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Stellaris is one of those games I've never played, but I'm delightfully confounded by it from afar, as occasionally one of my friends will send me a message about how her robotic gestalt consciousness is doing. And here I was thinking this was about annexing provinces, or whatever! If you'd like to be confounded up close, now seems like an ideal time—the game is free to play this weekend on Steam.
That's good through June 22, but you'll have a bit longer—until next Thursday, June 25—to decide if you'd like to buy it at a discount. Until then, the game is 70% off, bringing it to $15 for the base version or $18 for the "anniversary edition," which packs in the Galactic Paragons, Aquatics, and Leviathans DLCs.
If you want everything, that's on sale too, for the cool sum of just under $148. Hey, it's still a Paradox game. If you want to dip into that lifestyle before fully taking the plunge, you can subscribe to the game for $10 a month to get access to all the DLC instead, but there's no discount on that.
If you can look past the associated shedload of DLC, Stellaris is quite the game. PC Gamer EIC Phil Savage scored it a respectable 70% when he reviewed it back in 2016, saying its superlative early game revealed its potential as an "instant strategy classic." It's only refined things since with each new overhaul, and as Leana Hafer said in a recent story for PC Gamer, "1.0 and 4.3 are almost hard to recognize as the same game." Game director Stephen Muray joked back then that Stellaris is "the Spaceship of Theseus."
As for the new expansion, Nomads? Senior guide writer Sean Martin wrote in his impressions that it could "use some work," but its additions of Mongolian throat singing and nomadic factions are welcome indeed.
