of ink, how many revives you have, etc.

This is all not even mentioning the beautiful art style; it looks like a moving painting. I highly recommend playing this game, or at least checking it out if you're even slightly hooked by the concept.

No matter how much time passes, I will always respond: Monster Hunter. It's not a single game but a series, and it's one of the best I have ever gotten into. I've played almost every game, even the ones exclusively in Japan, and I've beaten them into the ground. Combined, I've got well over 20,000 hours into the series, and I cannot recommend it enough.

The concept behind it is simple: you are a hunter hired by a guild/village/etc., and you are here to resolve conflicts by hunting whatever it is they point you at. You'll start with small raptors and herbivores, building up to dragons straight out of myth that can burn a castle to the ground in a single breath. The amount of story in each of these games varies, but one thing is always consistent: your solution to problems is finding the thing you need to hunt, and you will be doing a lot of hunting.

This leads into a simple gameplay loop as well: you hunt monsters for materials and then use the materials to create better gear for hunting monsters. This is the entire gameplay loop. You can find other things to do, but fundamentally everything leads back to hunting more monsters. Which is my first asterisk to recommending this game: if you're not into this sort of game, I wouldn't recommend the game. However, if you are intrigued, please read on as I describe the actual gameplay.

Hunting over and over again in this series works because of just how much fun it is to hunt. With 14 (give or take a couple depending on the game) weapons at your disposal, you have an incredible amount of variety in how you hunt. You can have a greatsword, excelling most with proper positioning and finding good openings. You can have a bow, constantly dodging through attacks while aiming for weak points. You can have an insect glaive, picking up extracts from the monster to enhance your capabilities while flying into the air to avoid attacks. Once you get into the game, there's very likely a weapon for you.

Beyond weapon choice though, what's fun is just getting better at the game. All the weapons are viable, and you can build complicated armor sets for the optimal skills, but in the end, you control the buttons you press. By the endgame, your armor will no longer be capable of tanking attacks from monsters mindlessly; you will need to understand what they are opposing you with and come up with a solution. This is, in my mind, the best part about Monster Hunter. Knowing you have prepared everything you could possibly have prepared so you can topple monsters that have everything stacked in their favor. You prepared the right elemental weapon, but you also grow as a player to see the opening in their attacks to use that weapon. Without both, you cannot win the hardest hunts, but when you do, it's pure euphoria the first time around.

I hope some of you join the hunt now that Monster Hunter is properly on Steam.
Good hunting, and see you in the field!